A lot of reading this week. I finished The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. And I’m almost done with The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. I should have read them 20 years ago. A quote from the latter still shines in my mind:

I have long enjoyed asking candidate programmers, “Where is next November?” If the question is too cryptic, then, “Tell me about your mental model of the calendar.” The really good programmers have strong spatial senses; they usually have geometric models of time; and they quite often understand the first question without elaboration.

Btw I’m reading them on paper. The Chicago Public Library is awesome, I have the opportunity to get most of the books I want to read on paper.

Next week I’ll start reading Deep Learning With Python. I also started really understanding, I mean technically, how LLMs work, and how we can build apps using them. I’m doing kind of a curse following [these notebooks by Langchain people](RAG From Scratch). This graph is awesome, it really made me understand a lot of thing about RAGs and LLMs:

On the Open Source side of the life, I added some more nice articles to my awesome-django-articles list about how to create Single-File Django Projects: one by Eric Matthes and the other one by Paolo Melchiorre. Both good reads.

Work. It was a busy week. Intense. In a good sense. We finished our first integration with Salesforce (the 3rd one I do as a developer). I’ve started to notice how coding for more than a year now in such a fast and big project have improved my knowledge and skill about Django and DRF.

I started following John Cutler and Tom Dekan at LinkedIn. The former posted this quote from The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions:

What’s next is to stop thinking about software development as a delivery process and to start thinking of it as a problem-solving pro-cess, a creative process. Time and again we run into software delivery organizations-IT departments operating as cost centers and software firms working under contract-whose job is to turn someone else’s requirements into delivered software. Agile practices have helped these organizations handle requirements in smaller batches, reduce work-in-progress, and speed up software delivery. But unfortunately, agile practices do not address the underlying problem: the very idea of a software delivery organization is flawed.

This resonated with me, with how the company I work for approaches almost every feature we need to build.

Music is always present in my life of course. I watched Stagger Lee official video by Nick Cave for the 899 times now. I think Nick Cave is the kind of artist you need to watch, not just listen to.

Also, a few new artists I listened this week: Annelies Monere, Colle and Eartheater.

Finally one pending task remains in my TO-DO list: go and get my Illinois ID!