My name is Brenton Cleeland and I'm a web developer in Melbourne, Australia. Currently working as a Consultant at ThoughtWorks.
A smattering of content I've created over the last few years.
Most of my other talks and intro slides from the first 3 years of MelbDjango are availble on my slides.com account. I have a whole bunch of open-source personal projects on GitHub.
I post updates down below
Which sometimes post to @sesh on Twitter
And micro.blog
Doing some prep for my DjangoConEU workshop on Test Driven Development with Django. Hopefully doing a trial run at Common Code on Thursday night. I hope you like timezones as much as I do 😅
Very early birthday gift from Bonnie! This is going to be one very caffeinated ANZAC Day!
I released a new version of piprot this week. I promise it's still being (sort of) supported.
Again with the stars, and again with posting this nice and late the next month.
Here's a few projects that caught my eye in March.
Not a new one but a very important one. Steven Black's hosts file provides a tailored list of hostnames to block using your /etc/hosts file. In the age of websites using third-party tracking services the simplest way to ensure your privacy is to never let your computer communicate with known trackers. It only takes a couple of minutes to completely block Facebook and others from tracking you across the web.
Ever needed to play audio in a Python project? py-simple-audio enables just that in an incredibly easy way (simple, even?). If you've ever tried to play audio with PyAudio or PyGame you've run into the same dependency nightmares I have. To keep things simple it only supports WAV files – which is plenty for a lot of use cases (including a simple drum machine that I made last month).
Apex's up service launched last month and promises to deploy highly scalable, serverless application to AWS "in seconds" from you command line. It already supports a multitude of languages including Python and Node.js and intends to be cloud agnostic (though, only AWS Lambda is supported right now). I'll be using the OSS version of this to deploy a Django project ASAP, the paid version is $20/mo and offers things like instant rollbacks and encrypted secrets.
Flux/Redux takes quite a while to get your head around when you jump into the React world. unstated removes the "all your state in one place" concept and builds on top of React's existing context patterns to share state between components. Unstated introduces Containers, Subscribers and Providers to manage state closer to the Components than you would in a Flux-like architecture. It's an interesting departure from the traditional "React way" and seems to be gaining a lot of traction.
Finally, a fun one: pixel-synth is a lo-fi video synthesiser written in Javascript that runs in your browser. There's a demo online and the visuals are fun and Trippy.
That's it for now. I'll be back in May to talk about some fun discoveries in April. Then I'll be heading to Germany for DjangoConEU – can't wait!
After three amazing years together I’m over the moon to call Bonnie my best friend and fiancée #xoxo
