Family

The mowing season has officially kicked off. I mowed our yard for the first time this year on the highest setting because our grass seemed to have grown a foot in a week in several places since I fertilized it last weekend. I also trimmed and removed leaves and branches from the yard. I was rewarded by a late afternoon migraine, but lucked out and only lasted for a few hours.

I finally broke out my miter saw and portable workbench and made room for it in the garage. As I fixed one of the beams that held up the front porch, I realized the water damage was much worse than I thought. It was only held up by one beam, so I’m glad I didn’t put off fixing it any longer. The new support is now fixed, primed, and ready for some wood filler in the holes with a fresh coat of paint to be applied.

My son was an excellent helper this weekend, spending most of Sunday following me around and helping. We also went to a Lawrence fixture Cotton’s Hardware store to get some grass seed, windshield wiper fluid, and a replacement garden hose.

My daughter discovered a new Batman cartoon and spent Sunday shouting, “I am the night” and “I am Batman” as well as any two-year-old can.

Work

It was a busy work week, juggling two client projects. We had a client demo and then a design handoff, in which we now have to turn a static PHP website into a fully working Django website.

Community

Django Code of Conduct WG: I spent more time than expected this week helping with this. We were down to just me, and now we have at least three, soon four, and soon more people to help out.

Django Packages was accepted as a Djangonaut Space project, so I spent time preparing for some June deadlines.

Trailhawks: I met with my running club’s new President, and we discussed some changes to help get everything ready for the new 2024 racing season.

DEFNA: I walked the board through the conference budget, what to look for, and how to know how we are doing.

Conference Chats: We had our monthly Wednesday night meetup.

Office Hours: I hosted a Friday session.

Side projects

Django News Newsletter: We shipped issue #227.

Django News Jobs: I refactored some of my django-fsm states with a few different workflows to automate importing jobs via the aggregator.

Writing

I wrote and published every day.

2024-04-14: 🧱 Dear Tech Companies: Two-year-old edition 

2024-04-13: 🙋 How often do you use Django’s startproject and startapp? 

2024-04-12: 📅 Office Hours on April 19th 

2024-04-11: 📌 On leaving Pinboard, aka Raindrop, is better 🤷 

2024-04-10: 🐛 Production bugs happen to everyone 

2024-04-09: 📋 Copy All Urls browser extension 

2024-04-08: 🐳 Docker and OrbStack disk cleanup notes 

“Me” time

I spent a night deep diving on Simon’s Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus article, which meant registering a paid Claude account, paying for API access, and spending $0.50 to try everything out.

The results were better than expected, but the AI bar is still pretty low. It helped write tests and some light refactors, but it’s mostly a copy-and-paste-to-refactor tool vs. a write-out working code tool.

Entertainment

📺 Fallout is excellent and worthy of all the praise.

📺 X-Men ‘97 is a nostalgic ’90s throwback cartoon. If I hadn’t watched this series as a teenager, I’m not sure I would have liked it as an adult.

🎮 Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons - Sacred Reunion: My son and I picked up the DLC and started playing this weekend. The game is fun but only has five levels, which is a bit short. We can beat it in one session, which is nice, but the DLC improves on the original with a survival mode, which we liked a lot.

Next week

More work. More house projects. More office hours. More community projects. Figure out my PyCon US plans.