I do not like *args and **kwargs in Python
Posted on May 18, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
I do not like *args and **kwargs in Python *args and **kwargs are the way to declare positional and keyword function arguments (resp.) in Python.
Introduction This post explains why I am a fan of naming the arguments and I do not like positional arguments nor the *args and **kwargs way of passing arguments.
Why I don’t like *args and **kwargs? Most of the time I only use *args and **kwargs when strictly necessary, like when inheriting from a class that uses them, and I need to pass the parameters to the parent class.
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Can LLMs replace engineers?
Posted on May 17, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
Can LLMs replace engineers? This post provides my opinion about how a LLMs cannot replace a senior software engineer, even if the CEOs and other executives believe that it is possible.
Introduction I have been using Artificial Intelligence (in the form of LLMs) for several years already. My experience working with LLMs is limited to working with ChatGPT, Cursor and GitHub Copilot as of May 2025 (when this post was written).
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How to write a good unit test
Posted on April 5, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
How to write a good unit test This post provides some guidelines about how to write a good unit test. There are some examples in Python with unittest.
Introduction In my last post I wrote about software quality not being taken seriously sometimes.
Tests are a good part of the software quality so I wanted to write a bit about the testing effort we should be doing in our code.
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Software quality is not negotiable
Posted on March 15, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
Software quality is not negotiable From a conversation from one of the best software engineers I have had the please to work with, I heard the following sentence: software quality is not negotiable! And that is one of the axioms of our profession.
Why software quality is seen as optional? Software developers/engineers come from different backgrounds The world of software has no barrier entry. People with different backgrounds can start working as software developers or engineers.
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Joining test coverage from several test directories
Posted on February 14, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
Joining test coverage from several test directories This post show a simple way of computing the coverage.py’s test coverage from different tests folders.
Introduction I have been using coverage.py since I started working with python, and while it works pretty well, let us say that the interface of the command line tool could be better.
I struggled for some minutes trying to filter out other folder I have in my tests folder that were not meant to have their test coverage computed.
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Patching on setUp in Python's unittest
Posted on February 13, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
Patching on setUp in Python’s unittest One of my favorite programming languages is Python, and I think that tests should be a foundational part of software development, so it is not strange that I delve a lot in Python’s unittest.
In this post we are going to show how to use unittest.mock.patch not in a decorator (the usual case) but in the setUp method.
Why should you care about this? Well, I have not cared about this after more than a decade of working with python (intermittently), because I was just used to the patch decorator.
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The world is full of irrational people
Posted on January 25, 2025
| Diego J. Romero-López
The world is full of irrational people Recently I took a personality test where I ended up being classified as an analytical person, and I am that indeed. How can I thrive in a world where the critical thinking and the rationality are being attacked everyday?
Irrational people in software development Our profession, software development, is full of irrational people.
First of all, we do not work in Science, and in software development there are multiple ways of do the same thing.
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10 years of this blog
Posted on December 29, 2024
| Diego J. Romero-López
10 years of this blog I have been blogging about software and technology in this blog for a decade. What was the rationale of this blog? Why should you write a technical blog?
How it all started I started blogging in 2014, when I was improving my skills via a Masters Program. I was a bit burned out because studying and working at the same time require an energy I did not have during that time.
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How to create a Dockerfile for your deno fresh project
Posted on December 28, 2024
| Diego J. Romero-López
How to create a Dockerfile for your deno fresh project Sometimes creating a Dockerfile is an art, you need to be aware of what files include in each layer to leverage the docker cache. How can we do this with deno fresh?
Recommended or usual Dockerfile Most of the examples I have found in the internet (like this one) tend to copy all the files in the same Docker instruction:
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How to add OTEL to your deno fresh project
Posted on December 27, 2024
| Diego J. Romero-López
How to add OTEL to your deno fresh project OpenTelemetry is a standard for adding telemetry to your application. There are a myriad of implementations for almost all the programming languages. But you need to be aware that the particularities of each language can make integrating with OTEL very different in one case or other.
Introduction This post assumes you know what observability is, the best practices and the bare minimum that is accepted nowadays in modern applications.
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