Roundup for week ending May 19th (plus one extra)

Authored on 2024-05-21

PyGrunn

I gave a talk about being a Python developer on a platform engineering team catering to Python developers.

Preparation

I rewrote the presentation completely twice. So uhhh yeah, if you are reading this, don't do this. Especially if it's you, Andrii. STOP. GO TO BED. NO, THE SLIDES ARE FINE.

Conference

Seeing as preparation took a lot of effort and cost me some nerves, the presentation itself went good, with only a single fumbled slide. I even managed to do time tracking really well, which I think is mostly due to the presenter mode in slidev. Powerful stuff that.

My talk was in the first slot, which also meant I could simply enjoy the rest of the conference. I thoroughly enjoyed two talks about LLMs:

• "LLM Benchmark System with LangChain" by Laurens Weijs in which he described how to measure bias in LLMs and henceforth benchmark it for use in Dutch government projects.

• "When LLMs work and when they don't" by Arjan Egges covered a simple use case (generating a crossword puzzle) where LLMs are great for some parts but are absolutely terrible for other. In the end he also showed different styles of organizing code, which brought me back to Clojure nostalgia. Oh Swiss Arrows, how I miss you... Ok not really, they look neat but if you don't touch code using them for a month you are in for a rough time.

Aside from that, the closing keynote by Sybren Stüvel about Blender and Python was quite a pleasant tour of the common struggles of Python applications (not the web kind, the desktop kind). Packaging, 3rd party code, extending and much more. Recommend a watch, whenever the video are up.

Aftermath

Conversations afterwards left me with lots of thoughts. Here are they in all their disorganized glory:

• It seems that KPN is not on Python employment radar, despite having a sizeable (300+) number of Python engineers
• Replaying cookiecutter templates is silly (but also not silly). I generally agree, but it's so hard to move people from established practices, even if they are bad. I am not sure how I can convince literal hundreds of people to break the bad habit. One person at a time I suppose?
• It is not clear when a platform team should exist. I am of strong belief a platform role should exist in any team with more than 2 people, but there's no clear cut off point.
• FastAPI doesn't seem to be a popular as I imagined it to be. Maybe it's just a local bias, but Django is still very much king when it comes to Python teams working on web projects.

mise

As mentioned two weeks ago I dipped my toes into mise (formerly rtx, based on asdf). These past two weeks I've managed to put a little bit more time into it and I have to say I like the interface. There isn't much beyond that really, as I'm slowly getting my .envrcs replaced by mise.tomls I guess I'll run into some interesting edge cases.

Hades

Ok this is not at all a technical topic, but boy am I having fun with Hades. In fact over the past two weeks I've put in a whopping 35 hours of play. Which quite frankly is not a positive boon to my less gamepad-driven projects (see above).