Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game that lets you live out such fantasies as:

- Having money

- Making close friends as an adult

- Travelling the world without crippling debt

- Being able to change the world

- Getting better at something with practice

- Getting 8 hours of sleep each night --Dgar

Normal work week. Attended the PyDDF Python Spring Sprint which was great. I had to stop working on django-cast in January and used the Sprint to finally catch up. It's now possible to fetch all the data needed to render a list of pages (example: the feed) in one go and then pass that data to Wagtail, which then renders the pages without hitting the database. This opens up a lot of possibilities for performance improvements. The original plan was to work on a transcript feature, but this is fine too 😅. Adding transcripts is the next big feature on the list.

Mid-week I stumbled across this Mastodon post that forced me to indulge in some Vietnam travel nostalgia. I Went to an opera performance which was also great. And we released a new podcast episode about freelancing. Oh, and I managed to patch my favorite terminal font MonoLisa with some nerd font symbols because I finally started using Neovim again via LazyVim. Hmm, quite a busy week.

Articles

• STF invests in reimplementing GNU coreutils in Rust | This is surprisingly useful spent tax money, congrats!
• On pip isolation
• From Beeps to Toots: Reviving Pagers with Python and Mastodon
• Making wagtail.org more accessible | Results of an a11y audit
• How to spend less time writing Django tests | Using kolo to generate integration tests. Hmm, I for one actually enjoy writing tests 🤔
• The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Videos

• Is UV the FUTURE of Python PACKAGING? 🐍📦 | It depends 😄 - good video!

Software

• wger - Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout, nutrition and weight tracker written with Django
• djangosaml2 - A Django application that builds a Fully Compliant SAML2 Service Provider on top of PySAML2 library | Got some updates lately
• LazyVim is a Neovim setup powered by 💤 lazy.nvim to make it easy to customize and extend your config | Nice excuse to start playing around with neovim again
• Warp is the terminal reimagined | Shiny new terminal 🖥️
• tox-uv is a tox plugin which replaces virtualenv and pip with uv in your tox environments

Papers

• Mamba: Linear-lime Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces | Alternative architecture

Podcasts

• Cameron Jones & Sean Trott: Understanding, Grounding, and Reference in LLMs (The Gradient Podcast) | Interesting bits on how to test LLMs for theory of mind etc
• Episode 193: Wes McKinney on Improving the Data Stack & Composable Systems (The Real Python Podcast) | Cool episode!