Weeknotes (2023 week 5)

A long time has passed since I tried writing week notes. Oh well, here we go again. No committment here, just hope.

Podcasts

Really got into listening to podcasts in the last few weeks. That’s new for me, I never enjoyed listening to people talk when I could also listen to music. So, that’s interesting.

Podcasts I like a lot: The Ezra Klein Show, Django Chat and some others where I haven’t yet listened enough to list them here.

Advent of Code

I knew that Advent of Code existed quite long already but I never dug into it. I participated in the 2022 Advent of Code and enjoyed it a lot. I have long been unsecure regarding my programming skills since I do not have a formal CS background so it felt really good to be able to solve many problems with only a little help. Definitely not all of them though. It definitely was fun and I’m still working through other years a bit. Python is the most fun, JavaScript is sometimes nice. Rust gives me a hard time (or I’m giving myself a hard time) but the upside is that solving even easy puzzles feels very rewarding.

Open Source

This week I released new versions of feincms3 and django-tree-queries, only patch releases. I didn’t do that much open source work in the last weeks or months; it really depends a lot on the work I’m doing during the day at Feinheit. The activity in the open source project space is mostly always higher when I’m starting many small new projects and not so much when working on big old projects.

Django 4.2a1 has been released, and the main branch of Django will be the upcoming 5.0 release which will break backwards compatibility again. The minimum Python requirement has been bumped to Python 3.10, which caused and still causes some work in updating the CI job lists. Good to see that the world is moving forward here.

As an aside, I always try deploying the last and best version of Django in my current projects, but since one of our servers is still using Ubuntu 18.04 with an old PostgreSQL version I cannot even use Django 4.1 with many projects. That makes me sad but maybe the sadness will bring with it the energy to finally move to containers or something which makes it easier to jump to new versions. We’ll see. It’s not really an issue most of the time so maybe it still isn’t worth it even though I feel like our hosting strategy is stuck in 2010.

Machine Learning

I did some playing around with Dall-E and ChatGPT (as everyone seems to do). I had a few interesting discussions with people re. if predicting the next word will lead to Artificial General Intelligence (I don’t think so).

What was fun about it was that I got to throw a hack together with asyncio respectively uvicorn and Starlette. The Starlette source code is a breath of fresh air. It’s so beautiful to read and I just love how much it does with a minimal amount of code.