I recently realized I have several open-source projects I'm a maintainer or owner of which I've never really discussed on this site or on social media. Some of these projects have been pretty specific and tied to the other projects I was working on at the time, but several do have the potential for wider general use. I figured now was a good time to start talking about some of these projects and the problems they are intended to solve.
A couple of years ago I was working with a couple other languages beside Python and began to get frustrated with their virtualenv equivalents. Not that they were doing anything wrong, just that they didn't work the way I was used to with virtualenvs. On top of that, they didn't work well together. I wanted to see if I could get something working that used the workflow I was used to and managed all the languages I was working with. So after a little poking around I found that many of the newer, "modern" languages had ways of running them from custom paths. I did a bit of work and before long I had a couple of these languages installed in virtualenvs and working side-by-side.
Today I finally figured out the solution to a problem I've been trying to solve for a while. It's kind of hacky and maybe a bad idea, but now I know it's possible. The problem has always been that I'd like to test that a function recurses, but not needing it to actually have the recursion execute within to test. Just a unit test to assert that recursion is happening. After a little thought about how Python stores references I came up with this.
So I just spent a couple of hours banging my head on a ridiculous PyMox mocking issue and though I'd share. Here is an example of the existing code.
Anytime I see someone turning an instance method into a property on a Python object, I always have to step back and rethink whether it's really the right thing to do. While properties certain have valid use cases, I often see them overused and misused. This can result in code that is harder to refactor should you decide you actually do want to accept arguments as well as less straight forward to separate in unit tests.