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Sep 2026 | 28 posts

The week ofFeb 26 – Mar 3, 2024

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I came across uv from astral-sh, and it’s packed with great features and ideas. An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.

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I came across aerial.nvim from stevearc, and it’s packed with great features and ideas. Neovim plugin for a code outline window

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I’m really excited about cadwyn, an amazing project by zmievsa. It’s worth exploring! Production-ready community-driven modern Stripe-like API versioning in FastAPI

The week ofFeb 12 – Feb 18, 2024

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The week ofFeb 5 – Feb 11, 2024

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Textualize has done a fantastic job with toolong. Highly recommend taking a look. A terminal application to view, tail, merge, and search log files (plus JSONL).

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The week ofJan 29 – Feb 4, 2024

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2.5 Admins 180: Email 777 – 2.5 Admins 2.5admins.com How do you pronounce URL, is it U.R.L or Earle? I’m about 50/50, mostly when I am in a hurry I use Earle as it is one syllable and easy to say. I picked this up from MPJ of fun fun function, who took over Dev Tips. In this episide Jim uses Earle and they make fun of him. If it’s good enough for Jim, I am done with my 50/50 and I’m going all in on Earle. Episode also included a fastinating corrdinated attack that used Ars Technica profile photos communicate directions for the next attack via query parameters in the image url.

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This really makes me want to try Dolphin Mixtral with ollama now. It looks very impressive from this video. The ability to keep adding features before becoming confused is though with a lot of these llms. Being chat based, this is not a co pilot replacement. I was really hoping for an in line co pilot like tool that I can run locally. I have not used co pilot yet, but I have had great luck with codeium.

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Great take on low code. I have definitely felt the pressure of being presented low code options, “look it does almost everything you need, and you can do it without code.” Granted there are tons of great low code environments that serve their markets well (things like zapier). As pointed out here when they fall short rather than being hard, it goes to nearly impossible. As Theo points out here many applications follow an 80/20 rule. 80% of the app is really easy to put together, and takes about 20% of the time, probably less. What no code does is it takes that 80% that is already easy, makes it even easier ( pitches it as faster whether or not that is true), and makes the last 20% of the project impossibly hard to create and maintain, so you just should have picked a tool that had the capability of doing the whole thing from the start anyways.

The week ofJan 22 – Jan 28, 2024

Featured this weekWriting

poc is not product

A poc is not a product. I started focais, not in a rush, but as something that I already had a POC for and thought it would be easy. I wanted to build tools to make creating blog posts like this one easier. I stared with a tool that takes screenshots of websites. POC (proof of concept) For the poc, I made a single fastapi endpoint that takes a url and returns a screenshot of the page. It converts the url into a key that I can lookup to see if I have the shot, if I don’t I go get it. With the open source libraries out there, this is not too hard of a task. Progress Thus Far /shot But this wasn’t enough All it does so far for this first tool is take screenshots of websites, and give you a hosted image. Users To bring in users, I need to create a signup flow, with a database to store users, login, logout, and email recovery. I’ve never had to use an email service before that wasn’t already mandated by a company or an iternal smtp server. After some searching I chose resend for email. Prog…

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I’ve heard prime say just give it the one eyed fighting kirby so many times, and execute it few times, and there is no way to find it online, so this will be the link that I will come to, when I need to remember what @theprimeagen means when he says Give it the one eyed fighting kirby. So what is this? This is a vim substitute comand to replace text in the buffer. the one eyed fighting kirby is a regex capture group to capture everything between matches, and assign it a value to place back in after the match. substitute in a nutshell, More examples Here is a contrived example of text. Now for some reason I want to switch all of the words here and there. I can do that with three capture groups, \1 is here, \2 is everything between, \3 is there. Just give it the one eyed fighting kirby ~Prime still struggling I thought this explaination from phind was good and more verbose than mine. describe this vim substitute regex:%s/(here)(.)(there)/\3\2\1 ANSWER | PHIND V9 MODEL The given Vim substitute regex:%s/(here)(.)(there)/\3\2\1 performs the following operation: %s initiates the substitute command. The percent sign % indicates that the operation should be performed across the entire file…

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GitHub - charmbracelet/mods: AI on the command line AI on the command line. Contribute to charmbracelet/mods development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com This is a pretty sweet interface into llms. I used it a bit with my son tonight while he was asking me for datapack ideas. You can continue the conversation with a You can pass it some data

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GitHub - charmbracelet/mods: AI on the command line AI on the command line. Contribute to charmbracelet/mods development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com This is a pretty sweet interface into llms. I used it a bit with my son tonight while he was asking me for datapack ideas. You can continue the conversation with a

The week ofJan 8 – Jan 14, 2024

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Read a Range of Data - LIMIT and OFFSET - SQLModel SQLModel, SQL databases in Python, designed for simplicity, compatibility, and robustness. sqlmodel.tiangolo.com Today I was running some sqlmodel queries through the sqlalchemy orm. Admittedly I’ve not done enough orm queries before, and I’ve done quite a bit of raw sql. I was trying to get objects from two separate models that had relationships setup. It is incredibly slow, and gives me the following warning. What I learned from the SQLModel docs is that you should give it a join to correct this and go much faster.

The week ofDec 25 – Dec 31, 2023

Featured this weekWriting

So after months of fighting with gf not going to template files, I finally decided to put in some effort to make it work.

This was the dumbest keybind in my config, that I copied from someone else without understanding it.

What I am trying to do #

I have jinja templates in a directory called templates. I want to bind gf to open a template file, but it is trying to open a new file ./base.html

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% if request.state.user %}
    {% block title %}Fokais - {{ request.state.user.full_name }} {% endblock %}
{% else %}
    {% block title %}Fokais {% endblock %}
{% endif %}
{% block content %}
    {% if request.state.user %}
        <h1 id="title"
            class="inline-block mx-auto text-5xl font-black leading-loose
            text-transparent bg-clip-text bg-gradient-to-r from-red-600
            via-pink-500 to-yellow-400 ring-red-500 text-shadow-xl
            text-shadow-zinc-950 ring-5">
            {{ request.state.user.full_name }}
        </h1>
    {% endif %}
    {% include "me_partial.html" %}
{% endblock %}

What did not work #

I tried all sorts of changes to my path, but it still didn’t work.

vim.api.nvim_command("set path+=templates/**")

What I found #

after digging into my keymap I found that I had remaped gf to edit years ago. This works great if the file is in your current directory, and if it’s not it makes the file. This bind completely breaks vim’s ability to :find files and was a terrible keybind that I added probably from someone else years ago and have literally never used this feature. If gf opens an empty file I always close it and assume that vim failed to :find the file.

-- Allow gf to open non-existent files
set("", "gf", ":edit <cfile><CR>")

Yes, after that fix I still needed to adjust my path #

I ended up with the following in my options.lua.

-- look for jinja templates in the templates directory
vim.opt.path:append("templates/**")

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Template Designer Documentation — Jinja Documentation (3.1.x) jinja.palletsprojects.com html code generated by my jinja templates generally look half garbage because of indents and whitespace all over the place. I just learned about these pesky Whitespace Control characters that can get rid of the whitespace added from templating. You can also strip whitespace in templates by hand. If you add a minus sign (-) to the start or end of a block (e.g. a For tag), a comment, or a variable expression, the whitespaces before or after that block will be removed:

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Intro - Minecraft Server on Docker (Java Edition) Documentation for Minecraft Server on Docker docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io I just learned that if you can exec into the container running minecraft with the itzg/minecraft container you can run to get command access to the server. You need to set the if you want to access rcon remotely, but if you have not already done this and have access to the server you can just run when you are in.

The week ofDec 18 – Dec 24, 2023

Featured this weekWriting

thoughts on unit tests

Theo’s response puts a lot of my feelings about unit testing into words. Many of us have grown up in this world preaching unit testing. We often hear these statements “Everything must be unit tested, tests make code more maintainable.” In reality when we are not writing complex low level code unit tests are probably the wrong approach. We Finally Agree On Unit Tests - YouTube!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbU-PKukdMw Dec 22, 2023 Most of us are assemblers So much of software engineering is assembling existing well tested code. Crud applications, UI, Data Pipelines, building on top of battle tested code. Manufacturing Analogy - Unit Testing This kind of reminds me of Manufacturing. Individual components are QA tested with tests that look more like unit test. Parts like bearings, pistons, shafts, valves, they are all tested against sophisticated statistics of sample measurements. This is quite similar to unit testing. You see measuring the individual sizes of these components does not…
5 min read

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Theo’s response puts a lot of my feelings about unit testing into words. It’s crazy how cargo culty it becomes that the echo chamber of twitter can bring in beliefs that we think we believe, but have not experienced enough or put enough thought in to form our own opinion. This video made me think so much that it turned into it’s own blog post Thoughts on Unit Testing

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The week ofDec 11 – Dec 17, 2023

Featured this weekWriting

Authentication from cli tools can be a bit of a bear, and I have to look it up every time. This is my reference guide for future me to remember how to easily do it.

I set up a fastapi server running on port 8000, it uses a basic auth with waylonwalker as the username and asdf as the password. The server follows along with what comes out of the docs. I have it setup to take basic auth, form username and password, or a bearer token for authentication.

curl #

The og of command line url tools.

# basic auth
curl -u 'waylonwalker:asdf' -X POST localhost:8000/token
# basic auth with password prompt
curl -u 'waylonwalker' -X POST localhost:8000/token
# token
curl -H 'Authorization: bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg' -X POST localhost:8000/token

wget #

My go to if I want the result to go into a file.

# basic auth
wget -q -O - --auth-no-challenge --http-user=waylonwalker --http-password=asdf --post-data '' localhost:8000/token

# token
wget -q -O - --header="Authorization: bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg" -O - --post-data '' localhost:8000/token

httpx #

An http client written in python, primarilty used with the python api, but has a nice cli.

# install
python3 -m pip install httpx

# basic auth
httpx -m POST --auth waylonwalker asdf http://localhost:8000/token

# basic auth with password prompt
httpx -m POST --auth waylonwalker - http://localhost:8000/token

# token
httpx -m POST --headers="Authorization" "bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg" http://localhost:8000/token

httpie #

A modern http client written in python.

# install
python3 -m pip install httpie

# basic auth
http POST localhost:8000/token -a waylonwalker:asdf

# basic auth with password prompt
http POST localhost:8000/token -a waylonwalker

# token
http POST localhost:8000/token -A bearer -a eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg

httpie with plugin #

# install
python3 -m pip install httpie-credential-store
# usage
http POST localhost:8000/token -A creds

httpie prompt #

http-prompt comes from the httpie org, and has an interactive cli interface into apis. You can even specify a spec file to autocomplete on api methods.

http-prompt localhost:8000 --auth waylonwalker:asdf --spec openapi.json

Writing

I am working on fokais.com’s signup page, and I want to hide the form input during an htmx request. I was seeing some issues where I was able to prevent spamming the submit button, but was still able to get one extra hit on it.

It also felt like nothing was happening while sending the email to the user for verification. Now I get the form to disappear and a spinner to show during the request.

HTML #

Let’s start off with the form. It uses htmx to submit a post request to the post_request route. Note that there is a spinner in the post_request with the htmx-indicator class.

The intent is to hide the spinner until the request is running, and hide all of the form input during the request.

<form
  id="signup-form"
  hx-swap-oob="outerHTML"
  class="m-4 mx-auto mb-6 flex w-80 flex-col rounded-lg b p-4 shadow-xlc shadow-cyan-500/10"
  method="POST"
  action="{{ url_for('post_signup') }}"
  hx-post="{{ url_for('post_signup') }}"
>

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <input
    class="mx-8 mt-6 mb-4 border border-black bg-zinc-900 p-1 text-center focus:bg-zinc-800"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    type="text"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    value="{{ full_name }}"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    name="full_name"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    placeholder="Full Name"
  />

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% if full_name_error %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <label class="-mt-6 mb-6 mx-8 text-red-500 p-1 text-center">

<!--markata-attribution-->
    {{ full_name_error }}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  </label>

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% endif %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <input
    class="mx-8 mb-4 border border-black bg-zinc-900 p-1 text-center focus:bg-zinc-800"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    type="text"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    value="{{ username }}"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    name="username"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    placeholder="username"
  />

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% if username_error %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <label class="-mt-6 mb-6 mx-8 text-red-500 p-1 text-center">

<!--markata-attribution-->
    {{ username_error }}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  </label>

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% endif %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <input
    class="mx-8 mb-4 border border-black bg-zinc-900 p-1 text-center focus:bg-zinc-800"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    type="email"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    name="email"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    value="{{ email }}"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    placeholder="email"
  />

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% if email_error %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <label class="-mt-6 mb-6 mx-8 text-red-500 p-1 text-center">

<!--markata-attribution-->
    {{ email_error }}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  </label>

<!--markata-attribution-->
  {% endif %}

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <input
    class="mx-auto w-32 mb-4 border border-black bg-purple-900 p-1 text-center focus:bg-zinc-800"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    type="submit"

<!--markata-attribution-->
    value="sign up"
  />

<!--markata-attribution-->
  <div role="status" class="mx-auto htmx-indicator">

<!--markata-attribution-->
    <svg

<!--markata-attribution-->
      class="mx-auto animate-spin h-5 w-5 text-white"

<!--markata-attribution-->
      xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

<!--markata-attribution-->
      fill="none"

<!--markata-attribution-->
      viewBox="0 0 24 24"
    >

<!--markata-attribution-->
      <circle

<!--markata-attribution-->
        class="opacity-25"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        cx="12"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        cy="12"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        r="10"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        stroke="currentColor"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        stroke-width="4"
      ></circle>

<!--markata-attribution-->
      <path

<!--markata-attribution-->
        class="opacity-75"

<!--markata-attribution-->
        fill="currentColor"
        d="M4 12a8 8 0 018-8V0C5.373 0 0 5.373 0 12h4zm2 5.291A7.962 7.962 0 014 12H0c0 3.042 1.135 5.824 3 7.938l3-2.647z"
      ></path>

<!--markata-attribution-->
    </svg>

<!--markata-attribution-->
    <p>Signing up...</p>

<!--markata-attribution-->
  </div>

<!--markata-attribution-->
</form>

Yes this is styled using tailwindcss.

https://waylonwalker.com/still-loving-tailwind/

CSS #

Let’s take a look at how we achieve switching between only spinner an only form inputs using css.

.htmx-indicator {
  @apply hidden;
  opacity: 0;
  transition: opacity 500ms ease-in;
}
.htmx-request button,
.htmx-request input[type="submit"],
.htmx-request input,
.htmx-request label {
  @apply hidden;
}
.htmx-request .htmx-indicator {
  opacity: 1;
  @apply block;
}
.htmx-request.htmx-indicator {
  opacity: 1;
  @apply block;
}

Final Result #

Here is the final result of me signing up for a new account in fokais.

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Check out ddqa by DataDog. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential. Datadog’s QA manager for releases of GitHub repositories

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I like cross-rs’s project cross. “Zero setup” cross compilation and “cross testing” of Rust crates

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If you’re into interesting projects, don’t miss out on pyapp, created by ofek. Runtime installer for Python applications

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Looking for inspiration? llmware by llmware-ai. Unified framework for building enterprise RAG pipelines with small, specialized models

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Handling Errors - FastAPI FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production fastapi.tiangolo.com This page shows how to customize your fastapi errors. I found this very useful to setup common templates so that I can return the same 404’s both programatically and by default, so it all looks the same to the end user.

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logs with FastAPI and Uvicorn · Issue #1508 · fastapi/fastapi Hello, Thanks for FastAPI, easy to use in my Python projects! However, I have an issue with logs. In my Python project, I use: app = FastAPI() uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8000) And when... GitHub · github.com Setting an additional log handler to the uvicorn logger for access logs in fastapi was not straightforward, but This post was very helpful.

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waylon walker (@_WaylonWalker) on X Bloggers where do you put your markdown? X (formerly Twitter) · twitter.com Most bloggers on my twitter blog right into a file that goes on git. I kinda expected to have more database folk. I have my blog in markdown on git and the editing experience is top notch. I can just find files edit them in MY EDITOR, push them and I got a post. I am running thoughts in a sqlite database with a fastapi backend, and holy crap the instant nature of posting feels so much better. Both sides have good points.

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Show some equivalent list comprehensions in filter examples · Issue #1068 · pallets/jinja I'm willing to write a pull-request for this, but I just want to see what people think before I write it. So the issue is this. I'm very familiar with python. I'm new to Jinja2. Often I find myself... GitHub · github.com I often want to reach for non existing list comprehensions in jinja 2, Here are a few nice equivalents.

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GitHub - DataDog/ddqa: Datadog's QA manager for releases of GitHub repositories Datadog's QA manager for releases of GitHub repositories - DataDog/ddqa GitHub · github.com DataDog ddqa is building out a textual app and deploying it with pyapp. They have CI setup to fully build and cross compile their textual tui into github releases that you can just download from their releases page. This is something I am looking at for markata. This would be pretty sweet to be able to make it just work on places like windows. It would also be interesting to try to build a full desktop app with pyapp.

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Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) on X Hear me out. X (formerly Twitter) · twitter.com I’m going to give this trick a shot on my sites, and see how I like it. Down in the comments @adamwathan goes on to say. Basically every layout overflow bug ever boils down to some flex or grid child needing min-width: 0 😄 Oh and @ryanflorence also says in the comments. I … do this.

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External Link tushar.lol Nice message by @tusharsadhwani. Write it down. You had to dig deeper than face value at something. Write it down. You had to combine multiple pages of docs. Write it down. Someting was simply not obvious to you at first and it took someone else to give you that ah ha moment. Write it down. You had a small discovery that had a marginal impact on your day. Write it down. A blog does not have to be a Blog, it can be small meaningful posts. There are absolutely no rules. If you think you are going to end up with too many posts, that is a solvable problem, make a search, curate your favorite posts, make multiple feeds. At the end of the day. Write it down. This post itself is a thought, the smallest component to my blogging strategy. Write it down.

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Path Operation Advanced Configuration - FastAPI FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production fastapi.tiangolo.com From the Docs trailing slash I’ve had better luck just routing both naked and trailing slash routes in fastapi. I’ve had api’s deployed as a subroute to a site rather than a subdomain, and the automatic redirect betweens them tended to always get messed up. This is pretty easy fix for the pain is causes just give vim a yyp, and if you don’t want deuplicates in your docs, ignore one. favicon.ico Now you do not need to deploy favicons to your api in any way, it is nice to have it in your browser tab, but more importantly to me I hate having console errors that are meaningless, this gives the browser something to automatically grab and not log errors.

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Protect API docs behind authentication? · Issue #364 · fastapi/fastapi Basic Question Does FastAPI provide a method for implementing authentication middleware or similar on the docs themselves (e.g. to protect access to /docs and /redoc)? Additional context My company... GitHub · github.com You can protect your fastapi docs behind auth so that not only can certain roles not run certain routes, but they cannot even see the docs at all. This way no one that shouldn’t be poking around can even discover routes they shouldn’t be using. Here is the soluteion provided by @kennylajara