Ephes Blog

Attended Beyond Tellerrand 2022 which was a lot of fun. The wather was really nice this week, so I spent a fair amount of time outside. The new macro-capabilities of my phone camera are really nice (or scary, depending on the motive):

Articles

• Johannes weeklog | Worth reading it
• How To Host Multiple Websites Securely With Nginx And Php-fpm On Ubuntu 14.04 | Maybe I can deploy different worpress / podlove instances running just one nginx but keeping the processes running as different users
• Das Comeback der Tonfrequenz mit DJ Hell, Jan Delay und Richard Dorfmeister | Opportunity to go out in Düsseldorf

Design

• Drastically Improve Your UI Designs With This Technique | Use checklists to make sure you won't forget empty states etc..
• Designing Better Navigation With Navigation Queries | The homepage of the city of Düsseldorf is mentioned in a positive way in an article about webdesign? This branch of reality is definitely not ready for production..
• CSS Parent Selector
• The Future of CSS: CSS Toggles
• Under-Engineered Multi-Selects

Twitter

• Nuclear weapons might be dangerous
• Thread about pyscript
• Great thread about grades from a philosophical perspective | Yes, they are bullshit :)
• In defence of the Single Page Application | Hrhr
• I got Datasette working in WebAssembly via @pyodide!

Software

• Python f-string cheat sheets
• Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA
• 33 JavaScript Concepts Every Developer Should Know 🤓️💯️

Podcasts

• Navigating midlife with Kieran Setiya (Re:Considering) | New podcast I learned about via #btconf
• Philosophie der Identität - Auf der Suche nach dem Selbst (Sein und Streit)
• Bits und so #789 (Web 3.0) (Bits und so)
• Star Wars and Django (Django Chat)
• WR1359 Inflation, EZB, Energie (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Lots of valuable information
• UKW097 Ukraine: Er hat das Memo nicht gelesen (Unsere kleine Welt)

Worked on lots of small things:

• Released kptncook 0.0.6 fixing a confusingly named command.
• Answered some emails sent to hallo@python-podcast.de. Usually we don't get that much email, but last week we had multiple mails to be answered at the same time for the first time running the podcast. Dunno if this is good or bad :).
• Found a bug in jupyterlab where rename file is ignored if the target name already exists.
• Worked a little bit on making the podlove plugin / wordpress deployable on my infrastructure which is more difficult than expected.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog | Interesting as always
• The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations | Via Hotel Bar Sessions

Youtube

• It Depends Ep. 8 April 2022 Jordan Tigani peeks into the future of analytical databases | One of the creators of big table gets interviewed

Twitter

• https://howisFelix.today? - personal life tracking | Really interesting project, it's all open source..
• Language and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race | Buffalo!
• Do you have personal website with an #RSS feed? I’d love to subscribe! 🤗
• Microservices are still difficult - thread

Software

• Cookiecutter template for a Python package based on the Hypermodern Python article series | Lots of references to useful other projects included
• appdirs | Use standard data / config directories for your platform (windows / macos / linux)
• django-configurations | Make different configurations configurable :)
• Appliku - Deploy Django in 5 minutes | Interesting deployment option, deploying to your own servers is possible (which is usually much cheapier than cloud)
• SpeedPy.Com is a Django-based SaaS BoilerPlate | Interesting, I'll have to take a closer look at this..

Podcasts

• Folge 116 - Events, Event Sourcing und CQRS (Software Architektur im Stream)
• Episode 52: Immortality (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Good episode. There was a cool argument from Charles against afterlife: You have to assume there's no hope of changing anything in this life to be able to believe that creating a perfect virtual one makes things better. Also applies to video games or role playing, imho. If the yield on doing actual things is low maybe buying real estate on the moon or NFT or something like this seems like a good idea. But you have to be pretty desperate to buy into that.
• Hypermodern Python Projects (TalkPython['Podcast']) | Lots of great stuff in this episode
• Episode #280: Easy terminal scripts by sourcing your Py (Python Bytes)
• Revision 527: Vue State Management (Working Draft) | Pinia ftw
• Sonderfolge: Die Pandemie vom Menschen her denken (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Good episode, strange title because it's about communication strategies.
• Appliku - Kostja Palović (Django Chat) | Super interesting for me, because I'm about to do a very similar thing :>
• Wie funktioniert Manufactum? mit Max Heimann (Kassenzone.de) | Good as usual
• Episode 50: Desire (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• Politisch? - die freie Zeit (Das philosophische Radio)
• Ziviler Ungehorsam - Wie radikal darf Protest in der Klimakatastrophe sein? | Good talk. Includes a good definition of "Ziviler Ungehorsam"
• Episode 53: Metaphysics (Hotel Bar Sessions) | This podcast keeps getting better, really impressive
• Bits und so #788 (In 500 Meter das Ziel ist links) (Bits und so)

Released version 0.0.5 of the command line kptncook scraping tool based on the work to reverse the kptncook api from Daniel. It's now possible to fetch recipe metadata just by providing the sharing url of a recipe from the kptncook app. It's also possible to download all stored favorites and backup them locally or import them to mealie.

After listeing to LOV021 Podlove-API mit Dirk Schumann I realised it might be possible to use the podlovers podcast frontend also for django-cast because it doesn't depend directly on wordpress anymore. This is very exciting, because having to use php/wordpress was the main reason keeping me from looking more closely into the whole podlove ecosystem. The only thing I have to do is to write an adapter for the api (and there are some parts missing as well like transcripts and contributors). But at first I have to be able to test and understand the existing api locally. Therefore my aversion for wordpress led me to having to use it finally. In the end it wasn't that difficult at all and I took some notes on how to reproduce that. File handling is not working yet, but I'm sure to figure it out next week.

Articles

• Errors are constructed, not discovered
• Johannes weeklog | Lots of interesting stuff
• Lomuto’s Comeback | Computers are surprising, big O notation is not always right respect to caching and branch prediction issues on modern CPUs

YouTube

• DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Mark Ramm | Interesting to watch old talks.. 

Software

• Memray is a memory profiler for Python | Finally released by Bloomberg as open source \o/
• This package provides the core functionality for pydantic | Much faster core for pydantic v2 validation backend

Twitter

• Erfurt latrine desaster | Holy shit!
• Thread about reasonable covid behaviour atm | Ok, maybe times are confusing, but twitter is full of people demonstrating an inability to adapt their behaviour to a changed environment. This thread is a rare exception.

Podcasts

• Episode 51: Moral Subjectivity (Hotel Bar Sessions) | This whole episode is about two pages from "On the Genealogy of Morality" by Nietzsche - kind of a new format and I like it a lot
• Folge 115 - Data Mesh - nur ein neuer Datenanalyse-Hype? (Software Architektur im Stream) | Found an exception to the "if there's a question mark in the headline, the answer is always no"-rule :). Maybe I was framed by the bad audio quality into seeing flaws everywhere, but well, at least I do know now what people are talking about when they speak about data mesh.
• Django’s Rough Edges - Keryn Knight (Django Chat) | Good as always
• LOV021 Podlove-API mit Dirk Schumann (https://podlovers.org) | Very exciting episode (at least for me), because it seems like podlove is going to expose all its functionality via an api. Which means that I could use the podlove frontend (if there is such a thing) together with django-cast if I just implement the same api on the backend side, which shouldn't be that difficult (famous last words)..
• WR1351 Wörme im Büsenbachtal (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• Monchi (Feine Sahne Fischfilet) (Reflektor)
• WR1353 Schwache Kraft und Asteroidenfamilien (WRINT: Wer redet ist nicht tot)
• #787 (Eternal September) (Bits und so)
• Vom Pilgern und Fasten - Wie Religion heute noch funktionieren kann (Hörsaal) | I'm not religious at all, but there were some interesting facts in this episode. For example: In .de the number of members of the catholic church is in constant decline since at least 70 years. But globally the number of members is increasing. It's growing even if you correct for population growth. Fascinating. I also didn't know that there is no commonly accepted definition of religion in the social sciences.
• Glaube und Wissenschaft - Die Grenzen unseres Wissens (Hörsaal) | This talk is odd. The main conclusion "We don't know everything therefore we should consider a thing we like to believe as possible" (which has nothing to do with physics and everything with wishful thinking) is clearly wrong. What bothers me is the deceptive nature of this talk, trying to use physics jargon to bullshit the audience. This talk shouldn't have passed the editors of this podcast.
• Episode 49: Memory (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Great, iirc
• Revision 525: Beyond Tellerrand und andere Konferenzen in Zeiten von Corona (Working Draft) | Episode about the beyond tellerrand conference which will be next week in Düsseldorf (I will be there, too)

Met a lot of people last week. Spent the first half of the week going to this years PyCon DE despite I thought I wouldn't. This was really cool (day 1, day 2, day 3). After that I spent the last half of the week attending family appointments. Avoided to catch fire / covid, ffp2 ftw. Somebody was more successful than me reversing the kptncook app and opened an github issue to notify me about that. How awesome is that? As soon as I'll be able to spent more time on computer stuff I'm going to enhance my kptncook-scraper accordingly.

Things I Learned

• auto_error in fastAPI allows you to test for different authentication methods (cookie, bearer token, etc), but using an authentication middleware as in django is probably a cleaner solution
• It's not possible to return values from dependencies declared at router level in fastapi, but you could attach stuff to the request and use it as a container for additional state

Articles

• Weeklog from Johannes
• A reworked TCP zero-copy receive API / Zero-copy TCP receive | According to those articles, it should be possible to do zero copy tcp from one socket to another. For example serve a file directly from django to a client while fetching it from an object store like minio.
• Python f-strings | Nice guide on how to use f-strings
• spectrum-4 ethernet leaps to 800g with nvidia circuits | Hmm, that's kind of fast, I guess..
• The Illustrated Transformer | Great documentation about how the transformer neural net architecture works
• A Web Renaissance | More interesting than the content is who wrote it.. there's a broad trend for a while and now it starts to get recognized 

YouTube

• Multiway Systems as Models to Understand Mind and Universe - a Conversation with Stephen Wolfram

Software

• Typed Settings | Uses attrs / cattrs and it's main purpose is to aggregate settings from different sources like password managers etc. I mostly use pydantics BaseSettings for things like this.
• Folium - Python data, leaflet.js maps | Makes it easy to visualize data from python with leaflet on maps
• Great Expectations | Library to validate, document and profile your data..
• Checkmk monitoring software | Had to link to wikipedia, because it's not possible to find out what the software does from looking at the official website (hate things like that)
• MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding | Used by idealo
• SentenceTransformers is a Python framework for state-of-the-art sentence, text and image embeddings | Also used by idealo
• Faiss is a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors | Used by idealo for product clustering
• Label propagation algorithm | idealo

Twitter

• Twitter thread about cool command line tools | Need to look at threads like this every now and then
• How to build your own python
• Someone is even more annoyed by the education system than me :)
• Sdes for @PyConDE PyCon DE 2022 keynote "Python 3.11 in the web browser – A journey"
• Thread about the elon musk twitter takeover from someone who ran reddit for a while
• Python objects can define their own formatting mini-languages for f-strings by defining __format__ | pretty cool
• How can you break out of a #python double loop? Use a generator to make it a single loop instead!  | neat trick

Podcasts

• Episode #278: Multi-tenant Python applications (PythonBytes)
• Sonderfolge: Genesen, aber nicht gesund (Das Coronavirus-Update) | About 10% get long covid.. 
• #275 – Rick Rubin: Legendary Music Producer (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Studio recording is the opposite of a performance..
• Removing Python's Dead Batteries (in just 5 years) (Talk Python To Me)