Ephes Blog

Did not much programming progress last week and no streams. But I did some infrastructure work to migrate fastdeploy from a very "how to do this with fastAPI"-style backend to a more "Architecture Patterns with Python"-style one. Maybe it's because of the research I did for our latest podcast episode about fastAPI or just mundane yak shaving, I don't know. And as always it's amusing/painful/sad to watch my confidence going from "ok, I've read the book, no big deal" to "omg, I've got no clue about anything" pretty quickly while trying to implement it. Doing things is quite different from reading a book and believing you have now a solid understanding and will be able to do things. I suspect it's even worse when you try to write a book/teach about things you thought you know well enough. Let's hope I never have to find out.

Articles

• Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid | works in GitHub issues/comments
• Google Search Is Dying | Meh, I don't know.. in Twitter discussion people were pointing to you.com as an alternative
• Datasette table diagram using Mermaid | whoa

Youtube

• my python project setup (+ all tools) (intermediate) anthony explains #396 | Anthony Sottile

Twitter

• Optimist: the glass is 1/2 full Pessimist: the glass is 1/2 empty Excel: the glass is First of February
• Use pg_basebackup | I'm still searching for a good postgres backup solution for my usecase (many databases)

Software 

• Mermaid lets you create diagrams and visualizations using text and code

Podcasts

• Peter & Boris — Fine-tuning OpenAI's GPT-3 (Gradient Dissent) | I honestly didn't know you could tell GPT-3: "Translate from german to english" and it will try to do this.. (other instructions work, too)
• Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck denkt gerne erstmal nach (Frontaldialoge) | Nothing new for me here, but nice reminder.. and I don't understand the buzz about MBTI and stuff like that, since I find the scientific foundation of the big five already very weak and probably not sufficient.. MBTI seems more like complete bs to me, but meh
• (110) Keep Calm and Maske On (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Well, nothing new - but the SAGE szenarios are really interesting
• Warum Python so universell ist | c’t uplink 41.8 (c't uplink) | Listened to it, because I also podcast about python. I'm probably not in the target audience, therefore I can't say anything about whether this is helpful for beginners or not, but I suspect it's not very helpful. The time for formats like that is just over.
• Revision 516: Tailwind CSS v3.0 (Working Draft) | Ok, have to take a look at tailwind3
• Bits und so #777 (Wo das Llama pelzig ist) (Bits und so) | solid entertainment
• Django Deployments - Eric Matthes (Django Chat) | Yep, deployment is difficult and there's no agreement about how to do this at all.. I'm doing something completely different..
• Episode #271: CPython: Async Task Groups in Python 3.11 (PythonBytes) 
• David Heinemeier Hansson // Ruby on Rails Creator and CTO at Basecamp and Hey (Alphalist) | Found it strange that the business parts were the ones I could agree the most, but here we are..
• Schriftstellerin Kerstin HenselLachen über die Widersprüche unseres Lebens (Hörsaal) | Good fun!
• Meet Ross Wightman, a prolific contributor to the AI/ML open source movement (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Instant follow on GitHub

Renamed castle to pdcst. Found out castle was not available anymore when I tried to upload it to PyPI and wondered about the error message. Delusion level: solipsist. Added some issues to the GitHub repo to make it easier for other people to help me. Or to remind my future self of things I failed to do. Let's find out :).

Managed to record and produce a podcast episode about FastAPI. This is our second episode containing some advertisement. Found out that I feel much better talking about a topic when I'm at least a little bit prepared. Problem: preparation takes time.

Revived a hibernating bookmarking project I started a few years ago together with Claudio. Seems like it could benefit from some htmx magic and I set up a CD-pipeline using fastdeploy which didn't take much time and was quite easy - as it should be.

Articles

• The future of editing in Wagtail | wagtail got some support from google for improving their editor, cool
• Writing better release notes | Ok, having an issue to group changes etc seems like a really good idea, will try this out
• Using FastAPI to Build Python Web APIs | Just some preparation for the FastAPI episode

Youtube

• Dynamic list views with Django and htmx | Hmm, maybe I should do similar videos?

Miscellaneous

• Prototype Fund - We fund Public Interest Tech | Interesting, I didn't know this existed.. 

Software 

• Django got black formatting | DEP 8 - finally \o/
• Simple.css - A classless CSS framework | I'm looking into different css frameworks atm but I cant decide
• Pico.css Minimal CSS Framework for semantic HTML | Well..

Podcasts

• Eindeutig mehrdeutig (Was denkst du denn?)
• Modern and fast APIs with FastAPI (Talk Python To Me) | Some preparation for our own FastAPI episode
• Episode 95: What Is a JIT and How Can Pyjion Speed Up Your Python? (The Real Python Podcast) | This is quite cool
• Running Python in Production (Talk Python To Me) | Hynek and Glyph!
• Setting Your Sites (Django Riffs) | Ok, I'm not the target audience for this podcast :)
• Episode 44: The Godfather Trilogy (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Solid entertainment
• WR1331 Die Jobdescription des Mondes (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot) | Light entertainment :)
• Laravel Livewire mit Christoph Rumpel (programmier.bar) | I didn't know that livewire and Alpine.js are from the same developer
• Folge 109 - Was ist Software-Architektur überhaupt? (Software Architektur im Stream) | Dunno why I'm interested in software architecture that much these days, but here we are..

Got podcast deployment progress showing with htmx \o/ using the standard HTTP-API without WebSockets in cast-registry. This is not bad at all. Apart from that, I spent most of my spare time (as if I had a lot of this...) on creating a new command-line podcast client called castle. I'm not sure why I did it - I just wanted to answer an email and demonstrate something simple in a notebook. And then I couldn't stop writing it. Maybe it turns out to be useful for something or a bad digression, we'll see.

I didn't record any programming streams this week, but we published the first python podcast episode including advertisement.

Articles

• How to Add a Favicon to Your Django Site
• PREFACE: HATEOAS — An Alternative Explanation
• Learn Python ASTs, by building your own linter
• Vue 3 as the New Default
• How I build a feature
• Why you shouldn't invoke setup.py directly

Books

• Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft)
• Natural Language Processing with Transformers - Notebooks

Papers

• World of Bits: An Open-Domain Platform for Web-Based Agents (revisiting the old shop.co idea)

Software 

• README.md Jupyter Black [Black formatter for Jupyter Notebook]
• Notifiers - The easy way to send notifiations
• PyTest 7.0 release

Podcasts

• Folge 100 Die Party (Der INNOQ Podcast)
• # 49 Darf man Kochrezepte abschreiben? Und schmeckt Wein oder Sekt ohne Alkohol? (Völlerei & Leberschmerz)
• Python Steering Council 2021 Retrospective (Talk Python To Me)
• (109) BA.2 mit mehr PS (Das Coronavirus-Update)
• htmx (Python Podcast)
• Folge 99 - Sam Newman - Monolith to Microservices (Software Architektur im Stream) | Usually I stop listening when people start to talk about microservices (like bigdata or ai), because it's too painful. I dont enjoiy watching people trying to fix their big ball of mud design by turning it into a distributed big ball of mud and creating an even bigger mess. But this episode was more like: The author of the book about microservices telling people to start with a monolith first and to be pretty caucious about switching to microservices :). Good fun.
• Django Testing and Debugging - Karen Tracey (Django Chat)
• #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind (Lex Fridman Podcast)
• WR1329 Menschentrenner (Wrintheit)
• Episode 43: Superstition (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• Episode 96: Manipulating and Analyzing Audio in Python (The Real Python Podcast)
• Episode #269: Get Rich and replace your cat (Python Bytes)
• Episode 42: Optimism and Pessimism (Hotel Bar Sessions)

Worked on using the new deployment context feature of fastdeploy to automate deploying cast_hosting instances for my podcast hosting SaaS. It finally worked and the hardest part of this was getting the traefik config right. If users can choose domain names by themselves, you have to use wildcard certificates. This means that you have to use an API key for your DNS provider allowing traefik to manipulate DNS records for the dnsChallenge, which is the only one supporting wildcard DNS. But then you still have to get both this part and your httpChallenge based certificates to work well together. Ok, here's the static config part that made traefik work for me.

Additionally, I did two programming streams last week, which is an improvement. And then there was an interesting discussion on the PyDDF telegram channel about automatic speech recognition. I haven't looked at this topic since mid-2019 and wow, a lot is going on there. Maybe it's even possible to train an asr model for german just by using existing labeled training data like the Mozilla common voice dataset plus lots of unlabeled audio data (podcasts maybe?).

Articles

• Building a production database in ten years or less (background story of EdgeDB)
• Introducing the Python Launcher for Unix

Useful Websites

• Create and share beautiful images of your source code

YouTube

• SerenityOS programming

Twitter

• Not sure if this is a controversial opinion or not: unit tests should make up a minority segment of your overall automated test suite (Twitter Thread by Simon Willison) | I heard someone calling the type of tests Simon describing here as perimeter tests - and a few years ago, I would have completely agreed. Now I'm not so sure anymore. If the core of your application is doing crud stuff and mostly reading and writing from a database, then well: yes (probably most web applications today fall in this category). But if you have complex business logic and the crud/database part is not that important, then unit tests are maybe the way to go. Lately I also discovered the joys of mocking out your database with an in memory repository and have my test suite run in under 1s, that's just fun to work with. While even having to wait for a few minutes inevitably slows you down.
• What's a product or brand you recommend so regularly that you really should be getting a kickback? - Thread..
• The render_crispy_form() function from django-crispy-forms is very useful when working w/ #htmx | maybe I have to do a blogpost about htmx and crispy forms..
• When people, including bioscientists, say that "sex is a social construct," we don't mean it's a random thing totally unrelated to anything else that we can just change willy-nilly. That "blank slate" position is a strawman. We mean something way cooler and more legitimate. 1/ | Thread..

Papers 

• wav2vec: Unsupervised Pre-training for Speech Recognition | Maybe we don't need that much labeled data? The progress in speech recognition in the last few years looks very impressive...

Software 

• The Python Launcher for Unix
• zoxide is a smarter cd command, inspired by z and autojump
• DjHTML A pure-Python Django/Jinja template indenter without dependencies
• MVP CSS - A minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements

Podcasts

• Episode #267: Python on the beach (Python Bytes)
• SaaS Side Projects (Test & Code in Python)
• Mike Fisher of Etsy talks AI and E-commerce (The Robot Brains Podcast)
• Episode 93: Launching Python, Virtual Environments, and Locking Dependencies With Brett Cannon (The Real Python Podcast)
• Der Web Almanac ist sowas von 2021 (Wo wir sind ist vorne)
• Improve Your Productivity By Investing In Developer Experience Design For Your Projects - Episode 349 (Podcast.__init__)
• Episode 100 - Daniel Terhorst-North - SOLID vs. CUPID (Software Architektur im Stream)
• Episode 496: Bruce Momjian on Multi-Version Concurrency Control in Postgres (MVCC) (Software Engineering Radio)
• UKW090 Corona Weekly: Mit dem Angriff von Omikron wird das alles in Ordnung kommen (Unsere kleine Welt)
• David Heinemeier Hansson on Rails 7.0, Hotwire, and the future of Rails (Remote Ruby) | Always nice to hear that the RoR community is doing well and also moving in the "render html on the server"-direction
• What matters in tech according to Benedict Evans (The Robot Brains Podcast)
• Einzigartig? - unsere Individualität (Das philosophische Radio)

Articles

• JavaScript date objects | Oh yes, I also stumbled across this when I was trying to sort steps in fastdeploy by DateTime, but I didn't take the time to write up the lessons learned, thanks a lot for that
• cattrs I: un/structuring speed

Useful Websites

• schnelltest test

Twitter

• Adding HTMX attributes to a field within your Django Form class
• tree indent VS code tip

Books 

• Boost your Django DX

Software 

• Honcho

Podcasts

• (108) Letzte Ausfahrt Omikron? (Coronavirus-Update)
• Wer ist hier sensibel? (Was denkst du denn?)
• WR1319 Realität 2022… die überleben wollen (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• Rettend? - Technik und Wissenschaft (Das philosophische Radio)
• Episode #266: Python has a glossary? (Python Bytes)
• Django at UC Berkeley - Mohammed Shamma and Matthew Newton (Django Chat)
• Episode 495: Vaughn Vernon on Strategic Monoliths and Microservices (Software Engineering Radio)
• Title Ilya Grigorik // Principal Engineer at Shopify Episode Number Episode #43 Episode #43 Ilya Grigorik // Principal  Engineer at Shopify (ALPHALIST CTO PODCAST)
• WR1323 Die teilweise deprimierende Sphäre des wissenschaftlichen Humors (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• Episode 40: Resolve (HOTEL BAR SESSIONS)
• #258 – Yann LeCun: Dark Matter of Intelligence and Self-Supervised Learning (Lex Fridman Podcast)