Better Python programming with Dev Containers, uv, and ruff

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the view of my current, former, or future employers.

This article describes my macbook setup for coding in Python. The setup leverages VScode, Dev Containers, uv, and ruff.

Motivations

I started coding in 1985. At that time coding was easy because my programming language was BASIC, a simple programming language, and my computer, a Sinclair ZX spectrum, could run it out of the box.

As I started embracing more powerful languages like C or C++, my life as a programmer got more challenging. On one hand, the new programming languages required a deeper understanding of how computers work and wrestling with concepts like pointers, heap, stack, and so on. On the other hand, those languages required tools like a compiler, an assembler, a linker, and many libraries. Often so many versions of those tools clogged my computer to the point that only a full reinstall the OS could fix the performance issues that I experienced.

Many years ago, I started programming in Python. I love Python but soon I started having the same experience of programming with C/C++. My laptop was quickly littered with:

• Python interpreters
• virtualenvs
• many libraries and their versions
• different VSCode extensions