I’ve recently been on an overseas trip, and it seems without fail that the concept of mobile roaming charges causes confusion and headaches for me (or perhaps more specifically my travelling companions). This is a short post to crystallise what I’ve re-learnt and to have something to refer to There are a few related concepts at play: Roaming - whether you can do anything (make calls, send messages, emergency calls, access the internet) with your phone using cellular data.

This is a post that I hope to be able to point someone to the next time I’m teaching someone how to ssh into a machine. I’m sure there are better posts out there on this, but I want this to be terse and pragmatic, without a whole lot of backstory. So you want to log into a remote server, either a local server computer or on the cloud. Usually, I’m teaching a windows speaking audience, where I personally use WSL for ssh, but these instructions are also geared to powershell.

Although it’s not something I tend to advertise very often, I’m a maintainer for GeoPandas which is the de-facto standard tool for tabular geospatial analysis in Python. My contributions here wax and wane here with the amount of free time and mental space I have to volunteer. As part of this, we keep the software in sync with developments in pandas, and our CI tests against pandas/main. From time to time (more frequently with the upcoming pandas 2.

This is a continuation of [my previous post about pip-tools]({{< ref “python_dep_management.md” >}}), and the unsatisfying conclusion that it doesn’t handle generating cross platform requirements particularly elegantly. I started this investigation with the premise that it should be possible to generate a cross-platform environment specification from a single computer. This post determines the validity of that premise, by taking a peek at the internals of the pip-tools and its dependency solver.

I’ve chosen to split this post into at least two parts, as the preamble to give context became a blog post in itself. So this first piece focuses the context around introducing stricter dependency management, and outlining the cracks that appear when trying to come up with a solution that works on multiple platforms. Recently, I’ve been looking into transitioning a project (in this case, a large transport model dev codebase) from a heavy development cycle into a production like state.