“People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.” Jacob Kaplan-Moss - I have done & seen this too. Worth it, when you pick the right job.

Interesting introduction to ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter via Simon Willison

I’ve used all of these deployment patterns (really release patterns), and strongly prefer feature flagging everything with a layer of permission for user-facing changes as well.

“Where are the networks that deeply in their bones understand hospitality vs. performance, safe-to vs. safe-from, double-edged visibility, thresholds vs. hearths, gifts vs. barter, bystanders vs. safety-builders, even something as foundational as power differentials? I don’t think we have them, except piecemeal and by chance, or through the grace of socially gifted moderators and community leads who patch bad product design with their own EQ."

Good post on why speed matters although it completely misses any discussion of quality, which is critical. It’s all about balance, not just prioritising for speed.

Summary of a paper covering the past, present, and potential future of tech debt.

Interesting thoughts on monitoring (logs, metrics, traces).

Good intro to using Vulture with Django.

Deep dive into tech debt and the financial debt analogy (good for people not that familiar with finance, or, probably, people familiar with finance but not tech).

Speaking of Ben Hoyt, another post with more details on good naming.

My thoughts on Pythonic library API design in response to Ben Hoyt’s post a few weeks back. More on the stdlib email package when I find time.

Good list of lessons learnt in software engineering.

“1966! … Yet this person seemingly knew more about software development in 1966 than most managers of software product development companies do today. These are not new ideas, and sometimes it baffles me that they are not more widely known”. So true, and so sad.

My first experiments with using an LLM to help write code - TL;DR: disappointed so far.

Stamina looks great - an opinionated wrapper over Tenacity [via Simon Willison, who is for some reason still linking to Tweets?]

Good suggestions on processes to follow when making technical decisions - documenting the entire process of coming to a decision really has so many benefits.

Explanation of how to best serve various sizes/qualities of images. Is it wrong that I hate how complex this is?

The suggestion for handling streak recovery here is exactly what Knotwords (an excellent game) does, and it works really well.

I’ve broken streaks from unexpected busyness, ill health, or simple forgetfulness but have recovered them and it’s still motivating to continue.

Good tips on designing Pythonic library APIs from Ben Hoyt.

This is a sadly familiar story of chaos in product development. While the remedies are good things to do, I’m not convinced they address the core issue.

The analogy is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but this IKEA Oriented Development post has some good suggestions.

Nice post that explains how to use PyParsing and Q objects in Django to build a search DSL (for example, GitHub’s where you can do “is:open reviewer:tonyandrewmeyer” and so on). [h/t Simon Willison]

Good coverage of pre-fetch and select related in Django.

Great post on using Latin abbreviations, especially cf - I do this too much, which I think originates from my time in education, where it’s an expected style.