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Taking time off from formal employment to work on whatever I want. Which is open source projects entirely of my own choosing.

pydannyon Intel CEO Letter to Employees

Return to office so you can join zoom meetings!

pydannyon FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python

I like streamlit but found it if gets beyond a certain size it gets very hard to manage.

Also, because FastHTML is powered by starlette, it handles async really well. That means web sockets have been a trivial implementation.

pydannyon FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python

My impression having done Django for over 15 years is that FastHTML allows for separation of concerns, albeit not within templates. Rather, most of the "presentation layer" is executed during the return statement. A common pattern in people building non-tiny FastHTML projects is to break out presentation into a components layer and business logic into a business layer.

Often we see "components.py" for presentation and "content|logic|models.py" broken out for business logic. You can see this pattern done in my as-yet-DNS-switched blog here: https://github.com/pydanny/daniel-blog-fasthtml

Of course, it's still early in the project, it's going to be interesting to see what patterns emerge over time. :-)

pydannyon I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam Run by Fake Hosts on Airbnb (2019)

I'm in the UK now, specifically London. The owner of the flat doesn't live in the UK, works through a management company.

pydannyon I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam Run by Fake Hosts on Airbnb (2019)

I'm in London and would have loved to be able to talk directly to the owner of the property. I tried to do that, I really did. So would the building manager.

I only found out the place was being used as an AirBnB when I knocked on the door to tell them their flat was leaking water into the main corridor and a guest answered. The host (which claims to be a management company) does its best to dodge any kind of communications. Their rentals are mismanaged illegal stays in central London, which AirBnB doesn't seem to care about addressing.

My understanding is that our building has a number of AirBnB rentals. Since it's hard to get them out, building management doesn't worry about it unless it becomes a maintenance or noise problem. In this case, my "neighbour" is such a problem, so the pattern is to call in the authorities until something happens.

When I asked the building manager about contacting AirBnB, they laughed out loud.

pydannyon I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam Run by Fake Hosts on Airbnb (2019)

We had a similar thing with a malignant AirBnB host next to our living place. Plus issues with water leaks on their side. The host company and AirBnB made it clear their business was rentals, not taking care of the property or community on which they profit.

I used to be happy with AirBnB as an option when I travel, now it is my last resort if I can't find a hotel room.

pydannyon Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

At 40 I had a stalled career and an unfortunate marriage where we truly disliked reach other; I was extremely unhappy and bitter. I felt that I was stuck and wondered if this was my lot in life.

I stepped clear. I got divorced. I started over. The coding skills I had I re-applied to things I wanted to do. My ex moved on and found someone good for her.

In the years that followed I found the love of my life and had a beautiful daughter. Restarting was a great move for me.

But a lot of the bitterness and anger remained. I've been a total jerk at times. It took a long time to get over the frustrations caused by staying in my old place for so long. I found therapy and constructive outlets for myself, got over many of the dark feelings, and I believe I've become a better person for it.

My story is my own, not yours. However, what I can say is get yourself to a therapist. If you can change your life now, why not try to do so?

pydannyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)

Octopus Energy is a double unicorn hiring for many different roles on four continents. Our mission is selling renewable energy and other planet healing causes.

https://jobs.lever.co/octoenergy

pydannyon Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

Just discovered I can in theory use Youtube TV. The offer being submitted is to sign up for a year. So I stand corrected.

pydannyon Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

That's not true at all. There's literally no way for many Americans to find live or recorded events for free or to pay. NBC has blocked it off.

pydannyon Ask HN: Modern tech companies that use Django for Web products.

Sentry uses Django.

pydannyon Ask HN: Modern tech companies that use Django for Web products.

Pinterest left Django for other things years ago.

pydannyon Ask HN: What's your Django side project?

Just pushed out the alpha of the 5th edition of our book, which is titled: "Two Scoops of Django 3.x".

Here's the product page: https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-3-x

Also working on a book writing app where the file generating service backend is monitored by a Django project. Launches soon!

pydannyon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

My wife and I released the alpha of Two Scoops of Django 3.x: https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-3-x

pydannyon The Dropout Fallacy

Yes. I've encountered them. My anecdotal evidence is that all who dropped out because of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill gates, or Peter Thiel showed them 'a different way' have completely stagnated.

On the other hand, anecdotally, those dropouts who put their heads down and got stuff done, some of them did pretty well.

Finally, anecdotally, in my experience, people with college degrees got hired faster and in times of woe, are the last to be let go. In fact, many SV companies (Google, for example, but funded startups often work the same way), won't hire you without a college degree unless you've done something notable. Being notable, by definition, means you are in the minority of any group. making dropping out to achieve success a risky proposition.

Of course, your mileage may vary. ;-)

pydannyon Ask HN: What are some successful startups built on top of other services?

Never heard this before. Got a source?

pydannyon What is a Web Framework?

I would think that topic worthy of it's own blog post rather than a footnote or a distraction.

pydannyon Redesigned Python.org

I think it's because the site is in open beta. Let's give them a few days to hash things out. ;-)

pydannyon My Startup, a Retrospective

I'll toss in my own two cents. Thanks to a discussion with Randall we started working on what eventually became Two Scoops of Django. The 'The Heroku Hacker's Guide' was an inspiration, and his promise to be one of the reviewers gave us the confidence to get started.

I'm delighted OpenCNAM has done so well and I wish him the best in the future. :-)

pydannyon Stormpath Launches New Python SDK (Secure User Account API)

This looks pretty interesting. Until Stormpath, I never thought of offloading the users to a service. Sounds like a really nice shortcut for building things fast and securely.

If I were going to levy a complaint, it would be that https://github.com/stormpath/stormpath-sdk-python's README is so much better than the terse and nigh useless https://pypi.python.org/pypi/stormpath. A lot of people use PyPI for discovery, and on PyPI it's not clear what Stormpath does or how to use it.

pydannyon Why Python is Powerful Enough for Google

I like this article because some notes I took at Walt Disney Animation Studios is referenced.

Yes, today it's all about me :-)

pydannyon Python Indie Bundle - Honoring Bitcoin Black Friday

We're doing this sale until midnight of December 2.

pydannyon Django 1.6 released

https://github.com/boto/boto3

Still in progress, but there you go.

pydannyon Django 1.6 released

See https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/nov/06/django-16-r...

pydannyon Django 1.6 released

Fabric isn't part of Django. There is nothing specific about Django in Fabric. In fact, the vast majority of my deployments do not use Fabric.

pydannyon Django 1.6 released

Django Packages lists 160 apps that work with Python 3. See https://www.djangopackages.com/python3/

From personal experience, most of the critical ones are compatible.

pydannyon Does life end after 35?

My life finally kicked into gear when I was 38. NASA hired me.

Since then I finally realized my dream to travel around the world professionally as a developer, participated in multiple startups, wrote a well-received book, found the woman of my dreams, and changed possibly hundreds of lives.

Post-35 rocks!

pydannyon How to Tango with Django: A Python Django Tutorial

As one of the authors, I'm not sure what to say to this. I would honestly love to get your feedback.

Just so you know, when the book was more direct we had reviewers saying it was too direct and they wanted more flavor text. Our answer was an appendix of libraries in the back that listed all the recommended packages. Perhaps we should point readers to that earlier?

Also, if you are using Django, using third-party libraries is part of using Django. We feel this is a good thing because you don't want critical libraries standing still waiting for the next major Django release (a roughly yearly event). A good example is OAuth authentication - if Facebook or Twitter changes it's methods, you can upgrade to the latest django-social-auth or django-allauth and expect things to work.

However, as I said, I would love to hear more detailed feedback. That way we can make the book better. :-)