Dropbox recently wrote about dropping code sharing between iOS and Android, moving to using each platform’s native language instead.

By writing code in a non-standard fashion, we took on overhead that we would have not had to worry about had we stayed with the widely used platform defaults

Don’t underestimate the costs of doing your own thing.

The Apple TV Siri Remote (~£59)

Ships with the Apple TV 4K (~£199).

Has a “Touch surface” that can be both too easy and too hard to trigger, which gets super fun when navigating menus.

Has IR TV volume control but no standby control, so you still need the TV remote.

Do you know what your full dependency graph looks like?

I built Emporium to get a better idea.

Emporium looks at libraries on the Python Packaging Index (PyPI), and analyses their dependencies.

For some libraries, that’s quite a small set - many have no dependencies at all, or a tiny handful at most.

The Starfish Principle comes from a story told in various forms, inspired by Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower.

Versions seem to appear and disappear around the internet, so I’m republishing part of an old piece by Joel Barker so I have something stable to link to.

Most of my Raspberry Pis run headless, with no screen. So the image I keep around is Raspbian Lite. It’s half the size of the “full” Raspbian-with-Desktop image, it has everything I usually want, and very little that I don’t.

But sometimes I find I want a GUI.

I don’t want to have to keep the full image around and re-image my Pi. Nor do I want to have to manually install the various components of a desktop environment.

I do want a single command that just “gives me a GUI”.

I really like Django. Django is fast, featureful, secure, scalable, and versatile. It works well with a variety of workflows, approaches, tools, platforms, and libraries.

But sometimes you can have too much choice.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with Django, and supporting other users via IRC in #django on Freenode. In that time I’ve seen a lot of the same questions come up again and again.

Django doesn’t provide official answers to many of these questions, and I don’t think it should - its versatility is one of its strengths. Here are my answers though - all of which are broad and given without knowing exactly what you’re doing - they’re not universally correct, but in the absence of knowing better, if you’re facing an unclear choice, then they should provide some clarity.

Good luck!

I moved this blog from WordPress.com to Octopress in 2013.

Moving from a “blog service” to a static site generator has been great:

• Hosting static content is pretty easy
• It’s backed by git, so I get all the benefits that brings: history, branches, diffs, etc.
• Security-wise, the attack surface is much smaller - the production site is just static HTML/CSS/JS, so there are entire classes of vulnerabilities and threats that I don’t have to worry about

However, it’s possibly come with a little complacency - I looked back recently to find I’d not actually updated the framework itself since my very first commit ~6 years ago. Slightly embarrassing (as someone who regularly talks about the benefits and importance of regular incremental updates) but not exactly surprising: “the cobbler’s children have the worst shoes” after all…

I like a lot of light at my desk. It gives a better picture when I’m on video calls, and I think the light increase helps my mood too.

Now, I’m a bit of a lighting Philistine. I have friends who definitely have Opinions about colour temperature and brightness, whereas I grab a pack of cheap LED bulbs from Amazon whenever I need some and as long as they vaguely match what I have already then it’s fine for me - but I figured I’d just make a stab at something on my own, and then get feedback afterwards from people who know better. So here’s what I’ve got:

Last year I wrote “My 2017”, inspired by Always Improve, Never Stop, Never Pause, Never Appreciate: things I did; not necessarily “achievements”, but happy and/or notable things.

I’m glad I did, so I’m doing it again. So, in no particular order:

As per last year, some things I read in 2018, with some brief opinions/recommendations.

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.