Python, grok, books, history, faith, etc.
Like probably everybody, I get a lot of email. Newsletters, weekly mails of some shops I want to monitor for handy discounts, linkedIn updates, GitHub/dependabot notifications, some left-over spam, calendar notifications, some Patreon stuff, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and some real, individual emails! Oh, and spread over two accounts, work and personal. Goal: less effort and lower maintenance I want my…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Foss4g open source geo conference in Groningen, NL). Railmaps: Prorail open source GIS viewer based on generic web components (GeoBlocks) Warning : the title mentioned it as an open source GIS viewer, but it is not open source . After the presentation I asked where I could find it, but they said it was internal-only. They used open source, but the project…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Foss4g open source geo conference in Groningen, NL). Accessibility: geoinformation for everybody - Liliana Santoso-Avis & Jedidja van der Sluis - Stoutjesdijk WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) deals with accessibility ( a11y ). (I personally try to take accessibility a bit into account, proper headings and reasonably contrast-rich colors on my…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Foss4g open source geo conference in Groningen, NL). Increasing our digital sovereignty - Ronald Stolk There are public values we have: autonomy, humanity, justice. Things like inclusivity, academic freedom, security, etc. Those public values are under threat in our digital environment, mostly due to Big Tech. Digital sovereignty suddenly became more acute…
Two summaries of the July 2 2026 Python meetup in Leiden . I've omitted one, "Python with Karel" by EiEi Tun, as I've made a summary of that talk in Utrecht a month ago, already :-) Building modern internal team CLIs with incremental automation - Farid Nouri Neshat Obligatory xkcd cartoons: https://xkcd.com/974 and https://xkcd.com/1319 and https://xkcd.com/1205 Toil : manual, repetitive,…
I made summaries at the 4th PyUtrecht meetup (in Nieuwegein, at Qstars this time). Qstars IT and open source - Derk Weijers Qstars IT hosted the meeting. It is an infra/programming/consultancy/training company that uses lots of Python. They also love open source and try to sponsor where possible. One of the things they are going to open source (next week) is a "cable thermal model", a calculation…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day PyGrunn conference in Groningen, NL). His parents owned a record store in some Dutch town. First records, then CDs. A social shop where you would gather to listen to CDs to determine whether to buy them. His father's brother actually started the oldest record store in Amsterdam, Concerto. It still exists. Then the world changed. Napster, CD-burners. Illegal…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day PyGrunn conference in Groningen, NL). When automating in a big company with many systems, you often end up with spaghetti: many systems connecting to a lot of the others... A common solution is to have a "bus architecture". Generic existing " enterprise service bus" solutions were clearly overkill, so he proposed an alternative solution. He made a couple of…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day PyGrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Subtitle: a real-world journey from chaos to confidence using Pydantic and Pytest . Idealy, you'd have perfect json files with a fixed format and rigorous validation and ideally generated. But in a customer project, the other programmers weren't too happy about it. They had massive JSON files, partially manually…
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day PyGrunn conference in Groningen, NL). Years ago he listened to the "corecursive" podcast (recommended by Michiel), the one where Yann Collet got interviewed . He's the author of the LZ4 and zstandard ( zstd ) compression algorithm. In 2016 zstandard was released. In 2017 it was used in the linux kernel. Since 2020 it is one of the official formats in…