Ephes Blog

Usually, I use pip -e ../package-directory to install an editable version of a package I use in a different project. Usually I use this method to track a bug or develop a new feature. Some time ago I switched to using flit to build my packages because it supports putting all the configuration in pyproject.toml and is not poetry. Today I had to learn that for a django-packages built with flit but then installed with pip -e the Django template lookup is broken. Using flit install -s works fine though.

The feed generation of Python Podcast was kind of slow. Looking deeper into this using sentry, I found out that for each item in the feed, the size of the audio file has to be fetched via HTTP from S3. Ok, this might explain it 😅.

Here's a complete stream of me fixing the issue by caching the audio file sizes in a JSONField including the deployment to python-podcast.de. The stream is in german.

A few hours later I checked the slow HTTP-operations graph from sentry. Caching seems to work:

That’s why Tesla is right about banning remote work. I know a guy who claims to work for Tesla but also has a gig at a Telcom, at a freight company, does a side job digging holes, sells medical implants AND trades crypto. But he spends most of his time shitposting on twitter. --@avsa

Had to work quite a bit and went to the Django Meetup Cologne and a PyDDF event which I both enjoyed very much. I'm also looking forward to attending PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2023 in April. For django-cast I fixed a little issue raising an exception when an unknown language is set for a code block. But then there was also a bigger change splitting posts into post and episode models which is at least partly covered in a live stream.

In other news: Snow!

Articles

• Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning: My Experience and Advice for Using GPUs in Deep Learning | Long awaited update 🎊 - great article
• Science and technology links (January 15 2023) / Year 2022: Scientific progress
• Why I Like Nox | Ok, time to look at nox more closely
• How to make a website | Great article, I didn't know about Taxi.js
• How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many
• Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem
• Questions to ask a Django company | Yes, asking the right questions during an interview would have spared me a lot of trouble...
• Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification (21 Jan 2023) | Long but good

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: AI hacking and a SpatiaLite tutorial | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 2: January 09 to January 15 | Johannes

Software

• Suddenly, Toot! v18.0 is released! | Mastodon Client I use on iOS
• Quality metadata badges for open source projects
• tandem is a task runner for parallel dev servers. Small, fast, and pairs great with Makefiles! | I'm usually using honcho but this looks interesting, too
• Django 4.2 alpha 1 released
• Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.
• Taxi is a 🤏 small and 🐊 snappy js library for adding slick PJAX navigation and beautiful transitions to your website

Papers

• Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on typical tabular data?

Podcasts

• (116) Der Weg in die Endemie (Das Coronavirus-Update) | With increasing immunity masks get less useful for controlling infection rates and covid rates are falling... all in all not that bad.
• CRE088 Python und PyPy | (CRE)
• PyPy via Import This
• PyPy - The JIT Compiled Python Implementation (Talk Python To Me)
• Testing PyPy - Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (Test & Code in Python)
• Revision 552: Frontend Development im Jahr 2023 (Working Draft) | Lots of interesting references

Out of Context Images

Until now, posts and episodes were the same things in django-cast. But there are some attributes needed for podcast episodes that don't make much sense for normal blog posts like iTunes keywords or whether an episode should be excluded from iTunes or even the audio object that should be used for the episodes enclosure tag in the podcast feed. Maybe it is possible to move the podcast-specific attributes into a new episode page model and get rid of them in a normal blog post? This would make django-cast more usable for people who don't want to set up a podcast but a normal blog.

The stream is a little bit rougher this time, because I wasn't able to prepare anything beforehand. And I had to end the stream early because of other duties. But about an hour after the stream ended, I had the new episode model live in production 🎉.

"Stealing “quietly a bit crap” for my bio." --@GunnarBj

First work week of the year. Had less time for my projects but got some stuff done nonetheless:

• Fixed the Podlove Player share sheet for Python Podcast
• Added code blocks for django-cast and recorded the implementation of those two points in a stream
• Did also some refactoring and removed the old analytics code I had in django-cast
• Published New release 0.2.2.

A business idea I thought about for some time seems to be implemented by Adobe: Enhance voice recordings for free (via Adobe Podcast Enhance: KI macht vollautomatischen Audio-Cleanup). It's about taking crappy audio and improving it by passing it through some ML-model. What makes this idea more interesting than other applications is that training data comes for free in this case. Just take good-quality audio and re-record it using a phone or a bad room. Now you have a pair of bad audio input with a good audio target. It's even possible to parallelize this training data generation.

Articles

• I always recommend Modern Pandas when people ask me about how to do things with pandas and now there's a similar series of articles for polars: Modern Polars
• DjangoConEU is coming to Edinburgh | Haven't yet decided whether to go...
• Why static site generation? | Long form article about the question raised on our last podcast episode
• 15-Minute Cities: Leveraging Software and Location Intelligence to Reimagine Urban Mobility | via Luis newsletter

Videos

• Wie scheitern IT-Projekte garantiert? von Alexander Bernhardt | Just the basics, but it's surprising how often this simple stuff is causing big problems

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 1: January 02 to January 08 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-01-09 | Luis

Software

• Polars - User Guide | New dataframe library written in rust
• Learn Responsive Design | Online responsive design course by Jeremy Keith
• There's a PR for CPython PEP 703 which makes the GIL optional. Here's a link to the discussion.
• Python Packaging Strategy Discussion - Part 1

Podcasts

• WR1438 Physikalische Zumutungen (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Episode 78: Revolutionary Mathematics (with Justin Joque) (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Bah, don't talk about topics I know something about, please!
• Philosophie der Dummheit - Gegen Denkfaulheit und Ignoranz (Sein und Streit)
• Senior-Entwickler brauchen keine Frameworks … oder? – mit PHP-Legende Stefan Priebsch (Super Duper Developers Club) | Good episode. I don't share the preference for microservices, but all in all solid advice
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1449 Bazillen, Braunellen, Beten (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1450 Inflation für Doofe und Wachstumsgeschichte(n) (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Great stuff. I constantly hear people claiming that capitalism requires constant growth, glad to hear that this is not economic mainstream. Also, that splitting between functional and causal responsibility for inflation are different things etc.