July 29, 2014

Casey Kinsey; Co-founder, HeapSort

6 years ago and I was sitting across the table from Jacob Kaplan-Moss (a co-creator and former BDFL of the Django framework) in a training session. He was dictating aloud the syntax of a Python dictionary.

“Make sure you close the mustachios.”

Close the what? He went on to explain. It turned out that he was referring to the brace characters “{” and “}” which wrap around a Python dictionary definition. Apparently at some point he and a few other developers were working through some confusion about what those characters were actually called.

The purists called them “braces”. The aloof called them “curly brackets”. Some, content to watch the world burn, just called them “brackets.”

“Mustachios,” they eventually agreed. And such have they always been named as far as I’m concerned.

Our love of the mustachios and our disdain for hashtags have combined to form the next social media revolution.

Introducing The Stachetag #

The [stachetag{](#) is a modern take on those worn out, soul-crushing hashtags you see all over the interwebs these days. It’s a word-based tag, followed by a left mustachio, “{”.

\S+\{

Behold, the universal regex to parse [stachetags{](#). Prepare your mind, because its about to get meta up in this bitch:

The stachetag regex is a motherfucking stachetag #

Getting Started #

To get you started implementing [stachetags{](#) right this second, we’ve released a couple of libraries on our brand-spankin’ new GitHub account.

Pull requests welcome. Integrations encouraged. Shaving is frowned upon.

Want to enjoy stuff like this all day? Come join HeapSort and we’ll help you find a new job where the rest of the team actually appreciates your sense of humor.

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