Digital Preservation and the Gen-Z Technology Skills Gap
I saw this interesting video by Ema Roloff on a Gen-Z skills gap as identified by Salesforce. Of many interesting…
Category: Digital Preservation (page 3)
We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata
Andy Jackson is doing some positive work for the DPC, especially in his low-level look at Wikidata recently (external blog).…
iPRES2024: Self-sovereign-digital preservation: The reviewers enjoyed your submission, but… what reviewers???
*Knocking gently on the door* “is anyone there, iPRES2024“? One thing I didn’t make clear in my previous iPRES2024 post…
Not your first paper from iPRES2024: Design patterns in Digital Preservation: Declarative software for digital preservationists
Well folks, my paper for iPRES2024 was rejected. but the good news is that you get to read it here…
Demystify-lite is upgraded and demystify 2.0.0 is finally here!
Demystify-lite and Demystify 2.0.0 have been released featuring the denylist for the first time, plus some bonus features! With thanks…
PRONOM release statistics
My contribution to PRONOM research week 2023 (held in November 2023) is a PRONOM summary website and Application Programming Interface…
Moving to Leipzig and the year ahead
Late 2023 ended with a move to Leipzig. The move was driven by a switch back to full-time contracting in…
A rough guide to digital preservation metadata
A rough guide to metadata I published on Twitter once upon day and again in Content-disposition: Archival – Repatriating Dates…
Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents
In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.
Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.
Linting as understanding
I have been working on a Python template repository as part of my day-job at Orcfax.
It is based on the popular pypa sample project and adds important tooling that supports the quality assurance of projects that many developers are expected to engage with.
In my template repository I add editor defaults, linting, and prepare the repository for unit tests, and then deployment.
I have migrated a copy of the template I created for Orcfax to a new file format organisation I have created to capture work I am doing around tools such as ffdev.info (the PRONOM signature development utility).
The new template repository can be found here: ffdev-info/template.py.
I want to talk about how this tooling can be used as a way of understanding legacy, or new code that you are going to be looking at. Looking at how linting can be useful for learning and understanding.