Tonight's challenge was to implement a contact form, that sent emails asynchronously, but didn't need a task queue or a second "worker" process. I managed to get there, but learned lots, which I'll briefly document here.
It has been a busy time recently - I've really found a groove to developing code and have been super productive with my AI friends and getting my tooling dialled in. I whipped up the SPF Generator app in just a few hours, and now I've finished some major features for DJ Press over the last couple of days.
I spent a few hours today creating a new app to help generate SPF records: SPF Generator. It's linked to in Utilities section.
Python 3.13 was released today, 8th October 2024 (NZ time). The only new feature that really interests me is the update REPL. I know that free-threaded Python is a big deal, but it's not something I need right now.
But still, I upgraded this site, and the DJ Press package, and everything appears to be working fine. To upgrade this site, I needed to change the following settings and files.
Tonight I wanted to get a local copy of Django set up and running, with the aim of taking some baby steps towards contributing to Django. I was expecting this to be much harder, but after following the steps outlined in the Django docs, but substituting in some uv commands, I was up and running and fully tested within about 5 minutes.
Here are the steps I followed, on my Mac...
After a bit of a hiatus and time off due to appendicitis and just being busy in general, I'm back with a Dev Notes post!
Earlier today, I watched Simon Willison's keynote from PyConUS, and found myself nodding in agreement at pretty much everything he said.
I've been making extensive use of my "AI friends" over the last few months, switching between Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity's AI search engine, Inflection AI's Pi, Microsoft's Copilot (both in Bing as well as extensively in VS Code with Github Copilot), and Anthropic's Claude.ai. I mention Anthropic last, because this is my new favourite! The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet is genuinely incredible and feels like it's a step ahead of the rest.
More documentation of the template tags. And during my documentation, I decided to change the Category model to be more consistent with the Post model. This required a migration change and a bunch of refactoring, so I bumped the version.
Started the long process of documenting everything I've done so far, starting with the template tags. There are 24 template tags so far, and I've now documented the first three!
Just did some minor tweaks on the styling on this site today. I really enjoy playing with modern CSS - it's so easy to make simple but complex (if that makes sense) changes. Also, having GitHub Copilot in VS Code makes this even easier. Now, when this site is viewed on mobile, there are no more overlapping elements that overflow into the margins.
Just a few minor updates this evening. HTMX v2 was released, so I updated this on the Bus Times app and on this blog. It was pretty straight-forward since the major breaking change related to the hx-on tag which I wasn't using anywhere.
I added a new utility to the site tonight: the Markdown editor I had created with Pyscript. This gave me some ideas about adding new Markdown extensions to the editor. But to make this work, I had to push an update to DJ Press to allow custom extension configs.
Refactored the pagination links today in DJ Press, and then added some new ones to give some more flexibility. I've always had a goal with this package to be able to create fairly complex templates without needing to understand the models or the context being sent by the views.
Pushed a new update to the DJ Press package tonight, with the two key features being pages and template hierarchy.
I caught up on the development I've done this week on DJ Press but running the Coverage reports and catching up on missing tests. I'm really enjoying testing at the moment - something we feels like a chore at first, becomes really satisfying when the testing improves the quality of the code too.
Continued work on the Pages support. Starting to look better, especially after I got the tests all working again. Now I have to go through the Coverage reports again and get the coverage back up to 100%.
More work on the pages tonight. I wanted to be able to create a menu of the pages somewhere on the page. So I first added a menu_order field to the Posts table, and then added some template tags to get the pages, sort them by menu_order first, and then by title second.
Tested it out and it all seemed to work OK, but more refactoring required.
First crack at static pages tonight. It's a bit rough around the edges but worked OK.
Not too happy with it right now, so will hold off committing code until I can figure it out. But so far I have:
{% page_link "about" outer="li" %}post_detail view to first look for a matching page before trying to get the post.OK, made some good progress tonight. Refactored the post and posts contexts for all the views, and then had to update the tests to match.
Then I had my first crack at implementing template hierarchy. Again, inspired by the old WordPress template files.
No coding today, but lots of thinking about the template tags.
I think I'm happy with the approach I settled on yesterday, but want to give it some more thought.