Ephes Blog

“Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.”—Geoffrey Bowker

Work, carnival, and some progress on my side projects. Finally managed to try out the cool new openpodcast stack for podcast analytics. Hmm, first I have to find a way to get it to work with postgres instead of MySQL. Looking forward to shooting some pictures again, since I forgot the charging cable for my camera two months ago and now got it back 📸.

django-cast release 0.2.6:

• Got codecov.io to show 100% coverage (fixed the GitHub action submitting the coverage results)
• The release of django-crispy-forms broke tests and comments and stuff -> I was able to fix it after reading the migration guide
• Documentation for Pagination

homepage / python-podcast:

• Tuned down traces/performance metrics for sentry
• Fixed date facets breaking out of the form-control container for python-podcast.de

kptncook:

• Worked a little bit on a cool PR adding Paprika export for kptncook by Dorthe Luebbert

Articles

• Data Classification | Hmmm
• Science and Technology links (February 12 2023)
• ChatGPT provides solid entertainment
  • Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” | It's also fascinating that this whole thing is still amusing, but it is 🍿
  • What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? | Longish but profound explanation
• Modern Javascript doing just great
  • The balance has shifted away from SPAs | I'm not sure about even the omnipresent chat or audio/video player. Might be possible with htmx and fragment rendering. Have to try it...
  • The (extremely) loud minority | Boring tech might be more widely used than expected
  • Rethinking the Modern Web
  • The case for Flex applications
  • Why I'm not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications
  • What to expect from your framework
  • The modern web’s underrated powerhouse

Software

• Paprika Recipe Manager | Great application
• If you've been ignoring your deprecation warnings then pandas 2.0.0 will break your code | Time to check how much work it will be to migrate...
• NEXT.js Introduction | By vercel, nicely done
• PostgreSQL's explain analyze made readable
• Type Design Resources | Lots of resources

Mastodon / Twitter

• People who prefer ketchup over mustard are annoying because as soon as you say you like mustard, they go on and on about how much they hate it. Like, okay. You have the same flavor palette you had when you were 5 but that doesn’t mean you should insult what I put in my coffee.

Podcasts

• Einfach auch nur Menschen – Mirjam Aulbach (neu•gierig) | Conference Buddy is a great idea!
• Revision 556: Domain-Driven Design (Working Draft) | Good overview
• Django 4.2 - Mariusz Felisiak (Django Chat) | Feature overview for Django 4.2
• Episode 82: Materialism (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Great episode. If you want to know why I listen to this show - here's a good example
• Episode #70 Dominik Angerer_/_/_ Co-founder and CEO @ Storyblok (Alphalist CTO Podcast) | RoR backend, Vue.js frontend, Python for images - interesting.
• Die Rückseite des Neins ... oder warum 2023 das Neinhorn unter den Jahren ist (Was denkst du denn?) | Finally more Nietzsche 😁

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Been sick for the umpteenth time this winter. Tried to do some chores on django-cast to pass the time:

• The test coverage is now at 100% (failed to configure codecov.io to report the right number..)
• Nearly complete type annotations, which created a bug in production (failing isinstance call which got necessary to make mypy pass)
• Wagtail 4.2 compatibility, which led to this bug report
• Fixed the pagination feature

Updated my self-hosted mastodon instance to 4.1, which was just a redeploy - smooth.

Articles

• Python’s “Disappointing” Superpowers | tldr - have to do some "dynamic meta-programming" by myself 😆
• The Django Developer’s Guide To Vite | Of all things javascript I used, vite was one of the "only minor" PITA libs
• A historical reference of react criticism | Good article
• 100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS
• Use TOML for `.env` files?
• Big data is dead | Yep, it's not big, grande, or venti - it is just undead data most of the time...
• Bit Hacking (with Go code)
• Late initialization with mypy | This is a problem I had this week, too. And I used isinstance instead of hasattr and it caused a bug in production. And I added this just to be able to have type annotations. Bah.
• Journalism is Lossy Compression | I'm not a big fan of journalism either

Software

• Mypy 1.0 Released | And it's faster 🥳
• SiYuan | An obsidian alternative
• slippers - Build reusable components in Django without writing a single line of Python

Mastodon

• There's many ways of defending a castle...

Video

• Alles ist Eins. Außer der 0 - Dr. Waus Chaos Computer Film | Surprisingly good

Podcasts

• Wahrnehmung - Wie Kinder sich ihre eigene Welt erschaffen (Hörsaal)
• Episode 79: The History of Philosophy (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• #322: Python Packages, Let Me Count The Ways (Python Bytes)
• #22: Podcasting 2.0 (TOPP: The Open Podcast Podcast) | Hmm, maybe I have to implement more than RSS..
• DEEP DIVE 118 – Vercel (programmier.bar) | Interesting, vercel has nice features but seems to run on expensive infrastructure. Time for a smart follower?
• #57 Servant Leadership: Führungsstil der neuen Generation? (Engineering Kiosk)

I am wondering what should be the color of this bikeshed? --@kushal

The usual work and usual chores. Nothing interesting here.

Finally tried out Obsidian - wow, this is a deep rabbit hole. Syncing also works with iCloud folders between iOS and macOS. It's not great but sufficient for my needs (sharing links with the daily note).

Split the blog and podcast model and released a new django-cast version.

Articles

• Private and Public Mastodon
• Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns
• Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten
• My Reaction to Dr. Stroustrup’s Recent Memory Safety Comments | I have to take a closer look at rust soon...
• Twitter is turning off all free access to their apis next week (or at least that’s the plan as of today)
• The Market for Lemons | Good article ranting about the current state of web development (SPAs)

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2023-01-30 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 4: January 23 to January 29 | Johannes

Software

• Granian - A Rust HTTP server for Python applications.
• Django Rocket is a Django SaaS boilerplate framework powered by Cookiecutter.
• WhisperX - Whisper-Based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with improved timestamp accuracy using forced alignment.
• 😱 Awesome Falsehood Awesome A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.
• NiceGUI | Build simple web-UIs using pure Python
• Pyodide 0.22.0 release
• Announcing TypeScript 5.0 Beta

Mastodon / Twitter

• poetry really trying to defend their "< always" stance by breaking everything in a minor release
• Dave Winer on what counts as a podcast
• A webcomic of sheep in a trenchcoat...
• There are two approaches to making projections for business purposes. The one to avoid is estimation based on specification analysis. Unfortunately, that's what most ppl use, and it pretty much always fails because an up-front specification is invariably wong. 1/5 | Good thread - I keep wondering why people keep trying the specification based approach..

Podcasts

• Bits und so #828 (Pro Mac) (Bits und so) | Need to resist my gear acquisition syndrome 🥶
• DK077 - 10.000 Seiten später (Das Klima)
• Folge 149 - Das Strangler Fig Pattern (software-architektur.tv als Podcast)
• MongoDB - Mark Smith (Django Chat)
• Monorepos in Python (Talk Python To Me) | Hmm, still don't know why I want use a monorepo
• Episode 539: Adam Dymitruk on Event Modeling (Software Engineering Radio)

Your honor my client is no longer in their villain era --@ItsMattsLaw

At work, I had to find out that Python enums are slow when used as keys in a dict. I would never have guessed that some_enum.__hash__() is the main occupation of the software I wrote. Unfortunately, I won't attend PyConDE this year because I forgot I already bought tickets for btconf which happens on the same date 😭. And I am still not sure whether I should attend DjangoConEU 2023 or EuroPython 2023 - maybe someone is interested in trying to convince me? Also recorded a new podcast episode about PyPy which was a lot of fun. No issues with django-cast this time, all went well. Didn't even have to touch the Django admin. Closed all the issues I opened up last time.

There were also some improvements to django-cast:

• Started to add type annotations
• Renamed test files to make searching for tests easier
• Cached file sizes for audio models
• Added a new player card feature for Twitter thanks to a hint by @derphilipp
• Added pypy39 to the envlist of tox and it worked after some fiddling with cryptography

Articles

• The End of Writing
• Researchers look a dinosaur in its remarkably preserved face
• Yaml, JSON, Toml | My bets are on toml and yes, yaml is the worst
• How to tell when you're a real professional | Hits a little bit too close
• Marie Kondo Says She's 'Kind of Given up' on Tidying up | Fighting entropy often turns out to be more difficult than expected
• Looking Back at Postgres | Chapter of Stonebraker's Turing Award book about postgres by Joseph M. Hellerstein

Software

• Posy - a new project oriented Python workflow manager (replacement for pyenv, deadsnakes, tox, venv, pip, pip-compile/pipenv, and PEP 582)
• Mage - 🧙 A modern replacement for Airflow
• Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher (for macOS)
• SQLAlchemy 2.0.0, the first production release of SQLAlchemy 2.0, is now available
• LangChain ⚡ Building applications with LLMs through composability ⚡
• There's a new 2.0.a1 release for django-crispy-forms
• Resource Override | Really cool chrome extension lets you override css/javascript on any site (debugging, fiddling around)

Events

• Some CCC-related events for 2023
• PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2023 17. April - 19. April 2023
• #btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 17 - 18 Apr 2023
• DjangoConEU is coming to Edinburgh 29th May to Friday 2nd June 2023
• EuroPython 2023 From 17 July through 23 July, 2023

Videos

• Is Domain Driven Design Overrated? | Stefan Tilkov | The insight that for different circumstances different approaches might be useful is really valuable. I use the relational approach most of the time but am also ready to admit it's not the best one always.
• @mkennedy @brianokken went and listened to the joke video linked from the most recent episode of @pythonbytes and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Podcasts

• #318: GIL, How We Will Miss You (Python Bytes)
• #319: CSS-Style Queries for... JSON? (Python Bytes)
• #827 (Sorgfalt im Verkehr) (Bits und so)
• #826 (Liebhaberei) (Bits und so)
• Foxley Talent - Jon Gould (Django Chat) | Good episode
• Ukraine: Banks vs. Tanks (Unsere kleine Welt) | Meh
• Revision 553: State of JS2, Framework Boogaloo (Working Draft) | Learned about resource override here...
• 2023 – Bastian Allgeier (neu•gierig) | Tempted to steal the design 😅

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

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