Semi-technical thoughts

It often happens that you need to echo or cat something to some config file, or maybe a log, or something else owned by root. It also often happens that you try to run it as a regular user and get a permission denied error. And normally you'd just prepend your command with sudo and be done with it, but output redirects are not that easy: current shell will handle them itself, they will not be passed to sudo and you will still have your permission problem. Luckily, the fix is easy: instead of prepending the command, you just replace > somefile with | sudo tee somefile and >> somefile with | sudo tee -a somefile  whatever the command before was. You may also add > /dev/null if you don't want if to echo everything. Example: echo "truncated" | sudo tee /var/log/toolong.log echo "additional log record" | sudo tee -a /var/log/toolong.log Of course, this is not the only way and it's not always the best but it works all the time, it...

Every developer knows  datetime.strftime()  method, but some don't know that its argument's format is not documented in full in the official documentation. For example, you won't find any mention of %s directive there which means UNIX epoch time, timestamp. It works (at least with every major version of Python on Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS), I've tested it a few times myself, it's just not documented. I recently saw a piece of code where developers, being unaware of such a directive, used custom format string with both datetime.now() and time.time(), a function generator, and on top of it messed with model migrations (it all was about FileField.upload_to if you know what I'm talking about) when they could just use %s. From other undocumented features you might be interested in these: %C  is a century (%Y//100), could be helpful for complimenting %y or something, I guess. %u  is a weekday number with Monday as 1 and Sunday as 7 (as opposed to %w represen...