Ephes Blog

The Web is the set of digital networked technologies that work to increase user agency. --Robin Berjon

Busy work week in between projects. Didn't have time to do much besides just that.

Attended the 50th Django Cologne Meetup and mini sprint which was great. Thanks to Ronny and Sarah for organizing this event and the other Sarah and Thibaud for their interesting talk and the discussion about the future of Django roadmap.

Articles

• On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
• A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) | Yep
• The long sleep of capitalism's watchdogs
• Informal roadmap & retrospective workshops for Django | Discussion about a roadmap for Django on the forum
• Fünfzehn Jahre Trinklaune. Let’s call it a day. | It was a good time, thanks!

Video

• HTMX: Die perfekte UI-Technologie?! // deutsch | I don't know why I've been watching more videos that I completely disagree with lately. Maybe YouTube's recommendation engine has found my weak spots and is starting to take advantage of them? Jedenfalls macht sich hier Golo ordentlich zum Horst (just to be able to find the reference later).

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 3: January 15 to January 21 | Johannes

Mastodon

• Want to see something cool? Here it is: it’s a Scroll-Driven View Transition.

Books

• Tidy First?

Software

• bundlejs a quick npm package size checker
• Mastodon cleanup scripts

Podcasts

• An Exceptional Episode (core.py)
• Datasette, LLMs, and Django - Simon Willison | Great episode
• Daniel Kehlmann über Kant: Vordenker universalistischer Moral (Sein und Streit) | Really good episode!
• Soziale Energie - Was treibt uns als Gesellschaft an? (Hörsaal) | Great talk by Hartmut Rosa - interesting to see him acknowledge that mainstream economics doesn't agree with the otherwise popular view that capitalism only shines when there's growth and acceleration (I tend to side with economics here).

Out of Context Images

career Verb /kəˈri(ə)r/

> careers, plural;

> 1. Move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction

> - the car careered across the road and went through a hedge

Normal work week. Prefetching all the data needed to render a list of posts using Wagtail for django-cast was harder than expected. A lot of streamfield blocks end up making database queries. Template tags like pageurl or slugurl generate database queries. Custom templates overriding some behavior in some django-cast provided template blocks are issuing database queries. But I think I found most of them by now. And there is some good news: Prefetching the data actually improves performance a bit. And without hitting the database, the rendering time is about 3ms per Wagtail page (about 300ms for a feed with 100 posts), which is probably ok.

Articles

• How a Cheese Goes Extinct | Yummy
• Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac (12 Jan 2024) | As much as I like Apple devices, there's some point here
• Harrison Handbook in Python pt 1
• HTMX and Web Components: a Perfect Match | Yup
• SQLALchemy vs Django ORM
• They're Made out of Meat | Not exactly an article, but whatever
• REPL Python programming and debugging with IPython

Books

• Boost Your Django DX update out now | Great book!

Videos

• Hosting and DevOps for Django with Benjamin "Zags" Zagorsky | Ok, I think this is the first time I saw a technical talk and thought: Well, for each suggestion I would recommend to do exactly the opposite. I don't mean to say it's a bad talk (ok, maybe a little bit, because choosing multiple interdependent single points of failure instead of one seems just batshit crazy to me). But it's pretty much orthogonal to my views on this topic. So maybe it's interesting?
• The Cost Of JavaScript - 2023 | Very good

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 2: January 08 to January 14 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat | Simon Willison

Mastodon

• what subgenre of image is this | applied dialectics?
• Someone did some data scraping to determine the most discussed books of 2023 on Hacker News, and it's every bit as depressing a list as you think it will be

Software

• Firefly III - A free and open source personal finance manager
• What PWA Can Do Today
• Puput is a powerful and simple Django app to manage a blog | Another blog engine on top of Wagtail, maybe I can steal some ideas 😸
• Mealie reached 1.0! | Congratulations 🥳
• Hammerspoon - This is a tool for powerful automation of macOS | I don't know Lua, but chatGPT does 😅
• django-imagefield - Heavily based on django-versatileimagefield, but with a few important differences | I use a setting very similar to IMAGEFIELD_FORMATS for django-cast 😬

Podcasts

• Imports, frozen modules, Python news (core.py) | Oh yes, now I need a reason to abuse the import system
• Frame Evaluation (core.py) | Also good!
• WR1560 Juniorprofessuren, Bauern, Nichtlineare Phillipskurven (WRINT Wirtschaftskunde)

May type hints never overload you,

—Adam

First workweek of 2024. Recorded and published a podcast episode about Typescript and typing in general, which was a lot of fun 🎙️. For django-cast I found out that it is possible to pre-fetch all the data needed to render a list of posts or episodes and call .serve passing that data and avoid hitting the database 💡. You might to have to do some unholy things though, like monkeypatching the PageLinkHandler. I didn't expect this, but rendering a page including internal links in Wagtail will cause a database query because only the links page id is stored in the markup and the page object is needed to get the page url which is needed to render the link to html. And I haven't found a way to pass data from the page's template context to the PageLinkHandler. But it's doable. So I'll do it 😇.

Articles

• Python 3.13 gets a JIT | Sounds great!
• Dokku: my favorite personal serverless platform | Well, I would be more excited if I was still using docker, but self hosted PAAS are always interesting
• NumPy 2 is coming: preventing breakage, updating your code

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Page caching and custom templates for Datasette Cloud | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 1: January 01 to January 07 | Johannes

Mastodon / Twitter

• I'm very impressed by first impressions of https://marimo.io/ - a brand new open source Python notebook implementation... | This onboarding stuff..
• Andrew Ng about Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)

Podcasts

• Revision 600: Live (Working Draft) | Web components were a big topic and I'm into them right now, too
• Accessibility - Sarah Abderemane (Django Chat) | Yep, improving the Django Admin would be nice, and improving about this bad practice of bloating a custom user model: yup

This year will be harder than last year. It will, however, be easier than next year. --Enver Hoxha’s message to Albania in 1967

🏖️ Still on vacation. Bugfix release for django-cast, because sometimes the wrong gallery component element was found. Speaking of django-cast - the feed rendering performance has been deteriorating for a long time and I didn't notice it because of the caching in production. I'm taking this as an opportunity to systematically improve performance, which means I'll add tests that fail when the number of queries of performance-relevant views increases. This probably means I'll have to dig a little deeper into Wagtail's code base, because ideally I'd like to be able to render pages simply by passing the required data directly as an argument to the .serve method. This would be nice because I could then isolate all the data fetching stuff in one function call and maybe even optimize the sql by hand. Lets find out if this is feasible 🤯.

Wow, didn't expect the.tox directory for django-cast to be this big:

$ du -ch .tox | tail -1

21G total

Articles

• Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 | Nice overview
• How Pinterest scaled to 11 million users with only 6 engineers
• My Real-World Match / Case | Nice!
• PostgreSQL: Full text search with the “websearch” syntax | Hmm, have to steal this for django-cast
• SIMD in Pure Python | Hahaha, ok - this is crazy stuff!
• No Downtime Deployments with Gunicorn | Ok, merely changing restarted with reloaded in my ansible playbook did not do the trick - I'll have to revisit this...
• The Castro podcast app and its website are down | Well, I was aware of the rumors and switched back to Apple Podcasts in November, but this is really sad. And now I have to resist the urge to build my own podcast player 😱.

Video

• Modern editing experience for your Django models with Wagtail 🐦 with Sage Abdullah | Good overview!

Software

• Django CMS 4 Release! | Have to try it out, yet!
• Spectre.css is a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework
• transcribee 🐝 aims to make the workflow for media transcription easier, faster and more accessible | Ah, cool project!

Podcasts

• Understand Django - Matt Layman (Django Chat) | Good episode

Don't work harder or smarter.
Work darker.
Use your knowledge of black magic to call upon the old gods.
Turn all CEOs into newts & ferns.
Cover all office buildings in moss & wildflowers and let the raccoons have them.
You deserve a rest. --Edmonds_Scanner

On vacation, so no work this week. Did some open source, but not much. Released django-cast 0.2.26, which includes the new web component based image gallery as well as an htmx variant, to be able to see which one is simpler.

Articles

• Data scientists need to learn about significant digits | Yep
• Science and Technology links (December 30th 2023) | Asch replicates? I am not convinced, even if everyone else disagrees! 😇
• 12 Days of Web: Container Style Queries
• History of 20th century R&D labs | cool!

Mastodon / Twitter

• What password manager do you all recommend for a family plan? | Good question, interesting discussion
• Here are 10 beautifully designed websites for you to enjoy | Ok, clickbait alert, but I like nice websites, so..

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 51: December 18 to December 24 | Johannes
• Last weeknotes of 2023 | Simon Willison

Videos

• Room Tone 2023 | Nice idea
• Managing Content with Django with Michael Trythall | Wagtail vs Django CMS - django-cast is based on Wagtail, so this is kind of interesting to me

Software

• Ruby 3.3.0 Released | Still impressed by how much is going on in Ruby land
• Simple web app that renders minimalist CV with print-friendly layout

Out of Context Images

Web component version below:

And this is the htmx version - a little bit slower, but at least working!