Ephes Blog

Interviewer: do you have an example of projects you spent too much effort on?

Me: I suppose the work on Mambo 1 to 4 was a bit of a waste... --Chris Heilmann

Wrote my first UI Tests using Playwright as a pytest plugin, because the UI I'm currently working on is quite javascript heavy. Overall it was a good experience. But it's hard to get the test browser to behave like the real one:

• Drag and drop just looks different (I have no idea why).
• Clicking on a link in the test browser results in href navigation, while clicking on the link in the real browser triggers hx-get

One of the projects I worked on last year went live: Plastic IQ tool launched in Brazil and Indonesia (link goes to Linkedin).

Articles

• UGH | Webcomic - I feel attacked..
• Žižek and the game of life | Well I suspected something like this going on for a long time
• Citogenesis in science and the importance of real problems | Yup

Software

• django-template-partials - Reusable named inline partials for the Django Template Language
• Adding template fragments or partials for the DTL | Interesting discussion about template partials..
• Playwright for Python | There's a pytest plugin, too
• pytest-base-url is a simple plugin for pytest that provides an optional base URL
• Tutorial: Web Testing with Playwright in Python
• django-passkeys - An extension to Django ModelBackend backend to support passkeys
• PyPy v7.3.12: release of python 2.7, 3.9, and 3.10 | Python 3.10!

Videos

• DjangoCon Europe 2023 | Yak-shaving to Where the Puck is Going to Be.
• DjangoCon Europe 2023 | Good form: How Django’s form rendering improved during the 4.x series
• Why All the Best Cocktail Bars in NYC Buy Their Ice From Richard Boccato

Podcasts

• Revision 571: TypeScript 5.1 (Working Draft)
• Wie verändert KI unsere Welt? (Das philosophische Radio) | Surprisingly good (modulo using the term "artificial intelligence" very naively)
• Was bedeutet Ihnen Erich Fromm für die heutige Zeit? (Das philosophische Radio)
• Rocky Duan, from OpenAI to Covariant (The Robot Brains Podcast)
• End-to-End Web Testing with Playwright (Talk Python To Me) | There's even a pytest-plugin 🥳
• Ernährung - Wie wir essen, ist wichtiger als was wir essen (Hörsaal) | A very long list of things that won't work..
• Technikphilosophie - Künstliche Intelligenz und Verantwortung (Hörsaal) | Meh, kind of boring...
• Der sanfte Wellengang des Lebens - Über Hedonismus und Anhedonismus (Was denkst du denn?) | Good episode
• Future of Pydantic and FastAPI (Talk Python To Me) | OpenAI is using FastAPI / Pydantic for their APIs? Cool!

"I was born in 1994"

- boring

- heard it before

- tells you nothing

"I was born in the year of Cotton Eye Joe"

- arouses curiosity

- who was Cotton Eye Joe

- where did he come from?

- where did he go?

- Cotton Eye Joe

-- snart

A deep dive into htmx and Alpine.js. Mixing hyperscript in weird htmx attributes with javascript in even weirder alpine attributes embedded in already weird Django template syntax is often too much for PyCharm and djhtml. But it still works - so far I can't complain. A while ago, my printer broke down. I got a new one this week. I had to deal with some bureaucracy because the refund went to a bank account that no longer exists.

Another WWDC was held and some weird hardware got announced. But on the plus side, PWAs on Apple platforms finally seem to be getting interesting. So, yay for that. I went to a meeting of the local Python user group, which was a lot of fun. And finally, summer is here, so I spent a lot of time out in the sun, barbecuing, etc.

Articles

• ChatGPT is Not a Technological Singularity
• Using Django’s template loaders to configure Tailwind
• A new tutorial for Neapolitan
• LLMs are good at playing you

Books

• “Boost Your Git DX” available in early access

Videos

• DjangoCon Europe 2023 Edinburgh Videos Are Up!
• GO GO GOLEMS - COMPUTERS SHOULD COMPUTE | Talk by Manuel - strong recommendation - handout

Podcasts

• WR1494 Rezession, Gierflation, Industriestromspreis (Wirtschaftskunde) | Solid.
• UKW111 Ukraine: Die Gegenoffensive (unsere kleine welt)

"I don't want to be offensive, but there is a very fine line between...

... numerator and denominator.

It's a divisive issue." --Ten

Slowly getting back to work, combining Tailwind and htmx with Django. Released a new version of django-cast which now includes all the information needed to run a SPA in front of it from a theme. This was more work than expected. To make sure there's all the information needed for a SPA theme, I built a Vue.js cast-vue theme for django-cast, which is now feature complete after adding comments and the podlove player for audio content last week. Also met with Manuel to work on training LLMs from scratch using all the Python code from GitHub.

Articles

• Django 4 form rendering using Tailwind without Node or crispy️ | Let's see if it is possible to get rid of crispy
• Optimize Django Query Performance by combining Select Related and Prefetch Related
• The Python Language Summit 2023 | Lots of interesting details
• PEP 594 has been implemented: Python 3.13 removes 20 stdlib modules

Software

• django-widget-tweaks | Used for Tailwind without crispy
• GitHub Copilot Labs - A VS Code extension for experimental applications of GitHub Copilot | Good!
• PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 Released!
• Migrate your project to .readthedocs.yaml configuration file v2 | Oh noes, incoming work..
• Announcing Rust 1.70.0
• 🤗 Open LLM Leaderboard | Nice overview to keep track of this fast moving space...
• django-stubs 4.2.1 release

Mastodon / Twitter

• Sweet, libuv merged their first part of io_ring support! And it’s the file I/O part no less! | Hmm, maybe I should run my file download benchmarks again against this?

Podcasts / Videos

• Wir waren nochmal in Greifswald zu Besuch, beim Wendelstein 7-X. Diese Folge ist eine Nachbesprechung zur sehr populären Sendung 36 (Alternativlos) | Solid episode!
• FS266 Mehr Bums (Freakshow)
• State of GPT | By Andrej Karpathy
• #376 – Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT and the Nature of Truth, Reality & Computation (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Good episode
• #381 – Chris Lattner: Future of Programming and AI (Lex Fridman Podcast)

can't wait to quit my day job and start my new landscaping company, Move Fast and Rake Things --Annika Backstrom

Holiday week. Didn't do much except for some light programming in the morning, working on the comment feature of the Vue.js theme for django-cast.

Articles

• All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs

Software

• Improve how you architect webapps

Mastodon

• "Sure, the abyss is great for staring into. But if screaming is your thing, you'll want to go with the void."

Podcasts

• Bits und so #844 (Cook Time) (Bits und so)
• Gayatri Spivak: Wie gelingt guter Fortschritt? (Sein und Streit)
• Revision 567: Design Patterns in der Webentwicklung (Working Draft) | I think there's some truth to this old "design patterns are a workarounds for missing language features" saying. Yes, you probably won't need most of the design patterns in a language like Typescript. Same for Python.

Out of Context Images

"sorry about that, i wasn’t making a strange face because of what you said on the team sync meeting, but because i’ve been watching my own camera the whole time, and at all times i am nothing but a horse discovering his own reflection" --henry ✷

Less busy week, good. Created a first release for cast-vue, a Vue.js theme for django-cast. It's a weird mix of pre-rendered html via Django and classic http API based SPA. I like it 😆. To support cast-vue, some changes had to be made to django-cast, so there's a new release for it too. The only major feature that is missing from cast-vue in comparison to the bootstrap ones is comments.

Articles

• Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices | The prices of all this cloud stuff are absolute crazy compared to rolling your own hardware, I still don't get why this is so popular
• Real Multithreading is Coming to Python - Learn How You Can Use It Now | Using subinterpreters
• How China’s hottest social media app turned Düsseldorf into a foodie destination | Düsseldorf? Time to re-explore my hood..
• The Sauce That Survived Italy’s War on Pasta
• llm, ttok and strip-tags—CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs | Need to try to use more of them more regularily
• vWriting a chat application in Django 4.2 using async StreamingHttpResponse, Server-Sent Events and PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY

Software

• Below are the major highlights in JupyterLab 4.0.0 | JupyterLab 4.0 Release!
• Weights & Biases - The developer-first MLOps platform | Somehow I didn't notice it until now
• Tandoor Recipes | Recipe management using Django!

Podcasts

• (117) Long Covid: Das Rätsel nach der Pandemie (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Interesting: If you watch a group of people the risk to catch long covid increases with every new infection while the absolute count of long covid cases goes down. Why? Because it's correlation instead of causation: The people you detect as reinfected have a higher risk of catching long covid (because you only detect symptomatic cases).
• Geoff Hinton Returns (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Ok, this gets me a little bit worried, too.
• Was ist kritisch an der Kritischen Theorie? (Sein und Streit)
• 100 Jahre Frankfurter Schule - Ist unsere Lebensweise unvernünftig? (Sein und Streit)
• Yejin Choi - Teaching ai common sense and morality (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Good episode!
• UKW110 Ukraine: Balance des Schreckens (unsere kleine welt)