Journey 2 - Insomnia, Semantics, Wheels & PyPI

I’m not in the mood of writing today since I’m going through some sort of phase in my life. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to force my self to start getting into writing just so I won’t lose my streak.

I think I’d also need some kind of scratch pad or idea pad where in I could put random topics that come out during the week so I could have some idea on what to write on my weekly journal.

Insomnia #

It’s been happening for a couple of weeks or even months now that I’m having a hard time sleeping. I’m not sure if it’s just my brain trying to become active around 00:00 to 2:00¹ and it’s damn hard to silence it.

I’ve tried multiple things to sleep like blinking my eyes fast enough, or focusing on my breathing like when I was doing meditation, and even resorted to counting sheep!

As of writing this, it’s already 00:00 and I guess the root cause of my insomnia is that I’m still using my devices at this hour.

I forgot to mention – at work, we do our daily stand ups around 10:00. So I wake up around 9:00, prepare, and then sometimes just stare at my laptop until it’s time to do the daily stand up. Around 11:00, I stop working and kind of take a break and then cook brunch². While preparing, I would also play a podcast from syntax.fm on Spotify or any other interesting podcast I see on other platforms.

We’d finish eating around 12:30 and then I’ll take another break from 13:30 to 14:00 or some times 14:30. I do think that’s pretty inefficient and I gotta change that. Anyway, I resume work around 14:30 up to 17:00 and that brings me to around 4 hours of recorded work³.

Sometimes, I’d work until 18:00 and after that, I’d ride my bike buy food for dinner.

We’d finish eating dinner around 19:30 to 20:00. If it’s Tuesday or Thursday, I’d usually take a bath after going out since I buy dinner downtown and that takes me around 45 minutes to an hour of riding my bike.

At 20:30, I start working again up until 23:00 or 00:00 so I’d reach a minimum of 7 to 8 hours of working for the day. And that cycle repeats everyday.

Sometimes, I don’t even reach the minimum number of hours so those hours gets deducted during the pay cycle.⁴

I guess in order to resolve my insomnia, I have to first figure out a working schedule. Plus, I need time for myself at night.

Semantics #

Last Friday, April 05, 2024, it occurred to me to rewrite our capstone project way back 2017 from CodeIgniter to Django.⁵

I actually started rewriting it and I’m planning to use htmx and picocss for the frontend, and Python/Django for the backend.

Although limited functionality, I chose picocss since it focuses more on the developer writing semantic HTML rather than relying too much on divs and getting distracted with too many options.

It’s lightweight and I like the idea of using semantic HTML for structuring your design. It helps a lot for beginner developers and especially for devs like me who don’t write HTMl and CSS that much.

I’ve managed to do the models in the backend but got distracted with going back and forth with the documentation for both htmx and picocss, and also looking at other designs for inspiration on how the web app will look like.

It’s still a WIP but I’ll probably write about it once I get an MVP done.

Wheels & PyPI #

I talked about Wheels last week and I’ve created a new repository on structuring Django projects as if they are python packages and it turned out great. I’ve forked the original repository and made some changes to use different tools and it should be good to go. You can check out the repository here.

While I was trying to create the template, I also wanted to include a default EmailBackend for Django where it would automatically open the email in your browser whenever an email is sent.

I find this extremely useful especially during development. I wanted to add django-naomi as the default but it hasn’t been active for the last couple of year and there were some open pull requests in the main repository so I decided to create a fork of it and called it django-unravel and published it on PyPI.

I had fun writing it and kinda gained momentum, and used that momentum to proceed working on the django rewrite of our capstone project that I talked about earlier.

While I was doing the backend work, I had problems when trying to commit the project since ruff+/black⁶ were not compatible with reorder-python-imports.

The main problem was that neither the maintainers of black or reorder-python-imports would adjust their packages to make them work together.

It was a miniscule formatting issue where in reorder-python-imports would choose to remove white-space below docstrings or imports while black chooses to whitespace to it.

Here’s the commit I created that removes the reorder-python-imports because isort kinda does the same job with less drama by adding force-single-line = true, and ruff includes isort sorting by default.

Well, in reorder-python-imports’s defense, it has been like that since 2014 but I had to choose between the two and ruff seemed the logical choice for me since it has been widely adopted by the python community. Looking at FastAPI and django-ninja.

Enough of my ranting for this week. Time to snooze 💤