Ephes Blog

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• A historical reference of react criticism | Good article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 😅

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: