Weeknotes 2025-07-28 - Sentinel Values, IndieWeb Updates, and New Hardware

Are you fine (fucked up, insecure, needy, and emotional)? --amy tech (bones)

Building a Better Blogging Habit

I've been thinking about blogging more regularly, even if it's just quick "Today I Learned" posts whenever I discover a new approach to something. In our latest podcast episode, we discussed sentinel values in Python, and my Auto sentinel approach didn't go over well. We even received an email from a listener suggesting improvements, which got me thinking—this deserves a blog post. The takeaway? Avoid sentinel values unless you can't use None because it already has special meaning (like representing null in a database). I also wrote about handling editable installs with uv, since running uv pip install -e ../some-dependency followed by uv run pytest can cause issues when uv run internally calls uv sync. While I don't have a perfect solution yet, my current workaround might help others facing the same problem.

IndieWeb Integration and Community

This blog now supports webmentions thanks to the latest django-indieweb release. While implementing this feature, I also added proper microformat annotations, "continue reading" links, a profile photo, and a now page. Speaking of IndieWeb, I attended a local Homebrew Website Club meeting, which was fantastic. I discovered that my Bridgy connection between this blog and Mastodon was already functioning.

New Hardware and Language Switching Adventures

Concerned about Claude Code potentially becoming unavailable or prohibitively expensive, I decided to invest in hardware for running models locally. While open-weight models aren't quite at the level of commercial offerings yet, they're rapidly improving. I'm excited to start testing on my new 128GB M4 Mac Studio (the M3 Ultra looked tempting, but I couldn't justify the price). This might inspire me to update my awesome-devenv repository and share my software setup and new Mac configuration process. I'm considering Ansible for automation, though I'm not sure the effort is worthwhile for something I do so infrequently.

I also picked up a new keyboard that was only available in US layout, and now I'm battling decades of muscle memory just to type properly. Here's an amusing side effect: after switching to the US keyboard layout and setting English as the primary language on my Mac Studio, Siri on my Apple Watch suddenly forgot how to understand German. This definitely shouldn't happen—maybe it's Siri's way of protesting the change!

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