if you use a per project venv I see no reason not to use `pip install`. if you don't use a per project venv, well, do that!

Yeah, venv's are a must. And to the article's "forgot to activate the venv" complaint, I highly recommend direnv.

On top of activating the venv when (and only when) you're inside your project directory tree, you can use dotenv for loading all relevant env vars (AWS creds, API keys, etc.,) and add your project's root dir to PYTHONPATH with path_add.