Notes for week 17 of 2021

Spring is officially in full bloom since that’s what my magnolia is doing. I got properly sucked into the Graveyard project. This got reinforced by two events:

• I started a Discord for discussing some of the features. When I posted about its existence on its long-forgotten Facebook page, around twenty people joined in the next few hours, posting memes like this:

Some old communities never die ;)

• While I am trying to fly low, I got some outreaches and I started having some work conversations. That got me thinking that my next work job may start earlier than I’ve been planning and put me into a proper “ohshitohshitbutIalsowanttofinishthisfirst” panic mode

I told myself May is where I’ll start paying for the infrastructure and set up a proper production version. Let’s see how that goes.

Django & MySQL

• I spent nontrivial time ruminating over more complex join queries. The real savior is the FilteredRelation object
• Running migrations when deploying to Heroku is simple, just adding release: python manage.py process_tasks to Profile
• My 0000-00-00 00:00:00 adventures continue. Turns out for some columns, I need a manual migration to ALTER TABLE table MODIFY date_column DATETIME NOT NULL; this gets rid of the annoying default, but of course needs a data migration first

Random

• I’ve walked 25 km and rode 73 km. I’ve been active for 11 hours during 13 activities. This week’s max speed was 54.4 km/h.
• I had no idea that Joseph Pulitzer of the Pulitzer price is a founding father of yellow page/tabloid journalism. You know, the thing the prize is against. He event send the US into a war over it. Tells you something about the power of propaganda and legacy management.
• I was really surprised by few dozens of people joining my Discord the same evening I announced it. Old communities don’t die :)
• I have to say, GitHub matrixes are really nice
• I discovered the CSS filter property. Especially when used with icons, it allows a lot of very nice subtle touches. Especially useful with dark mode CSS
• Spend some time working on Paver which I neglected for a long while. The source of my procrastination was the need to move completely to Python 3, which is nontrivial amount of work on this project. But it sparks joy, it is kind of a Zen gardening

Recommended Readings From This Week

• The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet: This is just a hell of a story. And I am not sure why it makes me emotional, but it does ;)
• The Infinite Loop That Wasn’t: A Holy Grail Bug Story: A very dedicated bug hunt. Computers are such a weird thing. A story of an invalid memory, a memory bus and a DMA interrupt. And Hello Kitty
• Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I.: Your GDPR money at work (maybe)
• Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse?: This is just such a weird story
• Models of Generics and Metaprogramming: Go, Rust, Swift, D and More: The best overview/explanation of generics I’ve read
• Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source: Various options for oss social contract evolution
• Crisis Leadership: Lessons learned from the Office virus crisis
• Committed Engagement and the Critical Importance of Ambiguity: “Keep this in mind: Your mind flinches away from ambiguity. But you can learn to notice, and counter-flinch.”
• Conducting Difficult Interviews or Conversations: Guidance on interview behavior
• Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster: Another free service fails as a victim to the cryptocurrency attacks.
• The Self Educating Child: An attempt to replace classrooms with video
• Even Classical Music Is Getting Faster These Days: Well, as they say: “Come on, inner peace, I don’t have the whole day”
• The Rule of Three – Andrew Brookins: I am only a casual practitioner, but it feels like a good rule of thumb
• Opting your Website out of Google’s FLoC Network: Good guide
• Environmental sustainability at GitHub: This looks surprisingly thorough