A.k.a: Mastodon, Twitter, “engagement”, and designing against addiction The other day, former Twitter designer Jon Bell wrote this thread on the Fediverse, in which he lays out lessons learned from his time at Twitter, lessons that he thinks and hopes Mastodon and Fediverse generally will learn from. I think it’s worth engaging with seriously, but I also …
2020 has been rough, and I’ve been mostly focused on just staying afloat, emotionally and personally. But one thing I’ve enjoyed is seeing more folks get involved in bread baking, in particular, sourdough baking. Here, I share some of my techniques for baking sourdough.
A friend asked me about this recently, so I thought I’d write up what I do. First, use Pytest. It is good. It is your friend. It makes running tests a dee-lite. The builtin Django test runner is fine, but I much prefer writing and configuring Pytest. Next: where do I put my tests? I’ve …
OK, OK, we all know this, right? This is why we have database migrations, because our models (for me, this roughly means “database-persisted instances of some kind of in-memory object”, but you can interpret it more widely if that’s useful for you) change through time. We didn’t know we needed to track whether a Frobble …
Superb yarring tonight: We’re on a long Gold Hoarders voyage, and we have a ship full of loot. Last stop is a riddle at Devil’s Ridge, which we’ve avoided because we saw a sloop parked there and we wanted to avoid trouble, for the now. But there’s nothing for it, we wanna wrap up this …
OK so. Sea of Thieves is great emergent fun generally, but today was non-stop. Here’s the story. So, it’s a cartoon pirate game, right? They’ve done a lot of work to make it engaging, interesting, and relatively free of griefing (as free as an open world PvPish thing can be, I think). But it’s also …
Or, what to do about HTTP 202 Sometimes, we write code that takes a while to run. Whether that’s because of a big linear optimization problem (it could take minutes!) or because of external HTTP calls (it could take seconds!), it would increase the latency of our HTTP responses unacceptably, and so we have to …
I’ve been struggling to write this next piece because I feel like I don’t actually know how to do this. But I’ll write what I do know, and I hope that it helps you! There are two kinds of themes I’ve written for Sphinx: themes for HTML output and themes for PDF output. I understand …
I’m thinking about *hospitality*, and social media. Every social media site I’ve used (and services more broadly, really) encodes certain notions of hospitality. When you post something, you are inviting certain people into your space, based on the site you’re using and who can see it and the ways they can interact with it or …
Let’s say you want to build your docs in different formats. I already alluded to html versus dirhtml, but the distinction between those is relatively small; it’s just a matter of directory structure. What if I want to build my docs as PDFs or ePubs or something else? Well, Sphinx can do it. By default, …
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