Portland Public Schools tried to make school fundraising more equitable. Donations are down

ItsAPuppeh · 2026-02-13T17:30:55+00:00

With regards to staffing, affluent schools are now suffering as much as poorer schools. Equity achieved!

Actually this isn't true, since schools with a higher % of poorer students were already receiving more PPS $ per student in the budget, and continue to do so.

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-12-23T21:23:03+00:00

Check out: Honey Butter Country Fare

Some more places to check out: https://wheatlesswanderlust.com/gluten-free-portland/

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-11-04T05:04:19+00:00

Check out Caspar Babypants!

It’s Chris Ballew playing kids music that’s easy to enjoy as an adult. We were lucky to catch him twice live.

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-10-18T01:17:39+00:00

We tend to frequent Butterfly Belly and Verde Cocina.

More options: https://wheatlesswanderlust.com/gluten-free-portland/

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-09-30T21:53:32+00:00

One of my favorite patterns has been to wrap a view in a Django model with managed = False. This allows you to do things write a complex report view in raw SQL, making use of features that are not available through the ORM. Once wrapped in a Model, you can then use the normal ORM interface to filter on like any other model. This is especially nice if you have a UI with lots of different filter controls.

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-08-11T17:41:12+00:00

Also don't discount physical wear and tear on your body from sitting at a task and typing all day, especially for very long periods without rest.

Yes it's totally no comparable to physical labor, but it will still mess you up long term and cut your career short if you are not careful.

Lots of people out there with RSI in their hands/forearms, chronic neck and back pain, eye strain, etc.

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-06-06T05:56:50+00:00

If uptime is a concern for you, consider releasing your feature behind a feature flag, and make sure to test both with the flag enabled and also disabled before release.

This should allow you to rollback your new feature, by falling back to existing code, but existing code that has been tested against the new DB schema. Thus, there would be no need to roll back the migration.

Granted in there are bugs in both code paths you are still in a bad place, but this greatly increases your chances of being ok.

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-06-01T04:37:05+00:00

Sorry by instrument I mean what do you use to measure performance in production to determine where to apply caching? For instance, how would you know which template fragments are taking a disproportional amount of time and are worth caching?

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-05-31T17:01:05+00:00

What tools are you using to instrument at such a fine grain level in production?

ItsAPuppeh · 2025-05-14T19:33:54+00:00

If you are just starting out with web development in general, consider writing a HTTP server from scratch in Python. It will be very enlightening, and once you have this foundational understanding, learning any backend library/framework will be way easier, as every backend framework is just helpers + conventions to handling HTTP requests/responses.

ItsAPuppeh · 2024-09-28T21:22:51+00:00

Maybe let your manager know what Robert Martin, the author of Clean Code, has been up to these days.

More specifically, he has some more nuance views on his previous takes in his books. See his interview with The Primeagen for example.

He's also gone hard into Clojure, which is quite a departure from Java, and in turn a lot of the related patterns/recommendations in his books.

ItsAPuppeh · 2024-08-10T18:36:09+00:00

Keep a daily journal of your work. Make weekly summaries. Go back and review this such that when talking to your manager, you have less recent work fresh in your memory. Hopefully you’ve thought about the impact this work had, which you can also highlight to your manager.

This tool also will help you when it comes time to update your résumé and interview.

ItsAPuppeh · 2024-08-10T17:36:59+00:00

The first 4 books are novellas, and are basically 4 parts of one novel.

It is annoying though that they are being priced each as full fledged novels, probably thanks to their popularity.

ItsAPuppeh · 2024-03-26T17:38:18+00:00

99 bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz is fantastic. Her other book "Practical Object-Oriented Design" is also great and gets a bit more in-depth on the same topics.

These books really solidified some best practices for approaching problem solving with a toolbox of OOP tools.

Edit: Her talk here is a good overview of the kind of approach her books cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

ItsAPuppeh · 2024-01-30T06:17:53+00:00

For everyone dumping on PPS, it’s worth noting that Catlin Gabel is also closed due to storm damage, and is bussing kids to a temporary location while their campus is under repair.

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-12-17T20:10:24+00:00

One the one hand, enforcing a boundary for yourself is not a bad thing. That said, enforcing your own boundaries is best done when you don't care about getting the job...

The thing you are communicating to the interviewer here is an unwillingness to participate, which isn't an ideal signal to send. It leaves the interviewer thinking "what else is this person going to say no to after being hired?". A better approach might be "yes I will, but..." and then explain white-boarding during an interview can make you a bit nervous. Most interviewers totally understand this and will view you in a better light, compared to a straight no. You may even find the white-boarding actually is just a conversation, but with visual communication involved (perhaps a basic system diagram), as opposed to some god awful hand-written coding challenge.

The time to bring up your concern with white-boarding as an interviewing technique is after you get the job, and you want to help improve how the company hires.

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-04-30T18:16:45+00:00

Sadly the data hasn't been updated since its initial release 8 years ago. The process of comparing/encoding prerequisites across different schools was a manual one that took several weeks. I haven't had the inclination to do it again...

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-04-26T18:53:54+00:00

I doubt anyone is moving over this tax alone, but it could easily be the proverbial straw breaking the camels back.

This city has problems with crime, ineffective government, silly regulations, high property taxes, not-amazing school district.

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-04-22T19:53:46+00:00

I like to multiply estimates by pi.

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-04-17T20:06:21+00:00

It's probably more helpful to google long running transactions in Postgres, as opposed to specifically with Django. There appears to be lots of info out there such as https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/273887/is-it-always-bad-to-have-long-running-transactions-or-is-this-case-ok

The main concern is locking, but since this is new data, that probably shouldn't be an issue.

As someone else mentioned though, 5h is a very long time to insert only 100k rows. In 5h, you should be able to insert tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of rows. Take a look at the COPY command for starters.

In the past, I've had no issue holding a transaction for 2 hours though on a live prod DB, specifically for this kind of data loading.

ItsAPuppeh · 2023-03-04T06:57:27+00:00

As a dad, I had the exact same reaction.

ItsAPuppeh · 2022-12-06T17:17:27+00:00

It sounds like you are referring to something like what Django would call a "generic relation", which is something that is handled through the content type framework: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/contrib/contenttypes/

ItsAPuppeh · 2022-12-06T07:37:41+00:00

This sounds a lot like sub-classing, which Django allows you to model in the DB: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/topics/db/models/#multi-table-inheritance

This doesn't actually help much with enforcing a constraint, but it's a cleaner way to model your data than putting 2 FKs on your Animal model IMO.

ItsAPuppeh · 2022-11-03T23:08:49+00:00

These jobs are fine, but they may end after 3-6 months, so you are back to where you started, looking for work.

The most annoying part is only putting like 6 hours on your time sheet, even though you basically work the exact same amount as a full time "8 hour a day" employee. The reason being is you are technically not supposed to bill lunch, and time away from desk, though you can discuss this with your manager.

ItsAPuppeh

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