Ephes Blog

I learned all my HTML<br>
From a code camp held yearly in hell<br>
We started on `<s>`<br>
Then striked through the rest<br>
Now I have a career in DevRel --Heydon Pickering

Published a new podcast episode discussing Python 3.13. I’ve been using Jupyter notebooks to generate transcripts for the episodes and have started consolidating that workflow into a dedicated Python command-line application.

Articles

• The br element
• return in finally considered harmful
• Three Django wishes
• Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac

Books

• Boost Your Django DX updated again | Cool! Great book!

Software

• Recraft V3. Recraft are a generative AI design tool startup based out of London who released their v3 model a few weeks ago | It does SVG, too
• Mesa: Agent-based modeling in Python

Out of Context Images

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH --Endless Screaming

This is fine 🔥.

In other news, I attended the PyDDF autumn sprint! After putting off the transcripts feature for django-cast for quite some time, I finally started working on it. You can already see some transcript functionality in the web player on my podcast website. There’s still plenty to do, but at least it’s underway now.

Articles

• The button element
• HTML link, or button, that is the question
• Don't return named tuples in new APIs
• Der Prototype Fund geht weiter – und wie! | Great news!
• My IndieWeb Journey
• We've moved to Hetzner
• Ten simple rules for writing a technical book

Videos

• When and how to start coding with kids [PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2024]
• I bought a freeze dryer so you don't have to

Software

• Optuna: A hyperparameter optimization framework
• Beacon v0.1 and the Future | CMS for elixir
• dsd-flyio - A plugin for deploying Django projects to Fly.io, using django-simple-deploy
• Rails 8.0: No PaaS Required | Rails seems do do quite well

Fediverse

• The VERDAD prompts are pretty complex - Rajiv shared this example of a conversation he had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet to further iterate on the existing prompt

Out of Context Images

By age 35, your 500-foot burial pyramid should already be 80% complete. --batkaren

I’ve implemented some performance improvements on my podcast page and published an article about them: “TIL: Podlove Web Player Performance Improvements.” Additionally, I released a new version of django-cast that incorporates the new podlove-player web component and offers official support for Wagtail 6.3.

Articles

• How Google is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – And Why | Revival of the web ring or blogroll?
• Text fragments allow linking directly to a specific portion of text in a web document | I cannot believe I didn't know about that 😳
• The body element | Organ donor

Software

• llm-whisper-api | Might come in handy for processing podcast transcripts..
• Form validation styling | Nice to know how to do this
• Level up your image accessibility and dashboards with Wagtail 6.3 | 6.3 released 🥳
• xml2invoice | Might gonna need this in 2025 - receipts is also great!

Books

• Flexible Typesetting | Now free!

Fediverse

• Whenever I think I might be coming around to Python typing, I end up stumbling across something like this. | 🧵
• In a world where everyone does most internetting on their phones, how are PDFs still a thing? | I find myself asking this question repeatedly. And why do people use office software—which is intended for printing—when they never plan to print anything and just send me their junk via email? Why?

Weeknotes

• W̶e̶e̶k̶n̶o̶t̶e̶s̶ Monthnotes for October | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 43: October 21 to October 27 | Johannes

Videos

• Fixing Latent Unsound Abstract Operators in the eBPF Verifier of the Linux Kernel Santosh Nagarakatte @ SAS 2024, Rutgers University | eBPF is soo cool!
• Midjourney Editor | Nice

Out of Context Images

From Facebook .....

I just learned the professional way to say "I told you so":

"This was identified early on as a likely outcome." --Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD

Last week, I wrote a lot of Playwright end-to-end tests, and I really appreciate how easy it is these days to copy a snippet of HTML from a website and simply ask an LLM, 'How do I click the submit button?' or 'How can I select option "x" with Playwright?' It quickly generates a working line of code that I can drop straight into my test.

Articles

• SQL/JSON is here! (kinda “Waiting for Pg 17”) | Waiting is over 😏
• Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS
• Building a Bootstrap styled form in vanilla Django
• Initial explorations of Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability

Videos

• Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo | Impressive!

Fediverse

• "Writing the Worst Datalog Ever in 26loc"

Software

• A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C

Out of Context Images

ACAB includes Paw Patrol. --Prof Kemi FG

I attended the local Django Meetup in Cologne and listened to an interesting talk about Hyperview, which is based on React Native. It's probably more of an early adopter thing at the moment, but the idea is really intriguing.

I published a podcast episode about arrays and sequences , which had probably the longest gap between recording and publishing we've ever had—but I just wasn't able to do it earlier. We revisit the first chapters of Fluent Python because, why not? This book is really good.

On the infrastructure side, I updated all my databases to PostgreSQL 17 and found my old post about upgrading PostgreSQL still helpful. I'm also using uv now in production deployments, and it works really great. This uv thing looks like it will simplify a lot of workflows for me—yay for that!

Then I attended SUBSCRIBE 11, a podcasting-related conference. The conference was great, the weather was superb, and I talked to a lot of people about podcast publishing software. I even accidentally held a workshop about pods-blitz, a great new podcast publishing software written in Rust by Ulrich Dürholz. Here's a cool list of all the podcasts whose hosts attended.

Articles

• 🤖 I released files-to-claude-xml and new development workflows
• Solving the Maker-Taker problem | Well, maybe not completely solved..
• The blockquote element
• Scroll-driven animated card stack with scroll snap events
• AI Mathematical Olympiad - Progress Prize 2 | Kind of wild that there's an AI competition for problems that hard. Seemed impossible a few years ago.
• DSF initiatives I'd like to see | by Carlton Gibson
• Building an automatically updating live blog in Django
• Us | Webcomic definitely not about me.
• Unlocking the Power of JSON Patch | I've been storing a lot of data in JSON fields lately—this might come in handy.

Videos

• Live coding music with PyREPL in Python 3.13 — Łukasz Langa
• Around the wwworld: Web MIDI, Web AUDIO and what the web does best

Fediverse

• "That was a lot faster" | Webcomic
• Thread about SQL and the Django ORM..
• I have to re-figure out how to include an editable dependency with #uv every time I need it for local development.
• Big new draft update to PEP 750, which has now been renamed "Template Strings".
• This is really neat from Terence Eden: you can use text-wrap: balance for icons as well as text..