Ephes Blog

Weeknotes 2024-09-30

Sept. 30, 2024, Jochen

There’s nothing quite like tight kerning to make a design look dean and modem. --Chris Shiflett

I didn’t manage to accomplish much this week. I was generally busy but not really making any progress. However, I attended a great local green software meetup, which was solid fun - this talk about sustainable web design for example.

Articles

Weeknotes

Weeknotes: Three podcasts, two trips and a new plugin system | Curious about this plugin stuff since I'm building a plugin system for one of my projects atm too

Fediverse

Something to add to your CSS reset from now on

Software

Local-First Software | Interesting idea
OpenFreeMap | Oh wow

Weeknotes 2024-09-23

Sept. 23, 2024, Jochen

This week, I released a new version of kptncook that includes a fix for Windows by setting the default encoding to UTF-8. I also attended a meeting of the Django User Group in Cologne and enjoyed a really good talk comparing Django and Laravel.

Articles

Books

Compiling to Assembly from Scratch | now available as a print version!

Videos

Flux, the UI Library for Livewire | Caleb Porzio at Laracon US 2024 in Dallas, TX | From a Django developer's perspective, I'm kind of jealous of this deep integration. But it's probably not that easy to get right — see this thread

Software

Sidekick helps you along all the steps of deployment on your VPS
i-html is a drop in tag that allows for dynamically importing html, inline. It's a bit like an <iframe>, except the html gets adopted into the page | A web component for including html, nice!
django-cotton - Bringing component-based design to django templates | Need to take a closer look at this one

Type Annotations can Cause Unexpected Behavior in Python

Sept. 19, 2024, Jochen

Today I learned that type annotations in Python, while being valid code, can sometimes lead to unexpected problems. In a Django view, I had the following line:

def some_view(request):
    ...
    context["form"]: form
    return render(request, some_template, context=context)

This line doesn't raise a SyntaxError because the colon is interpreted as part of a type annotation, which is ignored at runtime. As a result, the line effectively becomes just context["form"], which is a no-op but still valid Python code.

It took me some time to figure out why {% if form.field.errors %} used later on was was always false. 🤦‍♂️

Weeknotes 2024-09-16

Sept. 16, 2024, Jochen

Be nice to us folks who wear glasses. We paid money to see you. --BobGolen

I just released a new version of kptncook because my wife's attempt to export her 800+ favorite recipes from kptncook to Paprika broke the process, so I finally had to fix it. Turns out that when you're generating JSON using Jinja2 templates, you need to remove a lot of junk characters if you want to be able to parse them again 😅.

Articles

Framework Patterns | Thinking about using the registry pattern soon.
Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more | Passkeys looked very promising, but I sadly have to agree: there are just too many ways to accidentally lock yourself out 😕.
CSS @property and the New Style | You can really do a lot with just CSS nowadays.
UV with Django | II'm going to use UV for my latest private project and tried to figure out how to use it.
Bear knowledge | Webcomic
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning | Very insightful and also applies to many aspects of software development.

Software

Cloudron - Self-hosting has never been simpler | Looks nice
Python 3.13 release highlights | The release is in two weeks! Time to watch this video about Python 3.13 features by Anthony Sottile 😅.
Mattermost | Nice open-source Slack replacement.
Bring Back Free Software Funding: Give Your Feedback to the European | If you want to support free software, here's an opportunity to contribute.

Podcasts

LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | I find it always inspiring to listen to Simon Willison.

Out of Context Images

Weeknotes 2024-09-09

Sept. 9, 2024, Jochen

WHY WAS IT CALLED SINGLE-SIGN ON WHEN SIGN-ON 37 TIMES PER DAY WAS RIGHT THERE --Joe B

I'm rereading Every Layout and practicing some CSS on my own—it’s going well so far. There’s finally a new django-cast release, but I could barely remember how to put it together. Maybe I should just stick to a weekly release schedule.

Articles

If pg_dump is not a backup tool, what is? | Alright, but what are the real backup solutions then? In any case, if you're looking to store a complete on-disk version of your entire cluster, you might want to check out pg_dumpall.
Following up "Mother of all htmx demos" | There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. I know Wagtail is also adopting the Stimulus approach, so maybe I should give it a try too. I’ve been using Alpine.js so far, but it might be worth checking out this Hotwire stuff as well.
When and how to start coding with kids | This is relevant to me because of reasons. When I find something that works for me, I'll let you know 😊.
How to build an alternate Django admin in only 10 years
Roll Your Own Frameworks | Yup