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Tech learnings and musings from the.dusktreader.

the.dusktreader blog © 2025 by Tucker Beck is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Makefile magic

TLDR

I have a cool structure, nice convenience functions, and flashy magic that "makes" my projects pretty awesome!

For a fairly long time, now, I've been including a Makefile in all of my projects. It's a nice way to provide access to actions that need to be done over-and-over in a software project. It's familiar (to most folks), works on almost any reasonable dev environment out-of-the box, and makes getting started on the project really straightforward.

Over the years, I've developed a lot of cool stuff that I like to include in my Makefiles. This ranges from some basic patterns and structures that I've found helpful to some fancy "magic" that makes it nice to work with.

make help example

Example of make help with my custom Makefile

Today, I decided to create a GitHub repo to showcase these patterns in a few example Makefile entries. I thought it might be nice to talk through what's offered there and explain some of the deeper magic.

  • in dev
  • 29 min read

Introducing Typerdrive: Develop API-Connected Typer Apps at Lightspeed

TLDR

I created a package to extend Typer with some great features for building CLIs that communicate with APIs.

During my time as an engineer working primarily with Python, I've written a a fair number of CLIs powered by Typer. One type of project that has been popping up for me a lot lately involves writing CLI programs that interface with RESTful APIs. These are pretty common these days with so many service companies offering fully operational battlestations...I mean, platforms that can be accessed via API.

I've established some pretty useful and re-usable patterns in building these kinds of apps, and I keep finding new ways to improve both the developer experience and the user experience. Every time I go about porting some feature across to a new or old CLI, I wish there was a library that wrapped them all up in a nice package. Now, there is:

typerdrive-logo typerdrive-logo

  • in dev
  • 29 min read

Bootstrapping Python projects with copier

TLDR

I used copier to create a python project template that includes logic to deploy the project to GitHub.

I tend to create a lot of Python projects of various sizes. In the past few weeks, this has been even more frequent. Just a few days ago, I started a new project called drivel. It is a CLI and Python package that generates fun metasyntactic names (think foo, bar, baz) to use in my code. You can read more about it in the drivel docs if you want to learn more.

When I went to start this project, I did what I usually do. I copied one of my other projects to a new directory and started ripping stuff out, renaming things, and just generally futzing around until I had the scaffolding for my new project. This isn't hard work, but it always ends up taking a lot longer than I expect.

There are a lot of conventions that I've gotten attached to in my projects over the years. And, while it's not that hard to just borrow things from past projects, it's boring work that cries out to be automated.

So, I decided to create a project template that would allow me to do all this in just a matter of seconds.

  • in dev
  • 4 min read

Self-contained Python scripts with uv

TLDR

You can add uv into the shebang line for a Python script to make it a self-contained executable.

I am working on a Go project to better learn the language. It's a simple API backed by a postgres database.

When I need to test out an endpoint, I prefer to use the httpx python package inside an ipython REPL over making curl requests. It's nice to be able to introspect responses and easily package payloads with dicts instead of writing out JSON.

Anyway, I decided to write a script to upsert some user data so that I can beat on my /users endpoint.