Weeknotes 2025-05-12
,The thing about being wrong is that before you know you’re wrong, it feels •exactly• like being right. --Roman Mars
Beyond Tellerrand 2025
I attended the Beyond Tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf this year. Being local residents, my partner and I didn't have to travel far to the venue, and since we're both interested in the topics, we always attend together. In previous years, we'd bring our children along, taking turns watching them between talks. This year marked the first time both kids were in kindergarten or school in the mornings and at playdates in the afternoons, so they didn't join us. Several attendees actually noticed their absence and asked where we'd "left the little ones."
The conference was excellent as always. I gained plenty of inspiration and thoroughly enjoyed both the presentations and conversations with familiar faces and new acquaintances alike. I did find myself wondering if the conference might benefit from exploring even more diverse topics "beyond tellerrand." It would be fascinating to see someone like Simon Willison discuss AI and its implications, or perhaps dive into more technically in-depth backend topics that could bring fresh perspectives.
That said, I can't recommend Beyond Tellerrand highly enough! The event consistently delivers exceptional content in a welcoming atmosphere that encourages creativity and connection. If you haven't experienced it yet, you're truly missing out on one of the best web conferences in Europe. And if you can't make it yourself, definitely encourage a colleague or friend to go – they'll thank you for it!
Special shout-out to my fellow podcast colleagues who made this event even more enjoyable: Alexander Bürner (devslove.it), Christian Schaefer (Working Draft), Sarah Gross (wwsiv) – and to Daniel Pietzsch and Nik Rademacher – it was fantastic seeing all of you there!
Nyxmon
I've made significant progress with my experiment developing a minimalist monitoring tool using vibe coding. I now have a comprehensive integration test where I add a check to the database and launch a check collector in a separate thread. This collector uses a blocking portal to poll the database for checks that are due to run.
Once a check is identified, the system issues an "execute checks" command that leverages an async check runner adapter along with another blocking portal. This setup allows the pending checks to run via httpx async in the event loop before returning results back to the synchronous message bus through a callback.
After receiving the result, the system issues an "add result" command to the message bus. Then the SQLite repository adapter utilizes a portal to write the result to the database within an async context.
While the code structure appears somewhat complex, it seems to be functioning as intended. The architecture successfully bridges synchronous and asynchronous operations throughout the monitoring workflow.
django-cast
Just released a new version with official support for Wagtail 7 and Django 5.2.
Articles
- Vibe Recap of DjangoCon Europe 2025
- Photos from btconf by Florian / day 2
- What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? | Seems not to be that bad, no?
- Announcing Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q1 2025! 🎉
- Quirks in Django's template language
- Sierpiński triangle? In my bitwise AND? | Hrhr!
Software
- saleor - Commerce that works with your language and stack | A Python/Django e-commerce platform with 20k stars on GitHub that somehow flew under my radar until a fellow Beyond Tellerrand attendee mentioned it to me. How did I miss this?
- OKLCH Color Picker & Converter
- Scroll-Driven Animations Debugger DevTools Extension
- Wagtail Prompt - This repository automatically fetches the documentation from the latest Wagtail release and converts it into a single text file suitable for prompting LLMs with large context windows | 😎
- Awesome MCP Servers
People
- Paula Zuccotti | Who did an amazing talk about "Every Thing We Touch"
- Matthias Ott / Slides of his Talk | Fantastic talk about a recurring btconf topic, but really well done