Ephes Blog

Hello everyone!

It's been over ten years of self-employment, and I've never publicly announced my availability for new projects—until now! 😀 I'm not just looking for opportunities for myself, but for a small full-stack team (design, frontend, and backend) as well. We're seeking projects that will last at least a few months.

To get in touch with us, please use one of the methods listed on my contact site.

We're excited to bring our expertise to your projects and collaborate with you!

Best,

Jochen

we saved daylight but at what cost --K

Much less work last week, but I still had a lot of paperwork to do. Worked on htmx integration for django-cast during this year's Python Spring Sprint & Hackathon in Düsseldorf. Htmx is now working for pagination in both built-in themes. See the latest release notes for all django-cast-related updates. Had a lot of fun attending the latest Django Meetup Cologne.

Despite being self-employed for over ten years now, I never publicly announced being open to new projects. Until now 😁!

Articles

• How virtual environments work | Didn't know there are so few lines needed to create a virtualenv
• Marketing for Developers | Hmm, didn't know about the Django subreddit
• Add Vue To Your Django Templates With Vite | Second part of this tutorial, got a working Django-Vite-Vue combination running using it 👍
• Sentry - Development Philosophy | I'm a little bit skeptical about claims like "we are not artists" or "Our work is there to solve customer problems". Writing computer programs is one of the purest creative activities in human history (pure as in "only limited by our imagination, not practical skills or laws of physics"). Claiming it isn't smells like overcompensation (bad) or ignorance (even worse).
• Lessons from a Pessimist: Make Your Pessimism Productive | Good point - I tame my pessimism by framing it as "optimistic realism"
• Chris’ Corner: Websites, Highlights, and Guesses
• OpenAI is testing the ability to run code and use third-party plugins in ChatGPT | Interesting
• The End of Front-End Development | Holy shit, 65k? I mean, ok it looks great and stuff but...

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: AI won’t slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor | Simon Willison
• Weeknotes March 19 - 26 | Bithive
• Weeklog for Week 11: March 13 to March 19 | Johannes

Books

• Every Layout | Has a cool website, too

Software

• django-hatchway - Hatchway is an API framework inspired by the likes of FastAPI, but while trying to keep API views as much like standard Django views as possible
• Django Ninja - Fast Django REST Framework
• Orval - Generate client with appropriate type-signatures | OpenAPI-Schema to typescript code generation tool
• Codon is a high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code | Interesting
• Dalai - Run LLaMA and Alpaca on your computer
• Podsqueeze - Generate shownotes, timestamps, newsletters and more for your podcast with one click! | Bootstrapped SaaS from an ex-colleague

Mastodon / Twitter

• Carbonara mit Bildern
• Someone referred to Podcasting 2.0 the other day. Oh my god. There is only one podcasting. I can tell this is going to be really tiresome. You know like Web 3 and all that bullshit. The other day someone told me that the real Web 3 is AI. Sigh.
• This blog post seemed very normal until I hit this bit GITHUB ACCIDENTALLY POSTED THEIR PRIVATE KEYS TO GITHUB THERE IS LITERALLY NO ONE ON EARTH ABLE TO USE THIS PROGRAM SAFELY

Podcasts

• Die Geschichte hinter PHPUnit – mit Sebastian Bergmann (Super Duper Developers Club) | Good episode
• DjangoCon US 2023 - Drew Winstel (Django Chat) | Good as always
• Revision 560: TypeScript 5.0 (Working Draft) | We sometimes joke about including the pre and post-show chatter because it's way more entertaining 😁 than the "real episode". Here they did exactly that and it worked out great!
• WR1467 Pazifistische pflegebedürftige Pensionäre (WRINT: Realitätsabgleich)
• A.I. Is About to Get Much Weirder. Here’s What to Watch For. (The Ezra Klein Show) | Quite solid for a journalistic publication
• Accessibility, Frontend und der ganze Rest mit Manuel Matuzović (Wo wir sind ist vorne.) | Wow, they talked about htmx and alpine in a frontend podcast 😄

sorry about that, i wasn’t making a strange face because of what you said on the team sync meeting, but because i’ve been watching my own camera the whole time, and at all times i am nothing but a horse discovering his own reflection --henry ✷

Covid is gone 😷, but I had to deal with a lot of sickness-related stuff last week, therefore not a lot happened except the usual work stuff. I updated my local Mastodon instance to version 4.1.1 and it went surprisingly smooth. Just like all the others I played around with GPT-4 and found it to be a bit better (more knowledge about details, working better as a world model).

For django-cast I tried to add htmx support but got stuck fixing bugs introduced by the week before last week's theme-switching feature - details are in the release notes for django-cast 0.2.9. Django-cast was also featured in last week's Django News newsletter 😎. This comes a little bit early but at least it's pushing me to create some proper installation documentation 😬.

Articles

• The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code
• Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know | I switched away from docker for my own projects in mid-2021 and never looked back, seems this bet is paying off now...
• Science and Technology links (March 11 2023)

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 10: March 06 to March 12 | Johannes
• Weeknotes March 12 - 19 | Bithive
• Week 11: GPT 4 & new Python tooling | Oliver

Mastodon / Twitter

• Having a single user (or in my case three-user) #mastodon instance has some annoyances, but a couple of clever hacks have really improved the experience. Quick thread | Howto follow hashtags if you are on a small instance like me - found it useful!
• English Nursery Rhyme (ca 1764) | Spot on

Software

• descript - a new way to make video and podcasts | Hmm, editing using the transcript is a nice idea, but the audio enhancement is not good (compared to auphonic for example) maybe I look again in a year 🙂
• Learn How to Support Apple Devices | Lots of nice tutorials for the Apple ecosystem

Podcasts

• Riskante Zeiten – Sicherheit weiter denken (Sein und Streit) | Interesting
• Welche Einsichten verdanken Sie der Psychoanalyse? (Das philosophische Radio)
• Rick Rubin (Design Matters) | Great episode
• Yoshua Bengio: large language models, higher cognition, causality, working memory, responsible AI (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Fantastic episode! Is reducing the world to a few discrete parameters (like words in a sentence) a way of regularization? Maybe that's how the brain subsystems manage to avoid a combinatorial explosion while communicating. Reminds me of software: Splitting up the functionality in modules so that there's not a combinatorial explosion of code paths is the hard problem here, too (ok, this idea needs some more thought but I just wanted to get it out of my head...).

Out of Context Images

Couldn't go outside much due to covid. Sometimes I think some higher being put a sticker like that below (reading "please ignore the dog") on my back.

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