Agents and Agency
There’s a lot of talk about the capabilities of AI Agents, and a lot of promise on the things that they may be able to achieve. Or not achieve. As well as a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of skepticism, where not direct rejection. The term of AI Agent is still a bit in flux, but it refers to a program that runs independently with a particular goal and it’s capable of taking actions. The instructions to it are either specific to be done right now (for example: “Go to this… Read More
Python Automation Cookbook for only $5!
There’s currently a Christmas offer in Packt website when you can get all ebooks for just $5 or 5€. It’s a great opportunity to get the second edition of the Python Automation Cookbook and improve your Python skills for this new year! Also available, of course, is Hands-On for Microservices with Python, for people interesting in learning about Docker, Kubernetes, and how to migrate Monolithic services into Microservices structure. A great opportunity to increase your tech library!
Still working from home after all those years
We are all experts in working from home now, right? Since March 2020 we’ve been stuck in this strange situation where time has stopped and we are working regularly from home, at least almost everyone in the software industry. Because we were already a bit ahead of the curve. I was seeing more and more remote work since at least a few years before. The first time that I had any meaningful remote work was around 2005. Back then, I was working as a consultant and I had regular meetings with customers… Read More
A Django project template for a RESTful Application using Docker
I used what I learn and some decisions to create a template for new projects. Part of software development is mainly plumbing. Laying bricks together and connecting parts so the important bits of software can be accessing. That’s a pretty important part of the work, but it can be quite tedious and frustrating. This is somehow a very personal work. I am using my own opinionated ideas for it, but I’ll explain the thought process behind them. Part of the idea is to add to the discussion on how a containerised Django… Read More
Compendium of Wondrous Links vol XI
It has been a while since the last time. More food for though! Python Python 3 upgrade strategy. The time has come to take migrating to python 3 seriously. Another addition to Python-to-c++ compilers, in a similar way to Cython: Pythran. I tested it with code from my recent post $7.11 in four prices and the Decimal type, revisited and it worked quite well, though it’s arguably a very simple test. Speed was quite good, better than Cython, actually. Powering the Python PyPI. These people deserve a lot of credit. PyPI is really important… Read More
Do not spawn processes on users requests
I’ve been playing recently an online game that has recently launched, that uses the following idea. When a user starts a match, it spawns a process in the server that acts as the opponent, generating the actions against the user. The game had a rough launch, with a lot of problems due it being played by a lot of people. And, IMHO, a lot of the problems can be traced to that idea. I see it’s a seductive one. If a user generates an interaction with the service that takes time (for example, a match for… Read More
Future as a developer and the ever changing picture
A few weeks ago I came by a couple of articles my Marco Arment that share the theme of the current status of accelerated change within the development community as a way of stressing up, and being difficult to be up to date. After all, one gets tired of learning a new framework or language every size months. It gets to a point where is not funny or interesting anymore. It seems like two different options are presented, that are available for developers after some time: Keep up, meaning that you adopt rapidly each new… Read More
The amazing forgiveness of software
One of the things I like most about developing software is the fact that you can recover from most mistakes with very few long term impact. Bugs are unavoidable, and most of the people involved on programming deeply understands that is something we all live with. So, there’s no hard feelings, once you find a bug, you fix it and immediately move on. Not only no one thinks that you’re a bad developer because you write bugs, but typically the impact of a bug is not that problematic. Yes, there are some bugs that are just… Read More
Wrong Side of Memphis 