Ephes Blog

Worked on lots of small things:

• Released kptncook 0.0.6 fixing a confusingly named command.
• Answered some emails sent to hallo@python-podcast.de. Usually we don't get that much email, but last week we had multiple mails to be answered at the same time for the first time running the podcast. Dunno if this is good or bad :).
• Found a bug in jupyterlab where rename file is ignored if the target name already exists.
• Worked a little bit on making the podlove plugin / wordpress deployable on my infrastructure which is more difficult than expected.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog | Interesting as always
• The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations | Via Hotel Bar Sessions

Youtube

• It Depends Ep. 8 April 2022 Jordan Tigani peeks into the future of analytical databases | One of the creators of big table gets interviewed

Twitter

• https://howisFelix.today? - personal life tracking | Really interesting project, it's all open source..
• Language and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race | Buffalo!
• Do you have personal website with an #RSS feed? I’d love to subscribe! 🤗
• Microservices are still difficult - thread

Software

• Cookiecutter template for a Python package based on the Hypermodern Python article series | Lots of references to useful other projects included
• appdirs | Use standard data / config directories for your platform (windows / macos / linux)
• django-configurations | Make different configurations configurable :)
• Appliku - Deploy Django in 5 minutes | Interesting deployment option, deploying to your own servers is possible (which is usually much cheapier than cloud)
• SpeedPy.Com is a Django-based SaaS BoilerPlate | Interesting, I'll have to take a closer look at this..

Podcasts

• Folge 116 - Events, Event Sourcing und CQRS (Software Architektur im Stream)
• Episode 52: Immortality (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Good episode. There was a cool argument from Charles against afterlife: You have to assume there's no hope of changing anything in this life to be able to believe that creating a perfect virtual one makes things better. Also applies to video games or role playing, imho. If the yield on doing actual things is low maybe buying real estate on the moon or NFT or something like this seems like a good idea. But you have to be pretty desperate to buy into that.
• Hypermodern Python Projects (TalkPython['Podcast']) | Lots of great stuff in this episode
• Episode #280: Easy terminal scripts by sourcing your Py (Python Bytes)
• Revision 527: Vue State Management (Working Draft) | Pinia ftw
• Sonderfolge: Die Pandemie vom Menschen her denken (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Good episode, strange title because it's about communication strategies.
• Appliku - Kostja Palović (Django Chat) | Super interesting for me, because I'm about to do a very similar thing :>
• Wie funktioniert Manufactum? mit Max Heimann (Kassenzone.de) | Good as usual
• Episode 50: Desire (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• Politisch? - die freie Zeit (Das philosophische Radio)
• Ziviler Ungehorsam - Wie radikal darf Protest in der Klimakatastrophe sein? | Good talk. Includes a good definition of "Ziviler Ungehorsam"
• Episode 53: Metaphysics (Hotel Bar Sessions) | This podcast keeps getting better, really impressive
• Bits und so #788 (In 500 Meter das Ziel ist links) (Bits und so)

Released version 0.0.5 of the command line kptncook scraping tool based on the work to reverse the kptncook api from Daniel. It's now possible to fetch recipe metadata just by providing the sharing url of a recipe from the kptncook app. It's also possible to download all stored favorites and backup them locally or import them to mealie.

After listeing to LOV021 Podlove-API mit Dirk Schumann I realised it might be possible to use the podlovers podcast frontend also for django-cast because it doesn't depend directly on wordpress anymore. This is very exciting, because having to use php/wordpress was the main reason keeping me from looking more closely into the whole podlove ecosystem. The only thing I have to do is to write an adapter for the api (and there are some parts missing as well like transcripts and contributors). But at first I have to be able to test and understand the existing api locally. Therefore my aversion for wordpress led me to having to use it finally. In the end it wasn't that difficult at all and I took some notes on how to reproduce that. File handling is not working yet, but I'm sure to figure it out next week.

Articles

• Errors are constructed, not discovered
• Johannes weeklog | Lots of interesting stuff
• Lomuto’s Comeback | Computers are surprising, big O notation is not always right respect to caching and branch prediction issues on modern CPUs

YouTube

• DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Mark Ramm | Interesting to watch old talks.. 

Software

• Memray is a memory profiler for Python | Finally released by Bloomberg as open source \o/
• This package provides the core functionality for pydantic | Much faster core for pydantic v2 validation backend

Twitter

• Erfurt latrine desaster | Holy shit!
• Thread about reasonable covid behaviour atm | Ok, maybe times are confusing, but twitter is full of people demonstrating an inability to adapt their behaviour to a changed environment. This thread is a rare exception.

Podcasts

• Episode 51: Moral Subjectivity (Hotel Bar Sessions) | This whole episode is about two pages from "On the Genealogy of Morality" by Nietzsche - kind of a new format and I like it a lot
• Folge 115 - Data Mesh - nur ein neuer Datenanalyse-Hype? (Software Architektur im Stream) | Found an exception to the "if there's a question mark in the headline, the answer is always no"-rule :). Maybe I was framed by the bad audio quality into seeing flaws everywhere, but well, at least I do know now what people are talking about when they speak about data mesh.
• Django’s Rough Edges - Keryn Knight (Django Chat) | Good as always
• LOV021 Podlove-API mit Dirk Schumann (https://podlovers.org) | Very exciting episode (at least for me), because it seems like podlove is going to expose all its functionality via an api. Which means that I could use the podlove frontend (if there is such a thing) together with django-cast if I just implement the same api on the backend side, which shouldn't be that difficult (famous last words)..
• WR1351 Wörme im Büsenbachtal (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• Monchi (Feine Sahne Fischfilet) (Reflektor)
• WR1353 Schwache Kraft und Asteroidenfamilien (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• #787 (Eternal September) (Bits und so)
• Vom Pilgern und Fasten - Wie Religion heute noch funktionieren kann (Hörsaal) | I'm not religious at all, but there were some interesting facts in this episode. For example: In .de the number of members of the catholic church is in constant decline since at least 70 years. But globally the number of members is increasing. It's growing even if you correct for population growth. Fascinating. I also didn't know that there is no commonly accepted definition of religion in the social sciences.
• Glaube und Wissenschaft - Die Grenzen unseres Wissens (Hörsaal) | This talk is odd. The main conclusion "We don't know everything therefore we should consider a thing we like to believe as possible" (which has nothing to do with physics and everything with wishful thinking) is clearly wrong. What bothers me is the deceptive nature of this talk, trying to use physics jargon to bullshit the audience. This talk shouldn't have passed the editors of this podcast.
• Episode 49: Memory (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Great, iirc
• Revision 525: Beyond Tellerrand und andere Konferenzen in Zeiten von Corona (Working Draft) | Episode about the beyond tellerrand conference which will be next week in Düsseldorf (I will be there, too)

Met a lot of people last week. Spent the first half of the week going to this years PyCon DE despite I thought I wouldn't. This was really cool (day 1, day 2, day 3). After that I spent the last half of the week attending family appointments. Avoided to catch fire / covid, ffp2 ftw. Somebody was more successful than me reversing the kptncook app and opened an github issue to notify me about that. How awesome is that? As soon as I'll be able to spent more time on computer stuff I'm going to enhance my kptncook-scraper accordingly.

Things I Learned

• auto_error in fastAPI allows you to test for different authentication methods (cookie, bearer token, etc), but using an authentication middleware as in django is probably a cleaner solution
• It's not possible to return values from dependencies declared at router level in fastapi, but you could attach stuff to the request and use it as a container for additional state

Articles

• Weeklog from Johannes
• A reworked TCP zero-copy receive API / Zero-copy TCP receive | According to those articles, it should be possible to do zero copy tcp from one socket to another. For example serve a file directly from django to a client while fetching it from an object store like minio.
• Python f-strings | Nice guide on how to use f-strings
• spectrum-4 ethernet leaps to 800g with nvidia circuits | Hmm, that's kind of fast, I guess..
• The Illustrated Transformer | Great documentation about how the transformer neural net architecture works
• A Web Renaissance | More interesting than the content is who wrote it.. there's a broad trend for a while and now it starts to get recognized 

YouTube

• Multiway Systems as Models to Understand Mind and Universe - a Conversation with Stephen Wolfram

Software

• Typed Settings | Uses attrs / cattrs and it's main purpose is to aggregate settings from different sources like password managers etc. I mostly use pydantics BaseSettings for things like this.
• Folium - Python data, leaflet.js maps | Makes it easy to visualize data from python with leaflet on maps
• Great Expectations | Library to validate, document and profile your data..
• Checkmk monitoring software | Had to link to wikipedia, because it's not possible to find out what the software does from looking at the official website (hate things like that)
• MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding | Used by idealo
• SentenceTransformers is a Python framework for state-of-the-art sentence, text and image embeddings | Also used by idealo
• Faiss is a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors | Used by idealo for product clustering
• Label propagation algorithm | idealo

Twitter

• Twitter thread about cool command line tools | Need to look at threads like this every now and then
• How to build your own python
• Someone is even more annoyed by the education system than me :)
• Sdes for @PyConDE PyCon DE 2022 keynote "Python 3.11 in the web browser – A journey"
• Thread about the elon musk twitter takeover from someone who ran reddit for a while
• Python objects can define their own formatting mini-languages for f-strings by defining __format__ | pretty cool
• How can you break out of a #python double loop? Use a generator to make it a single loop instead!  | neat trick

Podcasts

• Episode #278: Multi-tenant Python applications (PythonBytes)
• Sonderfolge: Genesen, aber nicht gesund (Das Coronavirus-Update) | About 10% get long covid.. 
• #275 – Rick Rubin: Legendary Music Producer (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Studio recording is the opposite of a performance..
• Removing Python's Dead Batteries (in just 5 years) (Talk Python To Me)

Recorded and produced a new podcast episode about microservices. For my podcast hosting project I need some place to store podcast episodes and therefore I finally automated the setup of minio. Let see if it will be fast enough :). Did a bugfix release of kptncook. And started to collect information about deployed services which then could be used by other services doing logging, monitoring or backup.

Things I Learned

• If you don't want to run your minio installation publicly this ssh-portforwarding command works (you have to change username and ports): ssh -v -L  10000:127.0.0.1:10000 -L 10001:127.0.0.1:10001 minio@staging.wersdoerfer.de

Books

• Fluent Python, 2nd Edition | Just released -> instant buy..

Articles

• OpenTelemetry and Python: A Complete Instrumentation Guide
• Cython is 20!
• Garlic Presses Are the Devil | FInally someone said it!
• Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540 Billion Parameters for Breakthrough Performance | Wow, joke explanation is really impressive
• Yes, You Can Charge More | As a freelancer, I approve the message :)
• Weeklog for Week 13: March 28 to April 03 | Great stuff
• The Majestic Monolith | Old article, but still good
• In defense of simple architectures | I would not use eventlet today and I beg to differ on graphql and kubernetes.. but the general direction: full ack
• How to Squash and Rebase a Git Branch

Software

• django-postgres-metrics | A Django application that exposes a bunch of PostgreSQL database metrics.
• crab is a simple unix toolkit for working with local development environments

Twitter

• This article is great! I didn't know that you could put form inputs outside of the nested <form> tag and specify the form they belong to with form=
• ENTP vs IMDB | ROFL
• DALL·E is impressive
• About Twitter advanced search | I didn't know about this
• "Did you come to my school when I was little and show me dinosaur poo?"
• News from cryptozoology | Hard evidence, just for once..
• Very impressive---indeed, awe-inspiring---AI demos this last week, e.g., from OpenAI (image generation) and Google (text generation). These demos seem to convince many people that current AI is getting closer and closer to human-level intelligence. 🧵 | I'm not sure whether those problems are too hard or there's just not enough interest in solving them..

Podcasts

• Sam Newman: Monolith to Microservices (InfoQ Podcast) | In preparation for own microservices episode
• Folge 99 - Sam Newman - Monolith to Microservices (Software Architektur im Stream) | dito
• Sam Newman on Information Hiding, Ubiquitous Language, UI Decomposition and Building Microservices (InfoQ Podcast) | dito
• WR1347 Bruttointelligenzprodukt (WRINT - Wissenschaft)
• WR1349 Embargo: Modelle, Zölle, Anreize (WRINT - Wirtschaftskunde) | What I like most about this podcast is to get a glance at the economic viewpoint, which is usually really foreign to me. Highlights: Maybe just use tariffs and form a price cartel to rob gas/oil from russia (they have to go down with their own price to be able to sell at market price). Those who scream loudest about oil/gas from russia being not substitutable are those who are most afraid of being substituted.
• Intelligente Kraken - Aliens mit neun Gehirnen (Sein und Streit) | Octopus cannot see color with their eyes, but with their arms :€ and the information about color and ground structure does not need to be transferred to the central brain, because each arm has one (bigger than the central one). They build "houses" with an individual aesthetic and get angry if you mess it up.
• Machtvoll? - Kunstwerke (Das philosophische Radio) | It's weird, every time I listen to Markus Gabriel talking about abstract topics I'm not familiar with, I'm thinking: Hmm, interesting and eloquent. Everytime I hear him say concrete things about topics I know about (computer stuff), I'm like: Wow, this is complete bullshit. Not sure what to make of this. But there were a lot of intereting definitions of art: From having no intent/purpose (Kant) to showing how things really are (which needs to be intentional, Klee) to art is the definition of art (Kosuth). Kept me entertained at least while doing sports.
• Andrew Song of Whisper AI on solving hearing loss with AI (The robot brains) 
• Föderation Mehr als nur Mastodon (Der INNOQ Podcast) | meh
• UKW096 Ukraine: Weltkrieg 2.5 (Unsere kleine Welt) | Really long
• Verletzlichkeit macht nahbar - über Vulnerabilität und was wir daraus lernen können (Was denkst du denn?) | Meh
• Rhetorik zwischen Wahrheit und Propaganda - das Handwerk der Glaubwürdigkeit (Sein und Streit) | Also meh

Applied for Prototype Fund with django-cast, I would love to be able to improve documentation and usabiltiy.  Finished a command line client for syncing kptncook recipes with my self-hosted mealie instance. Revisited my old "will_it_saturate" project to compare caddy vs uvicorn speed. Good fun.

Things I Learned

• You can have validators run befor assigning values in pydantic models, creating a previously non-existing directory, for example.

Articles

• Weeklog of shezi | Lots of interesting stuff as usual.
• The Concept of the Ruliad | Uff, maybe I have to read it again..

Talks

• Wagtail Space US 2022 | Wagtail conference talks

Youtube

• Object-Oriented Programming is Bad | Well, I wouldn't say it's all bad, but there are some points in this talk
• Object-Oriented Programming is Good* | Same author, same opinion :)

Twitter

• The microphone talk | I remember having this conversation more often than I would have expected
• I think the 1420 YouTube channel will make for a nice historical reference a few years from now | Really cool youtube channel. Those things are far more interesting to me than the usual media coverage. Previous generations didn't have access to this kind of content. It's not exactly flying cars, but still pretty cool that this is possible today.

Podcasts

• Bits und so #784 (Im Watschnbaumwald) (Bits und so) | Well, there are reasons for limiting the password length that are not completely stupid, but most of the time they are..
• (113) So Long (Das Coronavirus-Update) | I will be missing this. Interesting numbers from this episode: infection fatality rate did go down from 1.5% (begin) to 0.11% (now) which is comparable with the flue.. of course there are far more covid infections so it's not the same risk.. for every person dying from covid there's on which dies in hospital from a different cause, but was tested covid positiv
• Gesund? - Ehrgeiz (Das philosophische Radio) | Good content, really crappy website :/
• Überholt? - die Kultur des Maßes (Das philosophische Radio)
• Episode 505: Daniel Stenberg on 25 years with cURL (Software Engineering Radio) | Asked what he would tell aspiring programmers who want to achieve what he did, he replied: "Well, I don't know if I'm able to give advice on how to win the lottery." - pretty wise.
• Django the Good Parts - James Bennett (Django Chat) | The part about service layers was really interesting.
• Revision 523: Wenig TypeScript und viel Vermischtes (Working Draft) | Learned about those two programming youtube videos above in this episode
• Frontend & Feldfrüchte Mit Anselm Hannemann (Wo wir sind ist vorne.) | I cannot believe I would ever say this, but: maybe those episodes a little bit too long..
• Wege zum Erfolg - Geduld, die lernbare Superpower (Hörsaal) | Hard to swallow pill
• Verhaltensökonomie - Selbstkontrolle macht zufriedener (Hörsaal) | More hard to swallow pills - I do need a drink now
• NEWS 13/22 – Redis Stack // Safari Technology Preview 142 // Java 18 // Entwickler:innen-Zufriedenheit // node-ipc.js  Malware (programmier.bar) | News from other language communities..
• Episode 48: The Simulation Hypothesis (Hotel Bar Sessions) | They talked about roko's basilisk, dammit