-
My journey as a Djangonaut - from zero to contributor in one space mission
Disclaimer: I’m a fan of open source. The spirit of openness and collaboration just makes software better, and hackers happier. The benefits of open source are noticeable even if you’re just a user - but multiply when you become a contributor as well.
However, contributing into an existing project is always daunting. Specially when it comes to popular projects, with a huge codebase and thousands of participants - such as the Django project, for example. It’s hard to know where to start, how to proceed, and how to get your changes accepted. For all the years I’ve been working as a software engineer, contributing to open source is something that has always been on my wishlist, but never got to achieve.
But as it turns out, Django has an amazing community and runs a periodic program to help aspiring contributors along their journey into their first contribution to the project: the Djangonauts program. I joined session 5, running October-November 2025.
Read on →
Similarity to the Coconauts name purely coincidental 😬
-
Backup Internet Setup for Emergencies
We take so many things for granted in life when they are working fine, but when they fail, you suddenly realize they hanging by a thread - like, literally, THE INTERNET.
At home, we get our Internet from a fiber connection, which, as it turns out, it’s just light pulses coming thru a cable down the street. And this is a single point of failure, ready to be attacked by unlikely adversaries…
Read on → -
NFC Floppy Disk Game Launcher
As retro-gaming enthusiasts, we have a broad collection of old PC game files that we can conveniently play on modern PCs via DOSBox, SCUMMVM, and other utilities. But when playing on modern hardware, you lose some of the “magic” - for the real retro experience, those who are true purists will actually go and find some old hardware, set it up with an old DOS or Windows 3.1 build, and then install the actual games there. But this is very impractical… so, what if there was a way to simulate the retro experience, with modern technology?
That is exactly what we’ve done: we’re built ourselves a retro PC, using a 386x case, but with a modern PC inside. On it, we’ve installed a fake floppy drive that loads games using NFC - but seemingly, it looks as if they are magically loading from the floppy disks. Read on to learn how!
Read on → -
Hiring Demystified
It’s not secret that the hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things… oh, and hiring. In our industry we’ve developed a culture and a mysticism around hiring, with certain rituals and practices which are often so detached from reality that you see numerous jokes and memes about the subject.
Hiring is a difficult problem, yet important to get right. Many developers are faced with the challenge of hiring other team members, without much clue into how to proceed, and end up just copying the well known rituals without stopping to analyse their effectiveness or implications. Often, this results in hindering both companies and candidates, especially those of under represented demographics.
In this talk I gave at EuroPython 2021, I share my experiences and personal opinions both as a candidate and as an interviewer, analyze the implications of popular hiring tactics, and discuss what I consider effective ones, in order to hire the right developers for your team with minimum hassle for both sides.
This talk is actually an updated version of the one I gave a year earlier at PyConES.
-
Microservices: the small print
Microservices get a lot of sales talk, which leads many teams to adopt them eagerly. However, people are not always aware that they come at a price.
In this talk I gave at PyconES 2018 I discuss the basic theory around microservices architectures, and go over the common pain points that they bring, and how they often get you in the opposite direction than you intended with them.
subscribe via RSS