Yesterday I was at my favorite library and was about to buy Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert vinyl. I resisted the temptation and put it down. Here’s the problem: I don’t have a turntable. Part of me is convinced that certain fundamental vinyls are worth having, no matter what. They’re just beautiful artifacts (and TKC happens to be one of the finest). And then there’s the fact that albums such as this one, I feel they really made me, very much like the books I read. The famous Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” I feel it holds for selected music too. ...

JA Westenberg reflects on six years of going solo after a career working for various conglomerates. She’s leveraging AI tools to automate most mundane and boring tasks, so she can focus on the creative, challenging, and ultimately fun work. According to her experience, these tools, when used effectively, will allow small companies and individuals to compete on equal footing with the giants of the industry: I think the future probably belongs to the small companies // individuals more than sprawling conglomerates. There is a huge opportunity for people who use AI to remove everything that isn’t judgment from their workload, and apply that judgement to good products and good services. My theory is that one person, with an AI-augmented operational layer plus taste is the company of the future - and I’d bet on that again and again. ...

Markdown doesn’t do most of what those formats do. You can’t set margins. You can’t do columns. You can’t embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn’t even have a native way to change the font color. And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn’t about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format. ...

I just released Eve v2.3.1. In the unlikely event that you’ve been using JSONP callbacks with Eve, you’ll want to update as this patch improves on their security (changelog).

A couple of days ago I released FatturaElettronica 4.0.6. It adds support for legacy windows-1252 encoding to both XML and P7M invoices, a long-standing annoyance that could previously be circumvented via external code. windows-1252 encoding in Italian e-invoices has been a persistent headache — it’s technically outside the FatturaPA spec (which mandates UTF-8), but it crops up often enough in real-world invoices from older or misconfigured billing systems that users kept running into it. The Invoicetronic stack has been updated accordingly. ...

Eve v2.3 was just released on PyPI. It adds optimize_pagination_for_speed, a resource-level setting that allows granular control, overriding the equivalent global option that goes by the same name. Many thanks to Emanuele Di Giacomo for contributing to the project.

Senior engineering practitioners from major technology companies gathered for a multi-day retreat to confront the questions that matter most as AI transforms software development. The discussions covered more than twenty topics across breakout sessions, but the most significant insights didn’t emerge from one single session. Instead, they surfaced at various intersections; we found that the same concerns kept appearing in different conversations, framed by different people solving different problems. This publication synthesizes those cross-cutting themes, organized around the patterns that senior leaders need to understand and act on now. The retreat did not produce a single, unified vision of the future, but instead produced something more useful: a map of the fault lines where current practices are breaking and new ones are forming. ...

Eve v2.2.5 was just released on PyPI. It brings the pagination fix discussed in a previous post. Many thanks to Calvin Smith per contributing to the project.

Yesterday a pull request came in proposing a fix for a small pagination bug in Eve, the REST API framework I maintain. The intervention is small, precise, and comes with a well-crafted test. Two things stood out: the PR is in draft, and it includes an AI disclosure: the fix and the test were created by Claude. I don’t have mongo available or all the necessary python versions for testing, so I’m making this a draft PR so that I can verify all the tests/checks pass before marking it as ready to review. ...