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Pizza&Peli: personal movie session planner and tracker
At home we do a weekly movie session with the kids, which is met with high anticipation. But we’re not the kind of folks that just pop open Netflix of Disney+ and watch whatever is there - no, we take our children’s education seriously, and as hopeless geeks, that obviously includes carefully curating the selection of movies we consume, so that we expose them to cinematic gems at an age-appropriate rate.
We used to just keep a list in Obsidian with movie ideas as they came along, but as the list grew longer it became difficult to manage. Also, often other parents ask for recommendations on which movies we’ve watched and liked, but we had to rely on our memory to recall them.
So, we’ve built an app to manage both usecases: Pizza&Peli.
Read on →
Named after the way we call our movie sessions at home 🍕
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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 😬
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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…
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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!
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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.
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