Ephes Blog

From Facebook .....

I just learned the professional way to say "I told you so":

"This was identified early on as a likely outcome." --Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD

Last week, I wrote a lot of Playwright end-to-end tests, and I really appreciate how easy it is these days to copy a snippet of HTML from a website and simply ask an LLM, 'How do I click the submit button?' or 'How can I select option "x" with Playwright?' It quickly generates a working line of code that I can drop straight into my test.

Articles

• SQL/JSON is here! (kinda “Waiting for Pg 17”) | Waiting is over 😏
• Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS
• Building a Bootstrap styled form in vanilla Django
• Initial explorations of Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability

Videos

• Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo | Impressive!

Fediverse

• "Writing the Worst Datalog Ever in 26loc"

Software

• A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C

Out of Context Images

ACAB includes Paw Patrol. --Prof Kemi FG

I attended the local Django Meetup in Cologne and listened to an interesting talk about Hyperview, which is based on React Native. It's probably more of an early adopter thing at the moment, but the idea is really intriguing.

I published a podcast episode about arrays and sequences , which had probably the longest gap between recording and publishing we've ever had—but I just wasn't able to do it earlier. We revisit the first chapters of Fluent Python because, why not? This book is really good.

On the infrastructure side, I updated all my databases to PostgreSQL 17 and found my old post about upgrading PostgreSQL still helpful. I'm also using uv now in production deployments, and it works really great. This uv thing looks like it will simplify a lot of workflows for me—yay for that!

Then I attended SUBSCRIBE 11, a podcasting-related conference. The conference was great, the weather was superb, and I talked to a lot of people about podcast publishing software. I even accidentally held a workshop about pods-blitz, a great new podcast publishing software written in Rust by Ulrich Dürholz. Here's a cool list of all the podcasts whose hosts attended.

Articles

• 🤖 I released files-to-claude-xml and new development workflows
• Solving the Maker-Taker problem | Well, maybe not completely solved..
• The blockquote element
• Scroll-driven animated card stack with scroll snap events
• AI Mathematical Olympiad - Progress Prize 2 | Kind of wild that there's an AI competition for problems that hard. Seemed impossible a few years ago.
• DSF initiatives I'd like to see | by Carlton Gibson
• Building an automatically updating live blog in Django
• Us | Webcomic definitely not about me.
• Unlocking the Power of JSON Patch | I've been storing a lot of data in JSON fields lately—this might come in handy.

Videos

• Live coding music with PyREPL in Python 3.13 — Łukasz Langa
• Around the wwworld: Web MIDI, Web AUDIO and what the web does best

Fediverse

• "That was a lot faster" | Webcomic
• Thread about SQL and the Django ORM..
• I have to re-figure out how to include an editable dependency with #uv every time I need it for local development.
• Big new draft update to PEP 750, which has now been renamed "Template Strings".
• This is really neat from Terence Eden: you can use text-wrap: balance for icons as well as text..

"To whom it may concern"

- vague

- weak

- ignorable

"To whom it will concern"

- ominous

- strong

- alarming

--Aelfred the Great

Released a new version of django-cast with support for Python 3.13, which was just released last week. Made some progress on my frontend-heavy side project using htmx (still not published). Otherwise, it was a fairly typical work week.

Articles

• Lego ideas - proposal of a working turing machine
• Web Components are not Framework Components — and That’s Okay
• Join the Python Developers Survey 2024: Share your experience!
• From software to reality?
• Switching from virtualenvwrapper to direnv, Starship, and uv

Videos

• Smashing Hour With Heydon Pickering | Wow, didn't know you could do something like that (equalizer with CSS custom properties adjusting the height of bars) with the web audio api, cool stuff!
• Cabel Sasser - XOXO 2024 | Great talk

Fediverse

• Pixelimage to SVG conversion tool

hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave --Janel Comeau

I spent some time outdoors and noticed mushrooms growing everywhere—so cool! I have also been working on an upcoming project that should be easily extensible with plugins. Lets see how that works out.

Articles

• DJP: A plugin system for Django | Cool! I'm thinking about plugins a lot too, atm
• OpenAI DevDay: Let’s build developer tools, not digital God | Yep

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Three podcasts, two trips and a new plugin system | Simon Willison

Videos

• uv IS the Future of Python Packaging 🐍📦 | New video from Hynek! Ok, if he approves uv, I have to use it, too 🤷.

Software

• datasette-extract | Create tables from unstructured data in PDFs
• django-ledger - An Accounting, Bookkeeping & Financial Analysis Engine for the Django Framework | Interesting. Worked on something similar in the past.