Amethyst Reese

I am a software engineer by nature, and I focus on building tools for other developers, both for my employer and for personal, open source projects. I work full-time remote, and spend most of my time on a Mac, but I also support developers on every major OS.

In my free time I play a lot of video games, on a variety of platforms, but I have strong opinions about which ones are “best”. I have done my best to keep gaming-specific items in a separate section.

I’m grateful and privileged to be well employed and capable of buying quality gear. I appreciate that not everyone can afford such luxuries. I hope that someday the world will have enough social safety nets and universal benefits that everyone could have the same opportunities. #unionize

I joined Pascal Hartig on the Meta Tech Podcast, episode #57, to talk about Fixit, the new open source linter I’ve been working on, how and where Python is used at Meta, and how the Python Language Foundation team supports thousands of engineers, data scientists, AI and ML researchers, and anyone else who uses Python to get their work done.

You can find the episode in your podcast app of choice, or listen right here:

Let’s talk about my newest open source project, built as part of my effort to improve the linting ecosystem at Meta:

This year, we have been building a new linter, Fixit 2, designed from the ground up to make developers more efficient and capable, both in open source projects and the diverse landscape of our internal monorepo. At Meta, we are using Fixit 2 with a few early adopters, and plan to roll it out to the rest of our monorepo soon. But any developer can use it to perform auto-fixing more efficiently and make faster improvements to their own codebases.

Something I don’t get to talk about enough is just how much I truly appreciate the ability to spend my time at Meta solving problems with open source, and that I can share my work with the rest of the world. Fixit is the third open source project that I’ve had the privilege of releasing at Meta, and I believe Fixit makes it easier than ever before to build new lint rules for Python, a powerful tool for any Python team.

Writing a new lint rule can be done with less than a dozen lines of code, and test cases are defined inline. You can even place it right next to the code that it will be linting:

# teambread/rules/hollywood.py
import fixit
import libcst

class HollywoodName(fixit.LintRule):
    VALID = [...] # no lint errors here
    INVALID = [...] # bad code samples here
      
    def visit_SimpleString(self, node: libcst.SimpleString):
        if node.value in ('"Paul"', "'Paul'"):
            self.report(node, "It's underbaked!")

Unlike other new linters on the market, Fixit is uniquely focused on reducing the barriers to writing high quality, auto-fixing lint rules in pure Python, without needing to learn Rust or any other language. We believe that having targeted lint rules with auto-fixes is key to improving developer productivity even more than having the fastest possible linter:

When running Fixit 2 with auto-fixing lint rules, any code that triggers the lint rule is an opportunity to get an automatic replacement, improving the codebase with less effort from the developer. Applied more broadly, Fixit 2 can even be used as a tool to enact sweeping codemods against a large codebase while leaving a lint rule in place to handle any matching code in the future.

Fixit 2 is already available on PyPI. You can pip install fixit and start using it with zero configuration.

We have a roadmap with plans for future improvements and features, and a rich set of documentation and user guides to help you get started with Fixit 2 in your own projects or repositories.

My name is Amethyst.

I am a trans woman — wife, cat mom, daughter, and sister. This is who I am.

• You can call me “Amy” if you’d like.
• Please use she/they pronouns when referring to me.
• Please do not use my old name, even when talking about past me or past events.
• Please do not ask personal questions about my transition.

I started this journey over four years ago, but the difficult parts have only just begun. I greatly appreciate all of your love and support.

Thank you! 💜

My PyCon talk “Open Source on Easy Mode” is available to watch on YouTube, but I made a bold decision this year to give my talk using an iPad.

It turned out to actually be “PyCon Talk on Hard Mode” instead, because nothing went right.

It’s March, and I’m writing my talk. I care enough about style, typography, and legibility that I need tight control over fonts and themes. I lean heavily on Keynote and Adobe Fonts, with screenshots of oversized 42pt type in my editor of choice to get the best results.

And because I’m never good at extemporaneous speaking, I write a full script ahead of time, and keep that script in the speaker notes, so that in the worst case, I can fall back to orator mode. This all means I need tight control over the device that I’m presenting from.

But the only laptop I have is my employer’s, where installing fonts is complicated and a grey area that would require mixing my personal Adobe account with professional work tools. Every other device I own is a desktop, tablet, or phone.

Even more, I’ve never liked having to bring a big bag and heavy laptop just to give a presentation. Carrying four pounds of gear around all day sucks, and I’d much prefer something small and light enough to fit in my everyday bag.

That’s when I get The Idea:

“Why not give the talk using my iPad Mini?”

Modern iOS includes Keynote, and I can use the Adobe app to install my fonts system-wide, just like on my Mac, and Keynote can use them perfectly fine.

I pulled out my USB-C HDMI dongle, and while normally the iPad just mirrors the device over HDMI, Keynote will actually show the slides at full screen over HDMI, while showing the presenter notes on the iPad itself, just like a laptop. It would even render 16:9 when presenting!

I double check on my monitor’s input stats, and it’s outputting a 1440p signal. This might actually work!

It can’t be this easy, right? Am I crazy?

Seriously considering giving my PyCon talk using just an iPad and leaving my laptop at home. 👀

— Amethyst Reese ✊🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (@n7cmdr) March 29, 2022

I tried it with other monitors and my TV, and it seemed flawless. I did full dry runs using my iPad, and even paired my trackpad and keyboard to the iPad and edited the rest of the talk on the iPad. I was convinced I wouldn’t need my laptop.

A week before the event, I committed.

We fly to SLC, and I’m continuing to practice—and edit—my talk on the iPad. The morning of the talk, I immediately head to the green room and test my setup.

No issues.

This is actually happening!

I come back after lunch. The volunteer walks me to the room I’m presenting in.

I say hi to the staff, drop off my bag, get mic’ed up, walk up to the podium, plug in HDMI, trigger Keynote, and …

The A/V system is only rendering my slides on the left half of the screen, squashed into the wrong aspect ratio.

It’s OK, we’ll just unplug and re-plug.

But no matter what I or the A/V staff do, my slides won’t show up correctly.

We delay the start of the talk; people are still filing in bit by bit. The host tries to lighten the mood and asks me a couple filler questions to stall for time.

Time flies while we’re desperately waiting to see if this can get fixed. Before I know it, it’s about 8 minutes past the original start time, and the host asks if I just want to get started anyways.

I say yes, because bad slides are at least better than no slides—or no talk.

Now, my topic was intentionally broad in scope, and I had a lot to cover. I had already planned to talk fast to get through everything. During rehearsals, I cut content so that I could consistently finish at almost exactly the 30 minute time slot.

But now I’m already behind.

I had Keynote set up to show me a timer, so I would know how I was doing on time. Ten minutes into the talk, and the host is already showing me the “15 minutes left” card. I’m talking as fast as I can, but also stumbling under the pressure. I’ve gone from speaking to reading.

At 13 minutes, an A/V expert manages to fix the output of my slides, but it’s too late for the demo of “thx” that I was the most excited to share. I wouldn’t find out that they were fixed until much later. Nothing mattered if I couldn’t finish the talk.

Moments later and they show me the “10 minutes left” card. They’re not giving me the full half hour. I start dropping phrases or sentences where I can to make up. I don’t think I’ve ever talked this fast in my life.

At 18 minutes, they give me the “5 minute warning”.

I make it to the final section (well ahead of my original expected pace, mind you) and get the STOP card. I power through 8 slides in 40 seconds, but the “ums” return as I have to make it all up on the spot.

I close out the talk with a total runtime of just about 26 minutes.

The polite applause starts, and I manage to get myself off stage with a shred of dignity in tact. As they’re removing the mic, I thank and apologize to the A/V crew for causing so many problems. 😅

I find out that—for reasons I will never understand—the iPad was only negotiating a resolution of 1080i (interlacing!) instead of the 1080p that their system was expecting.

Why 1080i? Because technology!

And why did that break the A/V layout? No idea.

But thankfully, even after my mediocre delivery, the smashed slides, and flickering output, there were still folks that stopped by to say hello, compliment my talk, and ask questions. Sadly, my brain was toast, so I have little memory of who they were or what we talked about. 😓

I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to give this talk again in the future, but I’m planning to re-record it at home soon. Maybe I can talk at a more reasonable pace, and actually make it through with all of my content in one piece.

But there’s one thing I know I’m doing the next time a talk gets selected for PyCon, or any of the wonderful regional conferences I love attending:

I’m using my iPad to present! 💪

I joined Michael Kennedy on the excellent Talk Python podcast, episode #304, last week to chat about the Omnilib Project, an organization of open source packages I started, and how they fit into the modern world of Python and AsyncIO. We also discuss how I got started in programming and Python, with a rare glimpse into just how nerdy I was as a child. 😅

Listen in Overcast, any podcast player, or right here:

Back in 2019–remember the before times?–I gave a talk at North Bay Python 2019 on the topics of coroutines, AsyncIO, and how they work. It’s a crazy journey from bytecode and runtime instructions to building our own terrible event loop in pure Python using nothing but generators and tears. Enjoy!

And if that was too slow, don’t miss the shorter rendition of this talk that I gave at PyCascades 2020, right before COVID ruined everything.

I am a gender fluid person. My preferred pronouns are they/them.

This is difficult for me to say publicly. I’ve been trying to find the right time and the right words for over a year now.

Most of my life, I’ve known deep down that I didn’t fit into the traditional male gender role or expectations, even if I didn’t understand what that meant. I was often insulted, ridiculed, or harassed on a regular basis for being myself. I learned through trial by error how to “blend in”, and suppressed other emotions or behaviors for fear of how I would be perceived by everyone else. There wasn’t a lot of introspection involved–just reactions to external judgement. Without the vast array of media that’s now become available to everyone these days, I don’t know that I could have fully understood who I was even if I’d tried. I just didn’t have the conceptual framework or cognitive tools necessary to unpack notions of gender roles, let alone to analyze how they affected me or my own position within them.

But now I do, and I’ve become more aware of who I’ve been all along. The past few years have been a slow awakening and acknowledgement of how I feel and what truly makes me feel happy. It’s complicated, and I don’t claim to have a full definition of who I am, but I like to believe it includes some combination of courage, femininity, intelligence, empathy, and emotional strength. I’ve started to embrace this in what I wear and how I express myself as a person. I’ve bought and worn more “women’s” clothes, shoes, and accessories in the past two years than traditional “masculine” items, and it’s been absolutely liberating. Some of my closest coworkers, friends, and family have seen a small number of these over the past couple years, but I suspect most have not realized what they were seeing, because they only see what I’ve been willing–or felt safe enough–to share with the rest of the world.

I live in daily fear that expressing my true self in public may result in uncomfortable, dangerous, or even deadly consequences. Transgender, non-binary, and queer people face incredible risk in our society, just trying to live as who we are. As we become more visible in society, the number of hate crimes being committed against us is increasing. Even in progressive areas, I’ve witnessed name calling and harassment of queer people by bigots who thrive on intimidation and violence. This is absolutely unacceptable in our society, but it “works”; fear is an effective tactic. I’ve refused to wear overtly feminine clothes in public, because no matter how many allies I have in this world, it only takes one asshole to ruin–or end–my life, and I can’t know who they are until it’s too late.

Coming out here won’t change that. I already expect to see harassment–or at least be treated differently–by those who read this. I’m prepared to delete comments, and block people online or in real life, that refuse to accept me for who I am. Being visibly queer will most likely carry a stigma and risk for the rest of my life, but maybe it will also let me be more comfortable around those that do accept me, and that alone will be worth it to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe being myself in public, but I’m fortunate to now have a full-time remote position at one of the most diverse and accepting companies I’ve ever seen, increasing the time I can spend with my best friend, being the person I’ve always been. Over time, I’m sure that how I express myself will change and adapt as I learn more about myself and what makes me happy. I hope that some day I can feel safe enough to share more of my authentic self in public as well.

I’m truly thankful to have an amazing best friend, wife, and soul mate in Ember, who truly accepts and embraces me for who I am. She is, and always will be, the love of my life. At every step of this journey, she has been my rock and my guiding star, and I will never be able to express just how much it means to have her support.

I would also like to thank my friends, coworkers, and every other visible queer person I know that took these steps before me, so that I can more easily understand who I am and who I want to be.

A week ago today, I gave a talk at PyCon Australia in Sydney. I discussed refactoring in Python, and how to build refactoring tools using nothing but the standard library, building up from concepts to syntax trees to how the lib2to3 module works. The talk finished with the announcement of the open source refactoring framework I built at Facebook, Bowler, which I built using those same concepts. I really appreciated the questions from the audience and in the halls afterwards, and we really enjoyed our time in Sydney. Thanks to everyone that made PyCon so great!

This past Friday, I presented a talk at PyCon US 2018 – the first time I’ve been fortunate enough to attend. The talk was focused on achieving high performance from modern Python services through the use of AsyncIO and the multiprocessing modules. The turnout was better than I could have ever expected, and I was really happy to hear from everyone that stopped by the Facebook booth to ask questions, discuss Facebook engineering practices, or even just say “hello”. Thank you to everyone who made my first PyCon amazing!

This week, I was interviewed by Mike Driscoll of Mouse vs Python for their “PyDev of the Week” series, focusing on developers in the Python community.

A short quote, and timely announcement:

I’m currently preparing a talk for PyCon 2018 on using asyncio with multiprocessing for highly-parallel monitoring and/or scraping workloads. To go with this talk, I’m working on some simple example code that I hope to publish on Github. This will be my first major conference talk, so I’m both excited and absolutely terrified! 😅

I’m looking forward to giving that talk, and will post a video here afterwards!

One of my favorite projects that I’ve created has to be ZNC Push, a plugin for ZNC that generates push notifications for IRC highlights and private messages. It supports a wide array of push services for all of the major mobile platforms, and gives the user deep flexibility in choosing how and when to trigger these notifications.

However, I have very little insight into usage statistics for the plugin. Pushover is the only service that gives me gross usage data, but considering ZNC Push supports six other networks as well as custom push URLs, this only represents an unknown portion of the total usage. But I will continue to draw baseless conclusions from it regardless! Do note that I can’t see anything more than raw volume of notifications; I do not have access to who is sending/receiving these, nor the contents of those messages.

So without further ado, some pretty graphs straight from the Pushover dashboard:

ZNC Push reached a milestone of sending 15,000 push notifications in May through the Pushover service!

Push volume has been growing steadily since Pushover support was added, with a small dip in December and January that is likely attributeable to the holidays for most users. May marked the second occasion that ZNC Push has exceeded the volume “cap”, and Pushover has again graciously increased that in support of this open source project. At this sort of grawth rate, I would expect the next volume cap (25,000/mo) will be reached by October at the latest. I’m excited to see such growth for a small side project with such a niche use case.

Sometimes, it’s amazing to stop and realize just how far this project has come. What started in January of 2011 as a basic module for the Notifo push service, has blossomed into a mature system supporting multiple push services and far more customization options than I had ever envisioned from the beginning. Knowing that it’s being used by so many people, and helping them stay more connected with their online communities, makes me a very happy engineer.

Many thanks to Pushover for granting such a large volume of free notifications to ZNC Push. If you’re not already using them for your push service of choice, I highly recommend them. They have apps for both Android and iPhone, and they continue to improve them and add new features over time.

And as always, my eternal appreciation to everyone who has contributed time and energy to helping me improve the module over the past two and a half years! The project wouldn’t be where it is today without your support.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote an article about my Favorite Android Apps, but a lot has changed with Android and its app ecosystem since then. Developers have started putting more focus on design and usability when creating apps, and of course newer apps have come along that I have come to rely upon. I myself have upgraded to newer devices, with a Nexus 7 replacing my Galaxy Tab 10.1, and a Galaxy Nexus from work has sadly replaced my beloved but aging Nexus S. So what follows are some of my favorite new apps from 2012, and some follow-up on what my previous favorite apps look like in modern attire. All screenshots are taken from devices running Android 4.2.1 (CM 10.1 nightlies).

For the last couple years, this site has been managed and updated using the open source static site generator called Poole. It is an excellent and simple system, comprised of two Python files — the Poole source code and a site-specific macros.py — a simple page template, input documents and static content. This is more than enough for a small static website, but more complicated sites, like blogs, require quite a few macros in order to generate things like archives, tag pages, or even RSS feeds. Over the 18 months that I worked with Poole, my macro file had gotten a bit disorganization, and the limitation of working from only a single template file was starting to strain on what I could do with it.

Now keep in mind, I still like many of the features that drew me to Poole in the first place, such as the use of a document-centric build process, with YAML headers for defining page metadata rather than an inline, proprietary format used by projects like Jekyll. I also enjoy the simplicity of the content representations, but the lack of an extensible content pipeline is my biggest complaint. Supporting formats other than Markdown requires adding yet another hook to the macro file; generating archives and tag pages required hacking in a multi-phase build using os.exec(); and inlining another page’s content post-render was just not possible, resulting in Markdown named-link collisions when rendering multiple posts to a single page.

I wanted something new. So, for the past few months, I’ve been working on Nib.

The resulting design is based heavily on the concepts of Poole, but built around a primary goal of producing a proper content pipeline that is simultaneously aware of the differentiation between resources and documents, and defines multiple stages where plugins can hook into the process and alter or generate page contents at build time. Indeed, most of the actual functionality of Nib is contained within a handful of plugins, while the main module merely defines a framework for the content pipeline.

In effect, adding support for more content or resource formats should be as simple as adding a new plugin attached to the appropriate file extensions. Advanced content manipulation, generating “virtual pages”, and aggregating pages or documents into multiple locations are all possible as well.

The Markdown plugin is 14 lines of code; the LessCSS plugin is 13; even the blog plugin — which generates the archive pages, tag listings, and Atom feed — takes only 86 lines to do a better job than the old Poole macros that required double the effort.

Today, I’ve thrown the switch. While it looks nearly identical to the old site generated by Poole, the page you are now reading has officially been generated by Nib. The news feed sees the biggest makeover, having changed formats from RSS to Atom, and now offers full content posts. Link-style posts, a format that I’ve been wanting to experiment with, are also a new option. Both features would have required more effort on Poole than I was interested in expending, but the new architecture has allowed me to indulge myself.

Nib is still in an extremely early, and unstable, phase though. It works for the needs of my site, and does come with some basic documentation and a sample site to start from, but it’s far from complete. Near term goals include adding support for an intelligent menu, as well as support for more content and resource formats, like reStructuredText or SASS. Contributions are always welcome though, even at this early stage. Nib is liberally licensed, and I would love to hear feedback from anyone trying to use it. Hopefully it will be useful for someone other than myself.

The past two months have been intense. At the beginning of May, I was let go from BioWare and Electronic Arts in a round of budget cuts for my studio. Since then, I’ve played far too many video games (and beaten multiple titles), slogged through innumerable interviews, redesigned my website from the ground up, and celebrated my seventh wedding anniversary in some of the best summer weather I’ve ever experienced.

Oh, and I got a job at Facebook.

On May 3rd, BioWare informed me that my position in the studio was being eliminated. My terrible luck had struck again. But this time was different; within a few days, a recruiter from Facebook found this website and my open source work, reached out to me, and encouraged me to apply for an engineering role. Four weeks later, after phone screens and an on-site interview, I was offered a position as a Production Engineer. My luck had not only reversed, it had gone off the scale in the opposite direction.

Alongside Facebook, all my other leads paled in comparison. I wanted to stay in gaming, but here was the opportunity of a lifetime, to join one of the biggest and best engineering companies in the world, and the chance to learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. The position is similar to the role I had at BioWare: writing and maintaining software to manage and automate the vast array of infrastructure that supports the front-end applications and engineers. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Monday was my orientation, and I was immediately impressed by the level of passion, vision and dedication from the entire team. Boz discussed the culture of “hack”, and told a story about building a loft in a war room when it couldn’t fit everyone in just two dimensions. Chris Cox gave an inspiring talk about where Facebook is heading, and I got a surreal sense of wonder when he mentioned our long term goals or the level of impact we have on global society and the way people communicate. It feels amazing to be part of a company that truly wants to change the world and improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Even the training process embodies those same ideals. The first few weeks, every engineer goes through “bootcamp”, attending learning and development sessions, sitting among other bootcamp engineers, and working with veteran teammates on real tasks to get familiar with the infrastructure, tools and codebase. Everyone is given the chance to progress at their own pace, with as much or as little help as needed. I’ve already learned so much in a few days, and I’ve also had the chance to share my own knowledge and experience with my fellow newcomers. And yet there’s still so much left to cover.

Wednesday was my first day at a desk. Taped to the monitor was a sheet of paper printed with bold, red lettering.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I don’t have an answer for that yet, but I will soon.