February 2025

Time for another monthly post sharing some of the IT discoveries that crossed my path lately. Below you'll find a mix of articles, links, and resources, some of which tie into my current activities and areas of interest.

Some thoughts

February was interesting because I attended FOSDEM 2025. FOSDEM, which stands for the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, is a large, free, volunteer-run event held annually in Brussels. It brings together thousands of developers and enthusiasts from the global open-source community to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. I'll write a separate blog post about highlights from this event soon!

Articles

You Didn't Notice MP3 Is Now Free

Why nobody cares

7 proven mental models for engineering managers

Use mental models to make sure that your decisions don't hurt you and your teams.

Michael Lynch: My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Seven years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie founder.

Michael Lynch: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

7 Common Mistakes in Architecture Diagrams

When creating a technical architecture diagram, your goal is to give understanding to your audience. You want to honestly inform viewers about your system rather than merely make an impression. Mistakes made when creating diagrams can undermine this goal, however. Here are seven common mistakes to avoid when making technical architecture diagrams.

Developer philosophy

This listing is a little miscellaneous; it isn't intended to be an exhaustive exploration of the way in which I develop software. Also, if you are a senior developer already then obviously you might already be familiar with some of this. Or disagree! Software development is a famously subjective field.

Lee Robinson: Personal Software

Software can now adapt to you, not the other way around. Better yet, AI is making it possible for anyone, not just developers, to create single-use or custom applications.

Vim After Bram: A Core Maintainer on How They’ve Kept It Going

What happens when the chief maintainer of an open source project dies. Maintaining VIM turned out to be a full time job, though the community has stepped in to help.

Armin Ronacher: Ugly Code and Dumb Things

Perfect code doesn't guarantee success if you haven't solved a real problem for real people. Pursuing elegance in a vacuum leads to abandoned side projects or frameworks nobody uses. By contrast, clunky but functional code often comes with just the right compromises for quick iteration.

Christian Hollinger: Why I still self host my servers (and what I've recently learned)

This article is about two things: Why I still bother and what it has recently taught me. Think of it as a brief retrospective and an encouragement for readers to go down the same rabbit hole.

Productivity

devszczepaniak.pl: Pułapki produktywności

co zabija Twoją produktywność?

AI

Open WebUI

Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI platform designed to operate entirely offline. It supports various LLM runners like Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs, with built-in inference engine for RAG, making it a powerful AI deployment solution.

Programista Na Swoim: Podsumowanie mojego udziału w trzeciej edycji kursu AI Devs

Postanowiłem po prostu wrzucić tu kilka luźnych przemyśleń, które wpadły mi do głowy w trakcie jego trwania. Dla siebie – ku pamięci oraz dla Was – żeby zachęcić lub zniechęcić do udziału w kolejnych edycjach.

PennyroyalTea/gibberlink

Two conversational AI agents switching from English to sound-level protocol after confirming they are both AI agents

AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications

Anthropic, the developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, doesn’t want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they’re in marketing or engineering.

Django

Official Django MongoDB Backend Now Available in Public Preview

To get started, it’s as easy as running pip install django-mongodb-backend. MongoDB has even created an easy-to-use starter template that works with the django-admin command startproject, making it a snap to see what typical MongoDB migrations look like in Django. For more information, check out our quickstart guide.

What is OpenTelemetry and how to add it to your Django application

A step-by-step guide to connecting your Django app’s OpenTelemetry setup to an Elastic observability backend.

Django libraries

dracula/django-admin

A dark (and light 🕯️) theme for the Django Admin.

Cloud

Building MLOps Workflows with Airflow 2 on GKE

This CodeLab demonstrates how to integrate DevOps practices into machine learning (MLOps) by downloading a dataset, refining a model and deploying the LLM on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) by using an Airflow DAG with the least amount of abstraction.

Google Cloud: How L’Oréal's tech accelerator built its end-to-end MLOps platform

L'Oréal's modular MLOps platform, built on Google Cloud, has significantly boosted efficiency and agility in the AI development process. By empowering teams to work independently on their respective ML models, L'Oréal's Tech Accelerator has accelerated development, improved collaboration, and enhanced the quality and reliability of its systems.

Google Cloud: Tchibo brews up 10x faster customer insights with AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

AlloyDB has transformed Tchibo’s approach to data by enabling faster, deeper, and more scalable access to the customer feedback and analytics we rely on for decision-making.

Other stuff

DSS - Dead Simple Sites

The most minimal sites on the web, curated in one place.

wger

wger (ˈvɛɡɐ) Workout Manager is a free, open source web application that helps you manage your personal workouts, weight and diet plans and can also be used as a simple gym management utility. It offers a REST API as well, for easy integration with other projects and tools.