@alextomkins@fosstodon.org
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alextomkins

@alextomkins@fosstodon.org

Co-founder and Technical Director at a not-for-profit digital agency. A developer with an interest in Python, Django and Terraform.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

AWS Application Load Balancers can finally go IPv6 only!

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/05/application-load-balancer-ipv6-internet-clients/

Now, if AWS could get CloudFront to connect to IPv6 origins (especially IPv6 only origins), then hopefully a huge number of accounts could free up IPv4 addresses.

anze3db, to random
@anze3db@fosstodon.org avatar

Signups for https://flakytest.dev have almost completely stopped and only 3 out of the 180 signups configured the pytest plugin and successfully submitted test results to process.

None of those 3 users ever returned after that so I continue to be the only active user 🥲

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db It's possibly a bit of a niche use case - software teams that develop in Python, using pytest as a test runner, with enough flaky tests to bother them in a way that they haven't just dedicated time to fixing it - but need a service to figure it out and manage it.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db One thing which did make me slightly interested though, is the potential ability to see test suite performance. Your name and branding is flakytest, but maybe a rename and focus on overall test speed/health/usefulness with flaky test silencing as the bonus add-on might have slightly more appeal (disclaimer - I value testing, but less so on additional paid services to show anything like coverage, etc - so these are random opinions of someone who is unlikely to pay for either service 😂).

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db To encourage adoption, you could also make it free for open source - but make the stats/analytics visible and public to anyone. That way it could also serve as a public demo, similar in a way to codecov/coveralls and other similar services. If you want private for your organisation, then sign up!

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

So Google was down earlier today! - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cho9gs/google_is_down/

I had a horrific 10 minutes of trying to use Bing for search results 😞

talkpython, to python
@talkpython@fosstodon.org avatar

Latest episode: Building GPT Actions with FastAPI and Pydantic with Ian Maurer & @mkennedy. Enjoy!

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/456/building-gpt-actions-with-fastapi-and-pydantic

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@talkpython @mkennedy This one confused me for a moment in my Podcast client - it's dated 22nd January?

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Getting ready for Minority Report at the Birmingham Rep

caleb, to random
@caleb@hachyderm.io avatar

I keep coming across more and more tools for Python written in Rust. This is happening in way that absolutely did not happen with C, or C++ (pybind is pretty good actually), or Go. In the past, when C was used it was exclusively for very specfiic situations, the less the better. This is not the case with the Rust tools. Very difficult to predict how the Python ecosystem changes in sympathy to this. Right now Python+Rust is looking increasingly symbiotic.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@caleb Part of me feels slightly unsure about it. At the moment I'm cautiously adding some of these tools to newer projects to see how it goes rather than updating everything.

Although, when the development flow speed boosts are so significant - it's hard to argue against.

carlton, to django
@carlton@fosstodon.org avatar

Oooh, new SQLite based on disk-cache, with backend. Definitely giving this a try out.

https://github.com/grantjenks/python-diskcache

Been happily using Redis for many a year, but SSDs are quick and cheap.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@carlton The timing of this is scary. Earlier I was thinking - I might try this in an upcoming project, now I'm thinking - this looks like a nicely licensed solution!

https://redis.com/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Me: why should I try this newfangled uv?

From the docs: "uv supports constraints, but also takes this concept further by allowing users to override the acceptable versions of a package across the dependency tree via overrides"

Me: oooh!

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Is anyone else finding reCAPTCHA not as effective as it used to be?

I know it's a bit of a lazy option (just add reCAPTCHA - that'll help stop the spam!), but historically it has been pretty good. Currently I'm seeing a lot of form submission spam coming through - even on sites where the reCAPTCHA security settings are set to the highest.

anze3db, to random
@anze3db@fosstodon.org avatar

I have submitted my talk titled “Django, SQLite, and Production” for @djangoconeurope! Just in time since the deadline is by the end of the day today 😅

If the talk gets accepted, I'll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of SQLite to better understand if it's a good fit for your production workload.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db The content outline is great - all the key points.

My only feedback would be that you need a more clickbait title. Don't hold back and be too neutral! 😂

"SQLite - your next production database?"

jacob, to random
@jacob@jacobian.org avatar

The thing I think that people need to realize about this spam campaign is that it's about the EASIEST and MOST TRIVIAL spam campaign to block, a CS 101 bayes filter, or any other 20-year-old anti-spam technique, would kill it in its tracks, and yet it's been more or less impossible to block. I can think of about a million ways to kick off a much more sophisticated spam attack that would absolutely bring the Fediverse to its knees.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@jacob I just hope it doesn't end up like email today though!

So far people have been encouraged to join smaller instances, or start their own. If Mastodon trends towards the same path, would larger servers act like Gmail/Hotmail and block smaller servers by default?

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

At Resorts World Arena - looking forward to seeing Bill Bailey!

webology, to random
@webology@mastodon.social avatar

Python Development on macOS Notes: pyenv and pyenv-virtualenvwrapper: https://micro.webology.dev/2024/02/10/python-development-on.html

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@webology Wish I new about the :latest syntax earlier 🤦‍♂️

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Today's fun(?) task - trying to get IPsec going between two servers, one running strongSwan, another running Libreswan.

...given up on Libreswan and retreating to WireGuard instead 🫠

(Still happy with strongSwan as a VPN endpoint, even if that was a bit of a pain to setup a while ago)

paulox, to django
@paulox@fosstodon.org avatar

I published my first article of 2024 🎉

It contains all my ideas for the informal session of the Django roadmap for 2024, proposed by the new DSF board member, Thibaud Colas @thibaudcolas 🚀

Thanks for the hint 🙏

https://www.paulox.net/2024/01/19/my-django-roadmap-ideas/

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@paulox If it's viable - a 👍 to a GeoDjango light mode.

I'm mostly comfortable with running GeoDjango, but getting an environment with the right GDAL/GEOS for a specific version of Django is a little bit tedious.

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

TIL that the UK Web Archive tries to archive various UK sites (similar to the Internet Archive) - https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/legal-deposit/uk-web-archive

Only noticed this when seeing an IP address sending quite a lot of requests (but not abusive!), and had a bl.uk URL in the User-Agent.

Rather amusingly, I had to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to view pages from the main UK Web Archive website - as they're still down from the cyber attack in 2023.

anze3db, to random
@anze3db@fosstodon.org avatar

I wrote a blog post about using SQLite in production and dealing with db is closed errors.

Hapy to hear your thoughts, especially since we still don't have a proper solution to the problem.

This error made me switch two of my projects from SQLite to Postgres, but now I think I might be able to switch them back!

https://blog.pecar.me/django-sqlite-dblock

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db I encountered this a while ago when I was doing Wagtail SQLite benchmarking: https://github.com/tomkins/wagtail-sqlite-benchmark/pull/6

Simon Charette has pretty much given you the same solution, but it's something you can easily add to an existing project now by extending the DATABASES ENGINE setting.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@anze3db And just as some general Django/SQLite feedback - stick with it, it's worth it.

By enabling BEGIN IMMEDIATE, you definitely have to be careful over your transactions. You can't have a 1 hour cron job sitting in the background with an open transaction - although it's something you probably shouldn't have in the first place.

The performance/simplicity of it easily outweighs the minor issues, which will hopefully be fixed/documented as more people use it rather than avoiding it!

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Thoughts on the Elgato Prompter after using it for a couple of weeks:

It's great to be able to speak to people directly. Nice as an easy all in one hardware solution, and having all the parts in the kit regardless of what camera you've got.

The only downside from me - DisplayLink. As a macOS user it's a weak experience, it's slightly laggy, and macOS thinks that I'm streaming the desktop and disables desktop notifications, argh!

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

It's nearly midnight - time for some savoury snacks!

...maybe I should've thought about this one sooner.

alextomkins, to random
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

Nearly time for ABBA!

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

A fantastic experience - highly recommended

jonikorpi, to random
@jonikorpi@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Having one of these days.

alextomkins,
@alextomkins@fosstodon.org avatar

@jonikorpi I must admit, sometimes for work I'll create a private fork of the repo to test GitHub Actions in my personal account.

Then once I open all the GitHub Actions changes in one PR and it works first time after many attempts in private - I like to imagine myself as some sort of wizard 🧙‍♂️

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