Ephes Blog

Whenever someone at work tries to make you do something hard, simply because "you did it last time", remember that Elrond had been to Mount Doom before.

Sometimes you need to make the hobbits do the work so they stop seeing it as a zero-cost action. --John Bull

Covid has returned for a second round. Considering the amount of work to do, I hope it will be mild this time. We already had to cancel two podcast appointments because of sickness, so no podcast episode this month.

But I'm pleased about the progress achieved on django-cast last week. It's now possible to switch between themes using the wagtail admin (for the complete site or a single blog). You can also add your own bunch of theme templates in a new directory and select it in the admin. At the moment this only works with Django template loaders that are filesystem based. I also fixed a little bug causing a broken backlink when you commented on a post without Javascript (wagtail pages do not implement get_absolute_url by default).

Articles

• I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet | Regrettably, I must confess that I am not particularly skilled at executing dropkicks. As a result, it is safe to say that my profession is likely rotating posthumously given the abundance of spreadsheet-related activities occurring in my current workplace.
• Now You Have Three Problems | "lambda has the benefit of making the code compact and foreboding. Plus, it prevents people from trying to add meaningful names, documentation, or type-hints to the thing that is about to unfold." Hrhr, great article...
• Using ChatGPT to write AppleScript
• Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment | This will get wild
• Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT | Straw man fallacy, although I like the reference to Borges a lot

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 9: February 27 to March 05 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-02-27 | Luis
• Weeknotes March 05 - 12 | Bithive

Books

• Python Testing with pytest, Second Edition | Maybe I'm preparing a pytest-training course

Videos

• EuroPython 2021 talk: David Beazley - No, not typing. Types. | Uh oh, do I want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes?
• Btconf talk: Jeremy Keith – Declarative Design – SOTR | Interesting pointers..
• Layout Land | Good youtube channel for web design

Software

• math.isclose | Similar to pytest.approx but in the stdlib
• MyST Markdown Tools
• Facebooks LLaMA leaks via torrent file in PR | Hmm, could be interesting to fine-tune this
• Wagtail AI Get help with your content using AI superpowers
• Utopia - Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints
• Sphinx-Gallery | There has been JupyterLite support added recently, so maybe it's possible to run code snippets directly in the browser soon for the galleries of scikit-learn documentation for example
• Inference of Facebook's LLaMA model in pure C/C++
• High-performance inference of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model
• sourcegraph - searching millions of public repositories
• MacWhisper

Podcasts

• #362 – Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Better than expected
• Positiv wirkt: Das Interview (Agile Team Coaching Podcast) | Well...
• Folge 154 - Serverless Architektur mit Sascha Möllering (Software Architektur im Stream) | Interesting stuff like that you usually would like to send batches to lambda functions because you pay per call etc..
• Ich bin sehr neugierig – Vitaly Friedman (neu•gierig) | Interesting :)
• Episode 553: Luca Casonato on Deno (Software Engineering Radio) | Cool episode, too.
• What would you change about pytest? (Test & Code)
• Episode 86: Fascism (with Alberto Toscano) (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Lumpenbourgeoisie for the win 😆

Out of Context Images

CATHOLIC CHURCH: No meat on Fridays

PEOPLE: Ok so no eggs for breakfast

CC: No, eggs are ok

P: But eggs are chicken

CC: Not until they hatch

P: So the thing isn't the thing until it's born?

CC: Correct—um, no, wait. --Sean Kelly

Lots of work. Didn't have time to do much else. At least the weather is getting better.

Released django-cast 0.2.7 with:

• New API endpoints for pages and images
• A noindex option for excluding a blog and all posts from search engines
• Some small bug fixes

Articles

• ER Diagrams with SQL and Mermaid | Interesting approach but I couldn't get it to work with the mermaid live frontend - my notebook just got warm and I decided to kill the browser tab after a few minutes - maybe I used a database with too many tables...
• pandas 2.0 and the Arrow revolution (part I) | Apache Arrow as a backend for pandas 2.0
• The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era | Well, yes.
• The case for frameworks | Have to add some pro SPA pieces just for the balance (I think the article is wrong and not very clever)
• Build things that work, even when parts of it break | Some cool ideas for progressive enhancement
• Django: How to profile and improve startup time | Pretty deep dive 😅

Video

• A Critique of Realism | Impressive analysis
• tony ann - iPhone alarm as a piano ballad

Mastodon / Twitter

• Manuel showing a short video using copilot for programming
• A fun sequence of ChatGPT prompts. I won't provide the output, just the prompts..

Software

• ControlNet - Official implementation of Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models.
• FFmpeg 6.0 release notes
• QuickMacHotKey | Global hotkeys for macOS using Python

Podcasts

• Folge 153 - Domain-driven Design - nur vernünftige Software-Entwicklung? (Software Architektur im Stream) | Yes, good episode - need to ask those questions more often in projects:
  • Has the code to be reusable?
  • Will it be subject to a lot of changes?
• HB #07 - mit Jochen Lillich von freistil.it (Happy Bootstrapping!) | Enjoyed hearing from two ex-colleagues again, cool episode
• Klimakrise und „Bewusstseinskultur“ – In Würde scheitern? (Sein und Streit)
• Was kann zwischen Philosophie und Meditation entstehen? (WDR 5 Das philosophische Radio) | A little bit of a downer but well presented 😅
• Dev Environments - Calvin Hendryx-Parker (Django Chat) | Ok, I have my doubts about all this docker and k8s craze but lots of interesting pointers, too
• #23: Season Finale (TOPP: The Open Podcast Podcast) | Cool project, hope it will proceed to provide interesting results. And I couldn't agree more: It takes a lot of time to gain knowledge about a new domain (more than a few months, probably).
• Revision 558: Per dualer Ausbildung oder dualem Studium in den IT-Beruf (Working Draft) | Lots of interesting facts in this episode. Didn't know for example that "Fachinformatiker" is the second most popular apprenticeship in .de - but I'm still wondering where all those people end up working since I can't remember seeing many of them around.
• Clean Code in Python (Talk Python To Me) | Meh.
• Sprache - Unfaire Rhetorik erkennen und vermeiden (Hörsaal)
• The Greatest Myth About Learning (Build for Tomorrow) | Never believed this learning types stuff

Out of Context Images

"Maintaining a successful open source project is Good Will Hunting in reverse. You start out as a respected genius, and end up being a janitor who gets into fights." — Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart@twitter.com)

Good progress on work-related stuff. Didn't have much luck with my own projects this week. I tried to lower the number of database queries django-cast has to do to show the list of all posts for a blog, but it went nowhere. Then I spent way too much time trying to add a pages endpoint to the django-cast API. At least I found out how to integrate a Wagtail API into a local namespace. And finally, there was this cool PR from Dorthe Luebbert I got to merge adding Paprika-Export-Support for kptncook 🎉.

Last Thursday, I had a chaotic neutral encounter at a print shop. As I was getting some documents printed, I noticed a struggling man trying to navigate his iPad. Being the good Samaritan that I am, I offered to help by connecting his device to my phone. But little did I know, I was about to embark on a wild ride of confusion and identity crisis. The man turned out to be none other than Jochen Busse, and as fate would have it, he had also named his phone "Jochens iPhone" just like I had. I couldn't believe it - a Jochen convention right in the middle of the print shop! And to add insult to injury, I now have to change my phone name because apparently, I'm just a regular Jochen. (credits to chatGPT for making this paragraph more "accentuated" 😅).

Articles

• My favourite 3 lines of CSS | Need to learn more HTML and CSS 🤓
  • Learn HTML | Yes
  • Learn CSS | OK, got it
• Building a lightbox with the Dialog element | I'll have to redo the modal image stuff to show galleries in django-cast soon, this might be a starting point
• devdata - Improving developer velocity and experience | How to generate data for your development environments in Django
• Safari 16.4 Is An Admission | PWAs for iOS getting more interesting

Mastodon / Twitter

• So there's a great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood called Kiin. Yesterday, I searched for their website to order some takeout. Here's the Google result. | There are fake restaurant sites intercepting your orders to the real restaurant increasing the price by 15%. Being able to automatically navigate and put data into websites opens up some delicious arbitrage opportunities 😱.
• Ruin this joke by explaining it? Ok! This is an instance of Berkson's paradox. If a dingy restaurant with a broken website has bad food, it won't last, so among surviving restaurants, greasy styrofoam is correlated with good food.
• Dev: at big brain corp we use the right tool for the job Me: *starts deploying postgres* Dev: I didn’t tell you the job… Me: *adds a replica*

Software

• django-seal - application providing queryset sealing capability to force appropriate usage of only()/defer() and select_related()/prefetch_related()

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 7: February 13 to February 19 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-02-20 | Luis

Podcasts

• Folge 117: Agile Metriken (Mein Scrum ist kaputt!) | Finally a good german speaking podcast about agile etc
• WR1461 Chinesische Immobilien, Makroökonomische Prioritäten und Fachkräftemangel (Wirtschaftskunde) | Always good
• #59: Kann man mit Open Source Geld verdienen? (Engineering Kiosk) | I did know the material for mkdocs theme but didn't know about the business model 😎, good episode
• Ep. 184: Wie gefährlich ist Christian Lindners Generationenkapital? (Wohlstand für Alle) | okish
• VueJS Amsterdam // Nuxt Dev Tools // Unified JavaScript Tools // Nitro Server // Playwright // tsup (programmier.bar)
• MedienrevolutionenWas Buchdruck und Digitalisierung gemeinsam haben (Hörsaal) | Very interesting
• Was gibt uns Sinn im Leben? – Nicht das Ergebnis zählt, sondern das Handeln (Sein und Streit) | Good episode, better than expected (ok, the title is awful)
• Polars: A Lightning-fast DataFrame for Python (Talk Python To Me) | Interesting topic, but bad audio quality
• UKW109 Ukraine: Mentaler Einmarsch (unsere kleine welt) | Still meh, but some interesting pointers...
• #324: JSON in My DB? (Python Bytes)
• Folge 118: Coaching (mit Dr. Miriam Sasse) (Mein Scrum ist kaputt!)

“Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.”—Geoffrey Bowker

Work, carnival, and some progress on my side projects. Finally managed to try out the cool new openpodcast stack for podcast analytics. Hmm, first I have to find a way to get it to work with postgres instead of MySQL. Looking forward to shooting some pictures again, since I forgot the charging cable for my camera two months ago and now got it back 📸.

django-cast release 0.2.6:

• Got codecov.io to show 100% coverage (fixed the GitHub action submitting the coverage results)
• The release of django-crispy-forms broke tests and comments and stuff -> I was able to fix it after reading the migration guide
• Documentation for Pagination

homepage / python-podcast:

• Tuned down traces/performance metrics for sentry
• Fixed date facets breaking out of the form-control container for python-podcast.de

kptncook:

• Worked a little bit on a cool PR adding Paprika export for kptncook by Dorthe Luebbert

Articles

• Data Classification | Hmmm
• Science and Technology links (February 12 2023)
• ChatGPT provides solid entertainment
  • Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” | It's also fascinating that this whole thing is still amusing, but it is 🍿
  • What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? | Longish but profound explanation
• Modern Javascript doing just great
  • The balance has shifted away from SPAs | I'm not sure about even the omnipresent chat or audio/video player. Might be possible with htmx and fragment rendering. Have to try it...
  • The (extremely) loud minority | Boring tech might be more widely used than expected
  • Rethinking the Modern Web
  • The case for Flex applications
  • Why I'm not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications
  • What to expect from your framework
  • The modern web’s underrated powerhouse

Software

• Paprika Recipe Manager | Great application
• If you've been ignoring your deprecation warnings then pandas 2.0.0 will break your code | Time to check how much work it will be to migrate...
• NEXT.js Introduction | By vercel, nicely done
• PostgreSQL's explain analyze made readable
• Type Design Resources | Lots of resources

Mastodon / Twitter

• People who prefer ketchup over mustard are annoying because as soon as you say you like mustard, they go on and on about how much they hate it. Like, okay. You have the same flavor palette you had when you were 5 but that doesn’t mean you should insult what I put in my coffee.

Podcasts

• Einfach auch nur Menschen – Mirjam Aulbach (neu•gierig) | Conference Buddy is a great idea!
• Revision 556: Domain-Driven Design (Working Draft) | Good overview
• Django 4.2 - Mariusz Felisiak (Django Chat) | Feature overview for Django 4.2
• Episode 82: Materialism (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Great episode. If you want to know why I listen to this show - here's a good example
• Episode #70 Dominik Angerer_/_/_ Co-founder and CEO @ Storyblok (Alphalist CTO Podcast) | RoR backend, Vue.js frontend, Python for images - interesting.
• Die Rückseite des Neins ... oder warum 2023 das Neinhorn unter den Jahren ist (Was denkst du denn?) | Finally more Nietzsche 😁

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Been sick for the umpteenth time this winter. Tried to do some chores on django-cast to pass the time:

• The test coverage is now at 100% (failed to configure codecov.io to report the right number..)
• Nearly complete type annotations, which created a bug in production (failing isinstance call which got necessary to make mypy pass)
• Wagtail 4.2 compatibility, which led to this bug report
• Fixed the pagination feature

Updated my self-hosted mastodon instance to 4.1, which was just a redeploy - smooth.

Articles

• Python’s “Disappointing” Superpowers | tldr - have to do some "dynamic meta-programming" by myself 😆
• The Django Developer’s Guide To Vite | Of all things javascript I used, vite was one of the "only minor" PITA libs
• A historical reference of react criticism | Good article
• 100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS
• Use TOML for `.env` files?
• Big data is dead | Yep, it's not big, grande, or venti - it is just undead data most of the time...
• Bit Hacking (with Go code)
• Late initialization with mypy | This is a problem I had this week, too. And I used isinstance instead of hasattr and it caused a bug in production. And I added this just to be able to have type annotations. Bah.
• Journalism is Lossy Compression | I'm not a big fan of journalism either

Software

• Mypy 1.0 Released | And it's faster 🥳
• SiYuan | An obsidian alternative
• slippers - Build reusable components in Django without writing a single line of Python

Mastodon

• There's many ways of defending a castle...

Video

• Alles ist Eins. Außer der 0 - Dr. Waus Chaos Computer Film | Surprisingly good

Podcasts

• Wahrnehmung - Wie Kinder sich ihre eigene Welt erschaffen (Hörsaal)
• Episode 79: The History of Philosophy (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• #322: Python Packages, Let Me Count The Ways (Python Bytes)
• #22: Podcasting 2.0 (TOPP: The Open Podcast Podcast) | Hmm, maybe I have to implement more than RSS..
• DEEP DIVE 118 – Vercel (programmier.bar) | Interesting, vercel has nice features but seems to run on expensive infrastructure. Time for a smart follower?
• #57 Servant Leadership: Führungsstil der neuen Generation? (Engineering Kiosk)