Ephes Blog

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 😅

Usually, I use pip -e ../package-directory to install an editable version of a package I use in a different project. Usually I use this method to track a bug or develop a new feature. Some time ago I switched to using flit to build my packages because it supports putting all the configuration in pyproject.toml and is not poetry. Today I had to learn that for a django-packages built with flit but then installed with pip -e the Django template lookup is broken. Using flit install -s works fine though.

The feed generation of Python Podcast was kind of slow. Looking deeper into this using sentry, I found out that for each item in the feed, the size of the audio file has to be fetched via HTTP from S3. Ok, this might explain it 😅.

Here's a complete stream of me fixing the issue by caching the audio file sizes in a JSONField including the deployment to python-podcast.de. The stream is in german.

A few hours later I checked the slow HTTP-operations graph from sentry. Caching seems to work:

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

Out of Context Images

Until now, posts and episodes were the same things in django-cast. But there are some attributes needed for podcast episodes that don't make much sense for normal blog posts like iTunes keywords or whether an episode should be excluded from iTunes or even the audio object that should be used for the episodes enclosure tag in the podcast feed. Maybe it is possible to move the podcast-specific attributes into a new episode page model and get rid of them in a normal blog post? This would make django-cast more usable for people who don't want to set up a podcast but a normal blog.

The stream is a little bit rougher this time, because I wasn't able to prepare anything beforehand. And I had to end the stream early because of other duties. But about an hour after the stream ended, I had the new episode model live in production 🎉.