Ephes Blog

it's pretty messed up that the Beatles released a song called "Help!" and then an album called "Help!" and then a movie called "Help!" and nobody helped them and half of them died. --sunny jay real estate

Normal work week. Still not back to full health, but getting better. Went to the theater and visited a bar around the corner, which was great.

Articles

• One way to package Python code right now | Very good!
• Contingency planning for me and curl
• (comic) Narrator: They did not in fact delegate maintenance
• Let Me Tell You A Secret | Yes, click it already!
• Tracking Engineering Time
• Hello world, and the future for PyO3
• My Obsidian setup
• A beginner’s guide to making beautiful slides for your talks

Videos

• htmx deep dive | Good one!
• my thoughts on ruff

Mastodon

• This is going to be a hard one to explain tomorrow during standup.

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-12 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 6: February 05 to February 11 | Johannes

Software

• pico CSS - What’s new in v2?
• py_webauthn - A Python3 implementation of the server-side of the WebAuthn API | This whole webauthn stuff looks not so bad, actually

Podcasts

• Prächtig mächtig - Über Beziehungen, Diskursmacht und Strukturen (Was denkst du denn?) | Nice!
• SE Radio 602: Nicolas Carlo on Improving Legacy Code (Software Engineering Radio) | Oh, new website? Someone cleaned up the legacy code base? Looks good!
• SimpleWebAuthn with Matthew Miller (Software Engineering Daily) | Nice!

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE I'VE ALREADY BEEN ON THE FEDIVERSE FOR A YEAR. ONLY 999 TO GO UNTIL MY DISTRESS SIGNAL REACHES OMICRON PERSEI 8. --LRRR

Normal work week. Still wasn't able to do anything besides work.

Articles

• Django: Join the community on Mastodon | Just do it
• If What We Made Were Real | Hmm...
• foam - all about photography | cool magazine

Software

• Python 3.13.0 alpha 3 is now available
• Announcing the Deputy Developer in Residence and the Supporting Developer in Residence | PSF paid Python developers += 2
• Neapolitan 24.2 release
• PGTune | Tune your postgres configuration parameters
• Django Issue - Improving contrib.auth | Detailed discussion of the options. Context: Historically (and currently, still) the Django documentation recommends using a custom user model. Lately, opinions on whether this recommendation is correct are starting to shift.
• Wagtail 6.0 release notes
• FRITTer - Frame-Rate IndependenT TimEr tRee | Really cool project!

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-05 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 5: January 29 to February 04 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins | Simon Willison

Videos

• Postgres Performance: From Slow to Pro with Elizabeth Christensen | Great talk!

Lectures

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics | Ah, didn't know there was a website!

Podcasts

• New Podcast: Hidden Figures of Python | Welcome!
• UUID vs Bigint Battle!!! (Scaling PostgreSQL) | Except when forced to use client generated IDs, I use bigint.

Out of Context Images

A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit entered a clinic to donate blood.

The nurse asked the rabbit: "What's your blood type?"

"I'm probably a Type 0", said the rabbit. --via George Takei

Normal work week. Too sick to do any programming related stuff besides work.

Articles

• Why not HTMX? | First good critical article about htmx I have seen. Yes, you have to be careful with adding hx attributes to div elements (breaking a11y etc), but I disagree with web components being the solution, because how to do hx-sync with web components?

Books

• Beej's Guide to Networking Concepts | With source code in Python!

Software

• django-zen-queries - Gives you control over which parts of your code are allowed to run queries, and which aren't

Mastodon

• My people! What’s a recipe you cook semi regularly that’s really simple but is has no business being that delicious (given the amount of time/effort it takes)?
• Conni kann das alles nicht mehr

Podcasts

• Bruno Preisendörfer: Sokrates (Das philosophische Radio)| Didn't know about this "not" vs "nothing" thing, nice!
• #408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Brr, I'm not interested in Lex human side at all, but Tal is cool.
• #369: The Readability Episode (Python Bytes) | Dunno why I listen to that show less often, lately
• Folge #80 Ist die NATO-Osterweiterung Schuld an Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine? (Sicherheitshalber) | I am still short of good resources on this topic, but this episode helped my understanding quite a bit.
• The Old Parser (core.py) | Great! Wow about this access stuff...
• Mastodon with Eugen Rochko (Software Engineering Daily) | Really good episode
• The website of the Bildungstrinken podcast is down, but if you are only interested in the audio content, you can still find it here. We did a kind of nostalgic drinking session while trying to listen to the first episode.

I take my hat off to Jörg Meyer. If your cocktail recipes are printed on ice cubes packaging, you've probably made it.

The Web is the set of digital networked technologies that work to increase user agency. --Robin Berjon

Busy work week in between projects. Didn't have time to do much besides just that.

Attended the 50th Django Cologne Meetup and mini sprint which was great. Thanks to Ronny and Sarah for organizing this event and the other Sarah and Thibaud for their interesting talk and the discussion about the future of Django roadmap.

Articles

• On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
• A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) | Yep
• The long sleep of capitalism's watchdogs
• Informal roadmap & retrospective workshops for Django | Discussion about a roadmap for Django on the forum
• Fünfzehn Jahre Trinklaune. Let’s call it a day. | It was a good time, thanks!

Video

• HTMX: Die perfekte UI-Technologie?! // deutsch | I don't know why I've been watching more videos that I completely disagree with lately. Maybe YouTube's recommendation engine has found my weak spots and is starting to take advantage of them? Jedenfalls macht sich hier Golo ordentlich zum Horst (just to be able to find the reference later).

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 3: January 15 to January 21 | Johannes

Mastodon

• Want to see something cool? Here it is: it’s a Scroll-Driven View Transition.

Books

• Tidy First?

Software

• bundlejs a quick npm package size checker
• Mastodon cleanup scripts

Podcasts

• An Exceptional Episode (core.py)
• Datasette, LLMs, and Django - Simon Willison | Great episode
• Daniel Kehlmann über Kant: Vordenker universalistischer Moral (Sein und Streit) | Really good episode!
• Soziale Energie - Was treibt uns als Gesellschaft an? (Hörsaal) | Great talk by Hartmut Rosa - interesting to see him acknowledge that mainstream economics doesn't agree with the otherwise popular view that capitalism only shines when there's growth and acceleration (I tend to side with economics here).

Out of Context Images

career Verb /kəˈri(ə)r/

> careers, plural;

> 1. Move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction

> - the car careered across the road and went through a hedge

Normal work week. Prefetching all the data needed to render a list of posts using Wagtail for django-cast was harder than expected. A lot of streamfield blocks end up making database queries. Template tags like pageurl or slugurl generate database queries. Custom templates overriding some behavior in some django-cast provided template blocks are issuing database queries. But I think I found most of them by now. And there is some good news: Prefetching the data actually improves performance a bit. And without hitting the database, the rendering time is about 3ms per Wagtail page (about 300ms for a feed with 100 posts), which is probably ok.

Articles

• How a Cheese Goes Extinct | Yummy
• Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac (12 Jan 2024) | As much as I like Apple devices, there's some point here
• Harrison Handbook in Python pt 1
• HTMX and Web Components: a Perfect Match | Yup
• SQLALchemy vs Django ORM
• They're Made out of Meat | Not exactly an article, but whatever
• REPL Python programming and debugging with IPython

Books

• Boost Your Django DX update out now | Great book!

Videos

• Hosting and DevOps for Django with Benjamin "Zags" Zagorsky | Ok, I think this is the first time I saw a technical talk and thought: Well, for each suggestion I would recommend to do exactly the opposite. I don't mean to say it's a bad talk (ok, maybe a little bit, because choosing multiple interdependent single points of failure instead of one seems just batshit crazy to me). But it's pretty much orthogonal to my views on this topic. So maybe it's interesting?
• The Cost Of JavaScript - 2023 | Very good

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 2: January 08 to January 14 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat | Simon Willison

Mastodon

• what subgenre of image is this | applied dialectics?
• Someone did some data scraping to determine the most discussed books of 2023 on Hacker News, and it's every bit as depressing a list as you think it will be

Software

• Firefly III - A free and open source personal finance manager
• What PWA Can Do Today
• Puput is a powerful and simple Django app to manage a blog | Another blog engine on top of Wagtail, maybe I can steal some ideas 😸
• Mealie reached 1.0! | Congratulations 🥳
• Hammerspoon - This is a tool for powerful automation of macOS | I don't know Lua, but chatGPT does 😅
• django-imagefield - Heavily based on django-versatileimagefield, but with a few important differences | I use a setting very similar to IMAGEFIELD_FORMATS for django-cast 😬

Podcasts

• Imports, frozen modules, Python news (core.py) | Oh yes, now I need a reason to abuse the import system
• Frame Evaluation (core.py) | Also good!
• WR1560 Juniorprofessuren, Bauern, Nichtlineare Phillipskurven (WRINT Wirtschaftskunde)