Reading well written, idiomatic code is the best way to improve your code. Linked is a nice example.

Linked is a great analysis of what might have gone wrong to cause the crowdstrike global outage of windows computers. Also software engineering and operations techniques and principles which could have avoided the terrible event.

Linked is a service that generates quite respectable short promotional videos. I tried it on the syllabus to my course and it created something fairly amazing. I mean it’s still obviously ai generated. After your amazement subsides you may still not want to use it but it’s worth checking out. Maybe if you have to generate many short videos. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Follow the link below: I’ve been looking for a nicely packaged way to try llms locally, that is without using a cloud based service and without uploading my pi to another company. This tool is a good solution to the problem.

The attached article is a nice introduction to the auth0 service and tooling. Definity worth considering for your app. Authentication is a tricky thing to implement, and that’s before worrying about perfect security. The one thing that I am a little shaky on is relying on a paid service for authentication. What if I lose connectivity to the service or my credit card expires?

See attached info about RYE. Ok so I complain that python has so many different package managers, virtual environment mechanisms, dependency managers, and so on. Much to my chagrin, I recently read something saying, “whatever you do, don’t use poetry”.

Rye But, but, but… rye looks really nice from the linked description. I’m just a little hesitant to lock myself to rye and find myself in 6 months having to do something totally different.

By the way I happen to be a happy user of rbenv (@ Ruby environment manager) so my default is pyenv, which works the same way exactly. Not sure if they are from the same person, but they are basically identical.

Attached is a link to a macOS app Ui for Jupyter notebook. Looking at the screen shots (maybe they’re mockups, I can’t tell) it looks super useful and nice!

Another overview of the - too many - package managers.

Another python “improvement” by providing a Rustlang implementation of a python thing. My thought: “if we keep going down this path, python will become no more than a rustlang preprocessor”😊

A quick glance at this taught me a few useful things from the inscrutable, confusing, and still irreplaceable powerful world of CSS.

Attached is a long article about a single, but useful reminder: you can use ssh to execute remote commands.

While I am on the topic of coding apps for kids, here's another useful list I found.

I was looking for an idea for an educational game for a 7 year old. I came across this article (attached) which has some good links.

Attached is an elegant new product (at least its prerelease documentation) to “publish a book” to the web. I believe it will be a single license software product that you get to deploy to a server, including a cloud server. There are of course numerous ways of doing this but 37signals.com’s stuff is always excellent and beautiful.

Linked is a package for creating user interfaces with Python. This is just a reminder to myself that it exists. It looks useful.

Flourish is a pretty amazing tool. Can’t wait to try it myself. Just click on the links and try it out.

Attached is a really useful tool. Episodes.fm simply searches “all” podcasts, like a google for podcasts. It is really fast!

I agree. But you know what I really want? A bash code generator. I want to have a tool that lets me create vanilla bash scripts from a higher level language. I’ve come to the conclusion that vanilla bash is in the end the cross platform lingua franca for all kinds of sysadmin type chores and that there’s an art to writing complicated shell scripts. They work great with prompting, defaults, error handling and recovery. But they are a real pain to write, and that they turn out long and complicated and obscure. To paraphrase Philippe Kahn (there’s a really old callout) bash is a write-only language!

phillipe_kahn

The attached article severely dings the “python in excel” feature that was announced to great fanfare about a year ago. For me the headline is that Python in Excel is NOT a replacement for VBA. Rather it’s better to think of it as a replacement for the excel formula language.

The linked article goes in depth about ruff. Everyone loves ruff. Ruff is written in rust. Everyone loves rust. I think that last part is weird. Rust is a cool and interesting language but it is also pretty low level. Sure, for the user, rust programs tend to be very fast. But for the programmer, it’s more work and harder than… pick your language - python, ruby, java, swift… I mean why aren’t we all asking for programs written in c or assembly even? Anyway, I digress.