Hope everyone out there is having a fun and spooky October. I’m enjoying the cool weather, but could do without the sun glaring in my eyes. Soon enough, I’ll be complaining how it feels like there is never any sun. It’s a never-ending cycle here in the Great White North. Let’s jump into some links.
1. Optimizing Django Docker Builds with Astral’s uv (12 minutes)
Astral’s uv tool is great for making life as a Python developer a little less painful.
It’s also great at making development with Docker take less time.
Rob Hudson talks about some of the ways you can better utilized uv in your Docker setup.
Being able to separate out dev/prod dependencies is so nice for slimming down image sizes.
I was also intrigued by his use of caching between builds.
I’ll have to borrow a few of these ideas.
2. Just Enough Automation (6 minutes)
I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about this article, but it did stick with me. Zach talks about the concept of “Just Enough Automation” to measure whether automation provides enough value to justify. He also goes through the pros and cons of automating a task vs executing it manually. Part of me thinks that automating a task builds a deeper understanding of the problem space than manual toil ever will. It’s a great article and definitely made me stop and think.
3. Learning Is Slower Than You Think — And That’s the Point (14 minutes)
Nisheeth Vishnoi takes us through his ideas when it comes to using AI to remove the difficulties that come with learning. While AI is great for getting up to speed on topics quickly, what’s the cost of removing all that friction? Are we building true intelligence by having the machine walk us through concepts? While I do think tech can be useful, we also have to make sure we make time to slow down. Life is suffering, and no amount of AI is going to relieve that.
4. Everything I know about good API design (23 minutes)
If you are new to building API’s, this article is a great place to start. Sean Goedecke outlines some principles on API design while also tying in its relationship with the product. He covers rate limiting, pagination and even touches on the importance of idempotency for writes. If there’s one thing you should always have in your head, it’s “WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE”. I also appreciated his honest take on GraphQL.
This is a story from John Calhoun about almost getting fired during his early days at Apple. He decides to leave a few T.S. Eliot lines in code as an Easter Egg, which ends up jeopardizing the entire operating system release. Copyright issues are a big deal when you operate at the level Apple does. We all make mistakes in our careers; it’s humanizing to hear the stories of others. Hopefully ours will be less costly.
6. The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes (7 minutes)
Nathan Sobo is the CEO and co-founder of zed and built the Atom text editor. His article talks about the importance of craftsmanship when it fully utilizing AI. I love this position. If you are interested, he links to Zed’s Agentic Engineering which features guest speakers talking about their experience. There are already some impressive talks by Jessie Frazelle, Steve Yegge, and Mitchell Hashimoto.