This year will be harder than last year. It will, however, be easier than next year. --Enver Hoxha’s message to Albania in 1967

🏖️ Still on vacation. Bugfix release for django-cast, because sometimes the wrong gallery component element was found. Speaking of django-cast - the feed rendering performance has been deteriorating for a long time and I didn't notice it because of the caching in production. I'm taking this as an opportunity to systematically improve performance, which means I'll add tests that fail when the number of queries of performance-relevant views increases. This probably means I'll have to dig a little deeper into Wagtail's code base, because ideally I'd like to be able to render pages simply by passing the required data directly as an argument to the .serve method. This would be nice because I could then isolate all the data fetching stuff in one function call and maybe even optimize the sql by hand. Lets find out if this is feasible 🤯.

Wow, didn't expect the.tox directory for django-cast to be this big:

$ du -ch .tox | tail -1

21G total

Articles

• Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 | Nice overview
• How Pinterest scaled to 11 million users with only 6 engineers
• My Real-World Match / Case | Nice!
• PostgreSQL: Full text search with the “websearch” syntax | Hmm, have to steal this for django-cast
• SIMD in Pure Python | Hahaha, ok - this is crazy stuff!
• No Downtime Deployments with Gunicorn | Ok, merely changing restarted with reloaded in my ansible playbook did not do the trick - I'll have to revisit this...
• The Castro podcast app and its website are down | Well, I was aware of the rumors and switched back to Apple Podcasts in November, but this is really sad. And now I have to resist the urge to build my own podcast player 😱.

Video

• Modern editing experience for your Django models with Wagtail 🐦 with Sage Abdullah | Good overview!

Software

• Django CMS 4 Release! | Have to try it out, yet!
• Spectre.css is a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework
• transcribee 🐝 aims to make the workflow for media transcription easier, faster and more accessible | Ah, cool project!

Podcasts

• Understand Django - Matt Layman (Django Chat) | Good episode