Month: February 2026

• Better Python tests with inline-snapshot
• jolt Battery intelligence for your laptop
• Markdown code formatting with ruff
• act - run your GitHub actions locally
• Extras
• Joke

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Brian #1: Better Python tests with inline-snapshot

• Alex Hall, on Pydantic blog
• Great for testing complex data structures

• Allows you to write a test like this:

  from inline_snapshot import snapshot
  def test_user_creation():
      user = create_user(id=123, name="test_user")
      assert user.dict() == snapshot({})
  

• Then run pytest --inline-snapshot=fix

• And the library updates the test source code to look like this:

  def test_user_creation():
      user = create_user(id=123, name="test_user")
      assert user.dict() == snapshot({
          "id": 123,
          "name": "test_user",
          "status": "active"
      })
  

• Now, when you run the code without “fix” the collected data is used for comparison

• Awesome to be able to visually inspect the test data right there in the test code.
• Projects mentioned
  • inline-snapshot
  • pytest-examples
  • syrupy
  • dirty-equals
  • executing

Michael #2: jolt Battery intelligence for your laptop

• Support for both macOS and Linux
• Battery Status — Charge percentage, time remaining, health, and cycle count
• Power Monitoring — System power draw with CPU/GPU breakdown
• Process Tracking — Processes sorted by energy impact with color-coded severity
• Historical Graphs — Track battery and power trends over time
• Themes — 10+ built-in themes with dark/light auto-detection
• Background Daemon — Collect historical data even when the TUI isn't running
• Process Management — Kill energy-hungry processes directly

Brian #3: Markdown code formatting with ruff

• Suggested by Matthias Schoettle
• ruff can now format code within markdown files
• Will format valid Python code in code blocks marked with python, py, python3 or py3.
• Also recognizes pyi as Python type stub files.
• Includes the ability to turn off formatting with comment [HTML_REMOVED] , [HTML_REMOVED] blocks.
• Requires preview mode

  [tool.ruff.lint]
  preview = true
  

Michael #4: act - run your GitHub actions locally

• Run your GitHub Actions locally! Why would you want to do this? Two reasons:
  • Fast Feedback - Rather than having to commit/push every time you want to test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.
  • Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your .github/workflows/ to replace your Makefile!
• When you run act it reads in your GitHub Actions from .github/workflows/ and determines the set of actions that need to be run.
  • Uses the Docker API to either pull or build the necessary images, as defined in your workflow files and finally determines the execution path based on the dependencies that were defined.
  • Once it has the execution path, it then uses the Docker API to run containers for each action based on the images prepared earlier.
  • The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.

Extras

Michael:

• Winter is coming: Frozendict accepted
• Django ORM stand-alone
• Command Book app announcement post

Joke: Plug ‘n Paste