Ephes Blog

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

• FSL: A Better Business/Open Source Balance Than AGPL
• Django UI components for perfectionists with deadlines
• One way to fix Python circular imports

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

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

• The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
• Web Components for Password Input Enhancements
• Python is two languages now, and that's actually great

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

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.

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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

Software

• UI templates for django-allauth built with Tailwind
• Sandstorm is an open source platform for self-hosting web apps | Interesting

Fediverse

• #CSS View Transitions during local development for a next-gen vibe | Nice!
• 2000s: "extend Python with C" 2010s: "extend Python with Python" 2020s: "extend Python with Rust" I have many conflicting feelings about this progression… | Interesting 🧵 - this Fediverse thing is really the place to be atm!

Podcasts

• Evolving JavaScript with Douglas Crockford | Fascinating, didn't know how dismissive the xml community was towards json for example..

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Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification. — Fred Brooks

Lots of private appointments, didn't have time for open source. Hope this will get better next week.

Articles

• Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’
• A fresh look at the CSS grid template areas and how to take advantage of its full potential today
• Evolving Django’s auth.User | Behind paywall but worth it

Important Websites

• 📚 The largest truly open library in human history

Software

• things julia likes about fish | I also like fish 🐡

Weeknotes

• Weak Notes | They don't need to be that strong, right?
• Weeknotes (2024 week 35) | Matthias Kestenholz

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