Today I Learned

Short TIL posts

1834 posts latest post 2026-04-18
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 20 posts

I’m trying to level up my sre game. I’m trying to set up grafana dashboards for everything and it is such a wide surface area. It’s never just one thing you have to have 3 or more things hooked together in order for the data to flow.

I’m really getting not invented here vibes, and thoughts that I can just build this myself. Not grafana and it’s scalability necessarily, but small components of observability.

I’m trying to learn proper logs, monitoring, otel, and grafana. Today I imported a bunch of pre-made k8s dashboards and made a few of my own for specific apps, and it made me want to know how I can turn my own custom dashboards into infrastructure as code. Turns out grafana makes it pretty easy to do this, if you have the grafana dashboard sidecar running. It will pick up any ConfigMap with the grafana_dashboard label and import it.

Go to Dashboards -> Pick a Dashboard -> Export -> JSON.

Steve is such a great listen, the neurospicy 🌶️ rambles this episode goes on is so relatable. I feel like I really missed out on some great takes on intellij vs neovim, but got some really great knowledge about vector db’s, embedding, text compression, similarities to vector algegra like infinite craft.

Just popped open infinitecraft and I’ve definitely played this with my kids before, super fun, just could not remember the name of this one. I do remember an android one as well that is alchemist or something like that, which we have also played a lot.

This episode really got me thinking about the difference between HA and DR and my approach to each one. They talk about it from the perspective of a cach cow kind of app rather than a homelab or internal tooling, but think of HA as 9’s how many 9s are we willing to pay for, tink of DR as dollars how many dollars will we loose during the period of recovery. So much more in the episode, a lot of talk around cloud vendors and what they give you vs a purpose build platform with HA and DR in mind.

I’ve been using ruff to lint my python code for quite awhile now, I was pretty early to jump on it after release. Some of my projects have had a nice force-single-line setting and some have not. I dug into the docs and it was not clear what I needed to make it work.

[tool.ruff] select = ['I'] # you probably want others as well [tool.ruff.isort] force-single-line = true

Turns out I was missing Isort in the select list.

Astral is doing great things in the python industry. They are disrupting entire categories of tools with extremely fast, easy to use, and feature rich alternatives that make it really hard to keep using the incumbent. So far I am seeing no signs of evil, sometimes with such a disrupter there is some sort of downside that make it hard to want to do the switch. In the interview they even mention things like leaning on lsp so that it works across all editors rather than building out vscode integrations that work for most developers. As a neovim user I greatly apreciate this.

ty, has a playground running at types.ruff.rs. You can edit code in there and see what the type checker results would be in browser. This looks good, excited to see it running in my lsp.

Here is an example where a Optional may not be defined.

Checking for existance before using it resolves the issue.

I was looking back at my analytics page today and wondered what were my posts about back at the beginning. My blog is managed by markata so I looked at a few ways you could pull those posts up. Turns out it’s pretty simple to do, use the markata map with a filter.

from markata import Markata m.map('title, slug, date', filter='date.year==2016', sort='date')

Result #

[ ('⭐ jupyterlab jupyterlab',...

...

Astral is working on some great things around python, they have created a high standard for python tooling built on rust that works really well, runs fast and covers everything in the space it resides in. ty appears to be their linter coming soon.

This is madness that Wes Bos made this with manifold.js and no openscad! Yes, I have these stupid brackets everywhere, yes, I hand model my own brackets. No I don’t do it enough. I don’t like that these model generators like openscad cannot make fillets and chamfers, but I appreciate the heck out of the speed and automation you can make iterations of things.

Link to the promo video. https://bsky.app/profile/wesbos.com/post/3lo4h7unk6s2i

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

Interesting how confidently he says we can easily go to the top. really makes you wonder what we the normies are leaving on the table by using these general purpose models and what could be achieved with really tuned in models. Could I make an automatic blog tagger more accurately, maybe smaller, maybe tuned so well it runs fine on cpu?