September 02, 2025

#447 Going down a rat hole

35 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

rathole

pre-commit: install with uv

A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

Extras

Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit

Connect with the hosts

Michael: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Michael #1: rathole

A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. An alternative to frp and ngrok.

Features

High Performance Much higher throughput can be achieved than frp, and more stable when handling a large volume of connections.

Low Resource Consumption Consumes much fewer memory than similar tools. See Benchmark. The binary can be as small as ~500KiB to fit the constraints of devices, like embedded devices as routers.

On my server, it’s currently using about 2.7MB in Docker (wow!)

Security Tokens of services are mandatory and service-wise. The server and clients are responsible for their own configs. With the optional Noise Protocol, encryption can be configured at ease. No need to create a self-signed certificate! TLS is also supported.

Hot Reload Services can be added or removed dynamically by hot-reloading the configuration file. HTTP API is WIP.

Brian #2: pre-commit: install with uv

Adam Johnson

pre-commit doesn’t natively support uv, but you can get around that with pre-commit-uv

$ uv tool install pre-commit --with pre-commit-uv

Installing pre-commit like this

Installs it globally

Installs with uv

adds an extra plugin “pre-commit-uv” to pre-commit, so that any Python based tool installed via pre-commit also uses uv

Very cool. Nice speedup

Brian #3: A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

Rodrigo Girão Serrão

Remove punctuation functionally

Also How to use functools.Placeholder, a blog post about it.

functools.partial is cool way to create a new function that partially binds some parameters to another function.

It doesn’t always work for functions that take positional arguments.

functools.Placeholder fixes that with the ability to put in placeholders for spots where you want to be able to pass that in from the outer partial binding.

And all of this sounds totally obscure without a good example, so thank you to Rodgrigo for coming up with the punctuation removal example (and writeup)

Michael #4: Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

They were held-hostage at wordpress.com to markdown and integrated them into my Hugo site at mkennedy.codes

Here is the chat conversation with Claude Opus/Sonnet.

Had to juggle this a bit because the RSS feed only held the last 50. So we had to go back in and web scrape. That resulted in oddies like comments on wordpress that had to be cleaned etc.

Whole process took 3-4 hours from idea to “production”duction”.

The chat transcript is just the first round getting the RSS → Hugo done. The fixes occurred in other chats.

This article is timely and noteworthy: Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it

This highlights why your domain name needs to be legit, not just tied to the host. I’m looking at you pyfound.blogspot.com. I just redirected blog.michaelckennedy.net to mkennedy.codes

Carefully mapping old posts to a new archived area using NGINX config. This is just the HTTP portion, but note the /sitemap.xml and location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" { portions. The latter maps posts such as https://blog.michaelckennedy.net/2018/01/08/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/ to https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/

server {

listen 80;

server_name blog.michaelckennedy.net;

# Redirect sitemap.xml to new domain

location = /sitemap.xml {

return 301 ;

}

# Handle blog post redirects for HTTP -> HTTPS with URL transformation

# Pattern: /YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/ ->

location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" {

return 301 $4/>;

}

# Redirect all other HTTP URLs to mkennedy.codes homepage

location / {

return 301 ;

}

Extras

Brian:

SMS URLs and Draft SMS and iMessage from any computer keyboard from Seth Larson

Test and Code Archive is now up, see announcement

Michael:

Python: The Documentary | An origin story is out!

Joke: Do you know him? He is me.

...more

View all episodes

By Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

4.7

212212 ratings

September 02, 2025

#447 Going down a rat hole

35 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

rathole

pre-commit: install with uv

A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

Extras

Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit

Connect with the hosts

Michael: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Michael #1: rathole

A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. An alternative to frp and ngrok.

Features

High Performance Much higher throughput can be achieved than frp, and more stable when handling a large volume of connections.

Low Resource Consumption Consumes much fewer memory than similar tools. See Benchmark. The binary can be as small as ~500KiB to fit the constraints of devices, like embedded devices as routers.

On my server, it’s currently using about 2.7MB in Docker (wow!)

Hot Reload Services can be added or removed dynamically by hot-reloading the configuration file. HTTP API is WIP.

Brian #2: pre-commit: install with uv

Adam Johnson

pre-commit doesn’t natively support uv, but you can get around that with pre-commit-uv

$ uv tool install pre-commit --with pre-commit-uv

Installing pre-commit like this

Installs it globally

Installs with uv

adds an extra plugin “pre-commit-uv” to pre-commit, so that any Python based tool installed via pre-commit also uses uv

Very cool. Nice speedup

Brian #3: A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows

Rodrigo Girão Serrão

Remove punctuation functionally

Also How to use functools.Placeholder, a blog post about it.

functools.partial is cool way to create a new function that partially binds some parameters to another function.

It doesn’t always work for functions that take positional arguments.

functools.Placeholder fixes that with the ability to put in placeholders for spots where you want to be able to pass that in from the outer partial binding.

And all of this sounds totally obscure without a good example, so thank you to Rodgrigo for coming up with the punctuation removal example (and writeup)

Michael #4: Converted 160 old blog posts with AI

They were held-hostage at wordpress.com to markdown and integrated them into my Hugo site at mkennedy.codes

Here is the chat conversation with Claude Opus/Sonnet.

Had to juggle this a bit because the RSS feed only held the last 50. So we had to go back in and web scrape. That resulted in oddies like comments on wordpress that had to be cleaned etc.

Whole process took 3-4 hours from idea to “production”duction”.

The chat transcript is just the first round getting the RSS → Hugo done. The fixes occurred in other chats.

This article is timely and noteworthy: Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it

This highlights why your domain name needs to be legit, not just tied to the host. I’m looking at you pyfound.blogspot.com. I just redirected blog.michaelckennedy.net to mkennedy.codes

server {

listen 80;

server_name blog.michaelckennedy.net;

# Redirect sitemap.xml to new domain

location = /sitemap.xml {

return 301 ;

}

# Handle blog post redirects for HTTP -> HTTPS with URL transformation

# Pattern: /YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/ ->

location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" {

return 301 $4/>;

}