Which Agentic Chatbot? I have been working on a Python based AI test framework for a chatbot interface for my company 's product, Postgres AI Hybrid Manager. The manager allows the setup of Postgres clusters across cloud or on-prem and attaching various AI tools such as Langflow . So a combination of more traditional Postgres backup, migration, telemetry and analytics features along with LLM…
Introduction to Cloud Pricing I am looking forward to speaking at PyConLT 2025 . My talk is called Cutting the Price of Scraping Cloud Costs ( video ) Its been a while (12 years!) since my last Python conference EuroPython Florence 2012 , when I spoke as a Django web developer, although I did give a Golang talk at Kubecon USA last year. I work at EDB, the Postgres company, on our Postgres AI…
Why write an update? I wrote a blog post on Software Development with Generative AI last year , which was questioning the approach of the current AI software authoring assistants. I believe the bigger picture holds true that to fully utilize AI to write software, will require an entirely different approach. Changing the job of a software developer in a far more radical manner and perhaps making…
The jump in interest rates to the highest level in over 20 years that hit in summer 2023 for the US, UK and many other countries is still impacting the Software industry. Rates may be due to drop soon, but currently it has choked off investment, upped borrowing costs and lead to many software companies making engineers redundant to please the markets. For the UK the estimate is around 8% of…
The Current State of AI Software Generation The user tries to describe what they want generated in terms of a snippet of high level programming language code using standard English. They submit it to the AI tool. So what are they asking the AI to generate and how does it do it? The high level language High level programming languages are human languages composed of english and maths symbols…
I work as a developer of a Cloud service, Big Animal - EDB's Cloud Postgres product. So I went along to a meetup the other day, a panel discussion on Leveraging Cloud Computing for Increased Sustainability It got me thinking about this whole issue, and how in a practical sense I could do anything that might reduce the carbon footprint of the service I work on. The conclusion I came to was that I…
I recently got a new job where I need to write a lot of Golang, so needed to learn it. I figured that you don't really learn a language unless you try and write code that actually does something useful. However having been to a recent Golang meetup where someone had come to a similar conclusion, and had written a full emulator of the Gameboy in Go - I also figured I wanted to do something that was…
Do you work somewhere that has a lot of old shell scripts? Were they all dashed off quickly according to the whims of their original creator - just deploy scripts so maybe they missed some of the care (and documentation) the application code had? Whenever a major revision of said shell scripts is needed, do all of them end up in the bin - sorry trash in case you thought I meant the /usr/bin.…
Here is a list of the ten core elements needed for a development to deployment phase infrastructure to provide a stable service for your web applications. Along with minimizing time wasted on bugs and issues that are unrelated to functional development, and slashing the maintenance time and cost - compared to systems without them. I guess it could also be called automation, automation, automation…
With the release of Django 1.7 it could be argued that the balance has finally tipped towards Python 3 being its preferred platform. Well given Python 2.7 is the last 2.* then its probably time we all thought about moving to Python 3 for our Django deployments. Problem is those pesky third party package developers, because unless you are determined wheel reinventor (unlikely if you use Django!) -…
I am currently involved in the redevelopment of a survey creation tool , that is used by most of the UK University sector. The application is being redeveloped in Django, creating surveys in Postgresql and writing the completed survey data to Cassandra. The core performance bottleneck is likely to be the number of concurrent users who can simultaneously complete surveys. As part of the test tool…
Last night I went to the second meeting of the Django Cardiff User Group. This is a sister group to the DBBUG Bristol based one that I have been attending for the last 5 years. It was organised by Daniele Procida, who started attending DBBUG events a few years ago and has now decided to spread the word over the Severn, in Wales. He is also organising the first UK Django conference in a couple of…
Yes MegaMeet may have a slightly cheesey ring to it, but the Bristol IT MegaMeet was a lot of fun, and a great idea for a regional software community event. So unlike most conferences this one is not for a particular company, language, platform or area of software expertise. Instead it brings together all the voluntary community software and technology groups within the region of Bristol, UK.…
django-cookieless Last week I released a new add on for django, django-cookieless , it was a relatively small feature that was required for a current project, and since it was such a generic package seemed ideal for open sourcing as a separate egg. It made me realise that I hadn't released a new open source package for well over a year, and so this one is certainly long over due in that sense.…
Being English I often tend to start a new conversation with the weather. At Europython this week I had good reason, it was hot 30 - 35 degrees centrigrade. Whilst at home the UK has been bathed with ... rain and temperatures of 20 at the most. Of course for Florentines it is only a couple of degrees above the norm, so nothing worth talking about. However they were polite enough to respond to this,…
This week I had the opportunity to go to a couple of gatherings and deliver two python related talks. The first was at our local Django Bath and Bristol Users Group (#DBBUG). The second was at the Google Apps for EDU European User Group (GEUG12). I don't do a talk that often, maybe 5 or 6 times a year, and I guess share some of the traits of the stereotyped geek that I am not a natural extrovert…
In my day to day work, I haven't had an opportunity to use Google App Engine (GAE). So to get up to speed with it, and since it offers free hosting for low usage, I created my home site on the platform a year ago. The site uses App Engine as a base, and integrates in Google Apps for any content other than custom content types. Recently I have been upgrading the Django infrastructure we use at…
I am currently writing a permissions system for a Django based survey application and we wanted a nice clean implementation for testing users for appropriate permissions on the objects displayed on a page. Django has added class views in addition to the older function based ones. Traditionally tasks such as testing authorisation has been applied via decorator functions. @login_required def my_view…