Ephes Blog

OH: “Or, as Randall Munroe once said: «This quote is taken out of context»” --hukl

Normal work week, nothing to see here. Fixed a nasty bug in django-cast. Having a lot of state attached to the feed instance in combination with caching caused posts from blog A to be served to the feed of blog B 🫢. Big thanks to Niklas for reporting this. Johannes also pointed it out and, to add insult to injury, suggested I switch to his static site generator for blogging. If there's any truth to the sunk cost fallacy, it's too late for me now. That ship has sailed. Managed to release an update for django-cast with some additional fixes. Notably, I had to pin “wagtail < 6.1” again because I found out that the audio and video chooser are now broken, and fixing them seems quite challenging.

Over the weekend, I went to watch a kids’ bouldering competition because of reasons.

Articles

• Django / Python
  • Django: Getting a full model instance from a Subquery
  • How Python Asyncio Works: Recreating it from Scratch
  • Django Commons - A home for community-maintained Django packages
  • ✨ What's new in Django 5.1
• CSS
  • contrast-color() is a good thing, but also solving the problem at the wrong layer
  • Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid
  • We’ve Got Container Queries Now, But Are We Actually Using Them?
• Rust's iterators optimize nicely—and contain a footgun
• htmx sucks | 2.0.0 beta 4 got released a few days ago..
• Reclaiming Agility with Simple Principles | Considering the effort invested over the past 20 years, the results of the entire agile movement are quite underwhelming. I’m almost ready to admit that my bet on agile didn’t pay off. On the other hand, my bets on Python and Machine Learning have been wildly successful, so overall, I’m net positive. However, my bets against the cloud and SPAs are still undecided. Let’s wait and see 😇.
• On Fire Drills and Phishing Tests | These phishing tests are nuts. How can you be a serious company with a letter box and tax accountants and then perform obviously crazy shit like this?

Fediverse

• The pencil test | What really creeps me out isn’t that we’re great at imagining non-conscious things as people - that’s just a harmless quirk. It’s that we might be just as mistaken about actual people, and we’re stuck in a cosmic horror plot.
• I brought beer! | Webcomic
• Git cheat sheet by Julia Evans | Oh, this is great. Can't wait for the "How Git Works" article! 🎉

Videos

• I Read The Most Misunderstood Philosopher in the World | Unexpectedly, this was really good!

Software

• eGenix Micro Benchmark
• WezTerm is a powerful cross-platform terminal emulator | I was using iTerm2 for a long time and now running kitty - haven't looked into WezTerm yet, but save it here to remember to try it later 😅

Out of Context Images

@beecycling Don't chase your dreams. Humans are persistence predators. Follow your dreams at a moderate pace until they become too exhausted to flee further or fight back. --Athena L.M.

Very short work week. Went to the beyond tellerrand conference and it was as great as always. Fixed two small bugs in django-cast (1, 2), but didn't have time to release a new version. Right now I'm working on a really weird bug found by some unsolicited software testers (thanks!) that only happens on postgres not on sqlite. But when you see a "DataError: PostgreSQL text fields cannot contain NUL (0x00) bytes" caused by some garbage in a filter parameter, something is probably not quite right.

Articles

• Trends in Software Development
  • Learning from the object-oriented mania | Yep
  • Big Data is Dead | Ok, now it's official!
• Frontend
  • Look Mum, No Breakpoints! Have to play around with this
  • Just Speculating: You May Not Need a SPA framework | Ah, htmx has something similar in Javascript, nice to see the browser vendors adopting it
  • Recent CSS Bookmarks 16 | Didn't follow all of the links there, but really interesting!
• Python: Mock an inner import | Cool!
• Zero-to-the-Zero and the Do-Nothing Machine

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 19: May 06 to May 12 | Johannes

Videos

• Safe Space or Trap? Creating Software like DuckDB in Academic Institutions | Great talk. "You know this one weird trick VCs hate? Bootstrapping!" - I think he's 100% right here.

Fediverse

• "What radicalized you?"
• Apple’s new pencil / attention to detail | It casts a shadow 😮?

Software

• blacknoise is an ASGI app for static file serving inspired by whitenoise and following the principles of low maintenance software | Not just static files like whitenoise, but also media

Everyone seems to be obsessed with passive income but I’m set on passive-aggressive income, so you should probably pay me back if you care even the slightest amount about our friendship and how much I thought it meant to you. --Alice McFlurry

Short work week. Normally, I just sport a Neandertal look at work, but last week I decided to go full method-acting by working directly from the actual Neandertal!

Released a new version of django-cast that introduces cover images for posts. For podcasts, the iTunes artwork is used as a fallback. There are also some bugfixes and documentation improvements.

Articles

• Writing
  • Knowledge Graph Extraction & Visualization with local LLM from Unstructured Text: a History example | One of the projects worked on at the 2024 spring sprint of PyDDF Düsseldorf
  • On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
  • Writing with AI
  • Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
• Design
  • Masonry Layouts in CSS
  • The evolution of Figma’s mobile engine: Compiling away our custom programming language
  • Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma | Didn't know about this, whoa!
• The Night Watch | I devolved from systems programming to machine learning to web development, but I saw it as an arbitrary, random mutation. Now I'm beginning to suspect it was inevitable. I also like scarves. Classic 🏛️ post.
• Peer review is not the gold standard in science | I think this lab leak stuff is bullshit, but that science has to be against gatekeeping? Full ack.

Weeknotes

• Own Your Web – Issue 14: Webmentions | Matthias Ott - hmm, I should implement Webmentions in django-indieweb, no?
• Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 18: April 29 to May 05 | Johannes

Videos

• NOX vs TOX – WHAT are they for & HOW do you CHOOSE? 🐍 | Great video!

Software

• Cohere Toolkit - is a collection of prebuilt components enabling users to quickly build and deploy RAG applications
• btop++ - Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes | c++ continuation of bpytop

Podcasts

• Self-Hosted Open Source - Michael Kennedy | Yep, the vibe is mostly right. Personally I go a step further and ditch Docker as well (Michael made the argument that using Docker increases security somehow, which is false, of course ).

Out of Context Images

Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do. --Dave Winer

Made some solid progress on django-cast. It now has support for Podlove Web Player version 5. Although it still works, version 4 is no longer officially supported. I wanted to switch to version 5 for a long time, mainly because I see it as a prerequisite for adding a transcripts feature. What is also possible now is to heavily customize the appearance of the audio player. For example, if you go to my Python Podcast site, click on the little 'B' in the menu bar, and then select the 'Python Podcast' theme, you get a completely different looking player. This is also important because it might be possible to have a good looking podcast template (yes, I'm finally working on one).

And then there's support for the new Wagtail 6.1 release. All I had to do was to implement the new expand_db_attributes_many method in my custom PageLinkHandler to avoid database queries.

It's really warm in the great outdoors, so I spent some time there. And I enjoyed watching a ballet performance at the nearby opera house.

Articles

• My approach to HTML web components
• The new old: Jamstack and MACH's journey towards traditional CMS concepts Yep, monolith does not mean "not modular"
• An alternative proposal for CSS masonry
• Passkeys: A Shattered Dream | Hmm...

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 17: April 22 to April 28 | Johannes
• 📔 Week notes for week 18: A week to mostly forget | Oliver Andrich

Software

• Wagtail 6.1 release notes / Get even more organized with Wagtail 6.1
• dj-notebook - Django + shell_plus + Jupyter notebooks made easy | Ha, this is an alternative to using "jupyter-server < 2" and "traitlets < 5.10.0" - yeah, finally! 🎉
• pyinstrument - is a Python profiler

Out of Context Images