It warmed up this week, and we started our mornings out in the 30s and ended them in the 60s and even 70s all week. Our neighbors started putting their furniture back out on their porches, which is a local sign that winter is almost over.

Family

We found a small gas leak in our >100-year-old house and hired someone to fix it. If you ever smell gas, friends, please call and have it fixed as soon as possible.

I have been working with my son every day on his basketball skills. He missed his first game Saturday because of a stomach bug but bounced back enough Sunday to join me at the gym to practice. He went from zero dribbling skills to leading the team in dribbling drills, which he is pretty proud of.

My youngest child is firmly in the three to four-word sentence phase. My other half returned to work this week after being off for a procedure.

Work

I started a new client project this week, which involved spinning up a new green field project, taking a bunch of CSV files, and importing millions of records. The goal is to use Django, HTMX, and a lot of neat tech to build a vast parts catalog.

Community

We met to discuss our DjangoCon US website options as we try to figure out what we want in a new platform. We had a follow-up meeting about our Health and Safety policies, and I also had a meeting to help onboard someone to assist with our automation projects.

I joined the Conference Chats meetup this week and spent a few hours discussing conferences with other community organizers.

I joined two Wiggle Work events this week over lunch with the same group that had been writing this month.

I hosted Office Hours again this week.

Side Projects

I spent most of my side project time on Django News, Django News Jobs, and Django Packages.

Django News Jobs: I fixed several bugs, styled some message notifications, and refactored how various job status states work. We have different workflows for when a human submits a job versus jobs we collect from RSS feeds, APIs, or scraped. Most of these jobs are collected but have yet to be displayed. They should start seeing the light of day once I get a better handle on a moderation queue.

Django Packages: The website now runs on Django 5.0 thanks to Maksudul Haque. I merged in several rounds of dependency updates and pre-commit updates.

Django News Newsletter: We shipped issue #220. I worked on our secret backend project, which helps us collect news and makes updating the newsletter easier. I migrated our Tweet model to a Drafts model and dusted off some code that would post via the Typefully API.

All three projects received security updates, and I created a new blog app called the Changelog, which we’ll slowly roll out over the next few weeks or months. That should help us blog about project updates and release and share thoughts.

I started using the uv project to shave a minute or more off local updates and some Docker rebuilds. I’m trying it out for a week and then rolling it out.

“Me” time

I finished True Detective: Season 4: Night Country

I watched the first two seasons of Resident Alien

I watched two Kansas Basketball games and a bunch of random games.

I wrote seven blog posts, part of my goal to blog daily in February with the Wiggle Work Discord community I’m part of.

2024-02-24: Fetch the contents of a URL with Django service 

2024-02-23: Three years later, email is less of a pain

2024-02-22: Scratching Itches with Python and ChatGPT 

2024-02-21: Using Chamber with Django and managing environment variables 

2024-02-20: Transferred - django-rq-email-backend found a new home 

2024-02-19: 🥷 Django Ninja 

2024-02-18: My 2024 Development Setup 

Next week

I’ll finally take down those Christmas lights. I must repair rot damage on the front porch and our back steps. It’s almost time to start reseeding our yard and removing the extra sticks that have accumulated over the winter.