Ephes Blog

I am wondering what should be the color of this bikeshed? --@kushal

The usual work and usual chores. Nothing interesting here.

Finally tried out Obsidian - wow, this is a deep rabbit hole. Syncing also works with iCloud folders between iOS and macOS. It's not great but sufficient for my needs (sharing links with the daily note).

Split the blog and podcast model and released a new django-cast version.

Articles

• Private and Public Mastodon
• Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns
• Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten
• My Reaction to Dr. Stroustrup’s Recent Memory Safety Comments | I have to take a closer look at rust soon...
• Twitter is turning off all free access to their apis next week (or at least that’s the plan as of today)
• The Market for Lemons | Good article ranting about the current state of web development (SPAs)

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2023-01-30 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 4: January 23 to January 29 | Johannes

Software

• Granian - A Rust HTTP server for Python applications.
• Django Rocket is a Django SaaS boilerplate framework powered by Cookiecutter.
• WhisperX - Whisper-Based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with improved timestamp accuracy using forced alignment.
• 😱 Awesome Falsehood Awesome A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.
• NiceGUI | Build simple web-UIs using pure Python
• Pyodide 0.22.0 release
• Announcing TypeScript 5.0 Beta

Mastodon / Twitter

• poetry really trying to defend their "< always" stance by breaking everything in a minor release
• Dave Winer on what counts as a podcast
• A webcomic of sheep in a trenchcoat...
• There are two approaches to making projections for business purposes. The one to avoid is estimation based on specification analysis. Unfortunately, that's what most ppl use, and it pretty much always fails because an up-front specification is invariably wong. 1/5 | Good thread - I keep wondering why people keep trying the specification based approach..

Podcasts

• Bits und so #828 (Pro Mac) (Bits und so) | Need to resist my gear acquisition syndrome 🥶
• DK077 - 10.000 Seiten später (Das Klima)
• Folge 149 - Das Strangler Fig Pattern (software-architektur.tv als Podcast)
• MongoDB - Mark Smith (Django Chat)
• Monorepos in Python (Talk Python To Me) | Hmm, still don't know why I want use a monorepo
• Episode 539: Adam Dymitruk on Event Modeling (Software Engineering Radio)

Your honor my client is no longer in their villain era --@ItsMattsLaw

At work, I had to find out that Python enums are slow when used as keys in a dict. I would never have guessed that some_enum.__hash__() is the main occupation of the software I wrote. Unfortunately, I won't attend PyConDE this year because I forgot I already bought tickets for btconf which happens on the same date 😭. And I am still not sure whether I should attend DjangoConEU 2023 or EuroPython 2023 - maybe someone is interested in trying to convince me? Also recorded a new podcast episode about PyPy which was a lot of fun. No issues with django-cast this time, all went well. Didn't even have to touch the Django admin. Closed all the issues I opened up last time.

There were also some improvements to django-cast:

• Started to add type annotations
• Renamed test files to make searching for tests easier
• Cached file sizes for audio models
• Added a new player card feature for Twitter thanks to a hint by @derphilipp
• Added pypy39 to the envlist of tox and it worked after some fiddling with cryptography

Articles

• The End of Writing
• Researchers look a dinosaur in its remarkably preserved face
• Yaml, JSON, Toml | My bets are on toml and yes, yaml is the worst
• How to tell when you're a real professional | Hits a little bit too close
• Marie Kondo Says She's 'Kind of Given up' on Tidying up | Fighting entropy often turns out to be more difficult than expected
• Looking Back at Postgres | Chapter of Stonebraker's Turing Award book about postgres by Joseph M. Hellerstein

Software

• Posy - a new project oriented Python workflow manager (replacement for pyenv, deadsnakes, tox, venv, pip, pip-compile/pipenv, and PEP 582)
• Mage - 🧙 A modern replacement for Airflow
• Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher (for macOS)
• SQLAlchemy 2.0.0, the first production release of SQLAlchemy 2.0, is now available
• LangChain ⚡ Building applications with LLMs through composability ⚡
• There's a new 2.0.a1 release for django-crispy-forms
• Resource Override | Really cool chrome extension lets you override css/javascript on any site (debugging, fiddling around)

Events

• Some CCC-related events for 2023
• PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2023 17. April - 19. April 2023
• #btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 17 - 18 Apr 2023
• DjangoConEU is coming to Edinburgh 29th May to Friday 2nd June 2023
• EuroPython 2023 From 17 July through 23 July, 2023

Videos

• Is Domain Driven Design Overrated? | Stefan Tilkov | The insight that for different circumstances different approaches might be useful is really valuable. I use the relational approach most of the time but am also ready to admit it's not the best one always.
• @mkennedy @brianokken went and listened to the joke video linked from the most recent episode of @pythonbytes and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Podcasts

• #318: GIL, How We Will Miss You (Python Bytes)
• #319: CSS-Style Queries for... JSON? (Python Bytes)
• #827 (Sorgfalt im Verkehr) (Bits und so)
• #826 (Liebhaberei) (Bits und so)
• Foxley Talent - Jon Gould (Django Chat) | Good episode
• Ukraine: Banks vs. Tanks (Unsere kleine Welt) | Meh
• Revision 553: State of JS2, Framework Boogaloo (Working Draft) | Learned about resource override here...
• 2023 – Bastian Allgeier (neu•gierig) | Tempted to steal the design 😅

That’s why Tesla is right about banning remote work. I know a guy who claims to work for Tesla but also has a gig at a Telcom, at a freight company, does a side job digging holes, sells medical implants AND trades crypto. But he spends most of his time shitposting on twitter. --@avsa

Had to work quite a bit and went to the Django Meetup Cologne and a PyDDF event which I both enjoyed very much. I'm also looking forward to attending PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2023 in April. For django-cast I fixed a little issue raising an exception when an unknown language is set for a code block. But then there was also a bigger change splitting posts into post and episode models which is at least partly covered in a live stream.

In other news: Snow!

Articles

• Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning: My Experience and Advice for Using GPUs in Deep Learning | Long awaited update 🎊 - great article
• Science and technology links (January 15 2023) / Year 2022: Scientific progress
• Why I Like Nox | Ok, time to look at nox more closely
• How to make a website | Great article, I didn't know about Taxi.js
• How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many
• Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem
• Questions to ask a Django company | Yes, asking the right questions during an interview would have spared me a lot of trouble...
• Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023) | Long but good

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: AI hacking and a SpatiaLite tutorial | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 2: January 09 to January 15 | Johannes

Software

• Suddenly, Toot! v18.0 is released! | Mastodon Client I use on iOS
• Quality metadata badges for open source projects
• tandem is a task runner for parallel dev servers. Small, fast, and pairs great with Makefiles! | I'm usually using honcho but this looks interesting, too
• Django 4.2 alpha 1 released
• Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.
• Taxi is a 🤏 small and 🐊 snappy js library for adding slick PJAX navigation and beautiful transitions to your website

Papers

• Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on typical tabular data?

Podcasts

• (116) Der Weg in die Endemie (Das Coronavirus-Update) | With increasing immunity masks get less useful for controlling infection rates and covid rates are falling... all in all not that bad.
• CRE088 Python und PyPy | (CRE)
• PyPy via Import This
• PyPy - The JIT Compiled Python Implementation (Talk Python To Me)
• Testing PyPy - Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (Test & Code in Python)
• Revision 552: Frontend Development im Jahr 2023 (Working Draft) | Lots of interesting references

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"Stealing “quietly a bit crap” for my bio." --@GunnarBj

First work week of the year. Had less time for my projects but got some stuff done nonetheless:

• Fixed the Podlove Player share sheet for Python Podcast
• Added code blocks for django-cast and recorded the implementation of those two points in a stream
• Did also some refactoring and removed the old analytics code I had in django-cast
• Published New release 0.2.2.

A business idea I thought about for some time seems to be implemented by Adobe: Enhance voice recordings for free (via Adobe Podcast Enhance: KI macht vollautomatischen Audio-Cleanup). It's about taking crappy audio and improving it by passing it through some ML-model. What makes this idea more interesting than other applications is that training data comes for free in this case. Just take good-quality audio and re-record it using a phone or a bad room. Now you have a pair of bad audio input with a good audio target. It's even possible to parallelize this training data generation.

Articles

• I always recommend Modern Pandas when people ask me about how to do things with pandas and now there's a similar series of articles for polars: Modern Polars
• DjangoConEU is coming to Edinburgh | Haven't yet decided whether to go...
• Why static site generation? | Long form article about the question raised on our last podcast episode
• 15-Minute Cities: Leveraging Software and Location Intelligence to Reimagine Urban Mobility | via Luis newsletter

Videos

• Wie scheitern IT-Projekte garantiert? von Alexander Bernhardt | Just the basics, but it's surprising how often this simple stuff is causing big problems

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 1: January 02 to January 08 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-01-09 | Luis

Software

• Polars - User Guide | New dataframe library written in rust
• Learn Responsive Design | Online responsive design course by Jeremy Keith
• There's a PR for CPython PEP 703 which makes the GIL optional. Here's a link to the discussion.
• Python Packaging Strategy Discussion - Part 1

Podcasts

• WR1438 Physikalische Zumutungen (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Episode 78: Revolutionary Mathematics (with Justin Joque) (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Bah, don't talk about topics I know something about, please!
• Philosophie der Dummheit - Gegen Denkfaulheit und Ignoranz (Sein und Streit)
• Senior-Entwickler brauchen keine Frameworks … oder? – mit PHP-Legende Stefan Priebsch (Super Duper Developers Club) | Good episode. I don't share the preference for microservices, but all in all solid advice
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1449 Bazillen, Braunellen, Beten (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1450 Inflation für Doofe und Wachstumsgeschichte(n) (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Great stuff. I constantly hear people claiming that capitalism requires constant growth, glad to hear that this is not economic mainstream. Also, that splitting between functional and causal responsibility for inflation are different things etc.

in 2023 i have decided to become worse and more unhinged and more of a hater. maybe i will start yelling and biting. i am going chihuahua mode --@punished_cait

Still on vacation. Fixed some bugs in django-cast:

• The slim version of jQuery broke the comments feature
• API overview was broken due to a broken reverse lookup for 'image_list'
• Fixed a bad spam filter bug and recorded a stream fixing it. This was the first programming stream I recorded after about a year and it was surprisingly difficult to get the whole setup up and running again 😆. And it worked: No false positive "ham" comments since 2023-01-04 (should make a badge out of this..)
• New django-cast release 0.2.1

Other packages:

• Made the frontend tests work again for fastdeploy. Had to remove vue3-jest from jest.config.js and I have no clue why.
• New release for django-indieweb adding a missing migration

Articles

• Infinite AI Array | Very fun idea
• My new all-purpose excuse for when I'm not doing something | I'm in the control group, too 👈
• Just Use Postgres for Everything
• Histograms, Gradient Boosted Trees, Group-By Queries and One-Hot Encoding
• Fork My Brain (example of a well organized obsidian vault) | Maybe I have to look at this obsidian thing again...

Mastodon / Twitter

• In 1977, media prophet Marshall McLuhan discussed CIA and FBI surveillance, and then turned it into one of the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age I've ever heard.
• Nothing much, ChatGPT.

Books

• Hypermedia Systems | Book about htmx etc..

Software

• Nativefier is a command-line tool to easily create a “desktop app” for any web site with minimal fuss
• Pillow release 9.4.0
• I want to wish you a happy new year with MariaDB 11.0! | MariaDB got a new optimizer 😎

Podcasts

• Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life is Meaningless and Amazing (Freakonomics Radio) | Great episode
• Russland - System der Angst: Die "Z-Gesellschaft" (Hörsaal)
• Helmut Lethen zur Faszination des Bösen - Muss Politik unmoralisch sein? (Sein und Streit) | Also great, thanks for this music recommendation: Das Berliner Requiem: Großer Dankchoral
• Philosoph Jens Soentgen über Staub: Alles kommt zu uns zurück (Sein und Streit)
• WR1442 Die Wrintheit über Poppe Breitarsch (Wrintheit)
• Renaud Visage // Co-Founder & ex-CTO at Eventbrite (Alphalist CTO Podcast)
• Sentry - David Cramer (Django Chat)
• Episode 76: HBS Goes to the Movies: Casablanca (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• WR1447 Atemwegsinfektionen: Eine Handreichung (WRINT) | Confirmed my biases
• Episode 77: Human Nature (Hotel Bar Sessions) | "I'm always surprised how easy people, and by people I mean students, refer to human nature as...", hrhr. Great fun!

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