Welcome! I'm Lorna: engineer, author and speaker. I'm a Developer Evangelist and I love technology and sharing technology with others. On this site you'll find my blog and links to all the other things I think you (or I) might need to know about me - my opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation. If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
From The Blog
26 May
2020
Eye Contact Owl
I don't post as much handicraft on this blog as I used to (it's mostly on my instagram account with fewer words now), but I wanted to share my new handmade owl. He solves a genuine problem: how to make eye contact with your webcam.
21 May
2020
Custom OpenAPI Style Rules with Spectral
I work quite a bit with OpenAPI specs and with lots of specs and lots of collaborators, keeping the specs all functional (never mind tidy, consistent, or other dreamwords) is a challenge! We use spectral to check our specs, both when we work on them and in the build process. Spectral is great but it has Opinions(TM)!
For most users, running Spectral out of the box gives quite a lot of output even on an otherwise valid spec. I do think the default ruleset for Spectral is pretty good, but every situation is different so having your own ruleset to use is a good idea. This post shows how to use a ruleset and some examples. Continue reading
24 Apr
2020
The `python-is-python2` package on Ubuntu Focal Fossa
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa on my laptop, and was surprised at what happened when I went to install python:
$ sudo apt install python
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'python-is-python2' instead of 'python'
Um, what?
It turns out that since the python package has historically been Python 2, and there's a separate python3 package (and the commands match the package names, also pip3 etc), that default has remained in an attempt to break things for fewer people. Which is nice, but how do I get current, stable python?
sudo apt install python-is-python3
There's a sister package called python-is-python3 and installing that makes my python command use version 3 as I expected! It's a fairly good solution to the problem but it took me a moment to work out how to install it so I thought I'd write it down for next time! Hope it helps you too :)
