Feeds

Drupal GovCon wrapped up with actionable insights from Rod Martin on non-coding solutions for site builders and Bree Benesh on navigating leadership challenges. Explore their sessions for practical strategies to apply in your Drupal projects.

We are looking for the next group of organizers to own and lead the 2026 DjangoCon Europe conference. Could your town - or your football stadium, circus tent, private island or city hall - host this wonderful community event?

DjangoCon Europe is a major pillar of the Django community, as people from across the world meet and share. This includes many qualities that make it a unique event - unconventional and conventional venues, creative happenings, a feast of talks and a dedication to inclusion and diversity.

Hosting a DjangoCon is an ambitious undertaking. It's hard work, but each year it has been successfully run by a team of community volunteers, not all of whom have had previous experience - more important is enthusiasm, organizational skills, the ability to plan and manage budgets, time and people - and plenty of time to invest in the project.

For 2026, we want to kickstart the organization much earlier than in previous years to allow more flexibility for the organizing team, and open up more opportunities for support from our DjangoCon Europe support working group.

Step 1: Submit your expression of interest

If you’re considering organizing DjangoCon Europe (🙌 great!), fill in our DjangoCon Europe 2026 expression of interest form with your contact details. No need to fill in all the information at this stage if you don’t have it all already, we’ll reach out and help you figure it out.

Express your interest in organizing

Step 2: We’re here to help!

We've set up a DjangoCon Europe support working group of previous organizers that you can reach out to with questions about organizing and running a DjangoCon Europe.

The group will be in touch with everyone submitting the expression of interest form, or you can reach out to them directly: european-organizers-support@djangoproject.com

We'd love to hear from you as soon as possible, so your proposal can be finalized and sent to the DSF board by October 6th 2024. The selected hosts will be publicly announced at DjangoCon Europe 2025 by the current organizers.

Step 3: Submitting the proposal

The more detailed and complete your final proposal is, the better. Basic details include:

• Organizing committee members: You won’t have a full team yet, probably, naming just some core team members is enough.
• The legal entity that is intended to run the conference: Even if the entity does not exist yet, please share how you are planning to set it up.
• Dates: See “What dates are possible in 2026?” below. We must avoid conflicts with major holidays, EuroPython, DjangoCon US, and PyCon US.
• Venue(s), including size, number of possible attendees, pictures, accessibility concerns, catering, etc.
• Transport links and accommodation: Can your venue be reached by international travelers?
• Budgets and ticket prices: Talk to the DjangoCon Europe Support group to get help with this, including information on past event budgets.

We also like to see:

• Timelines
• Pictures
• Plans for online participation, and other ways to make the event more inclusive and reduce its environmental footprint
• Draft agreements with providers
• Alternatives you have considered

Have a look at our proposed DjangoCon Europe 2026 Licensing Agreement for the fine print on contractual requirements and involvement of the Django Software Foundation.

Submit your completed proposal by October 6th 2024 via our DjangoCon Europe 2026 expression of interest form, this time filling in as many fields as possible. We look forward to reviewing great proposals that continue the excellence the whole community associates with DjangoCon Europe.

Q&A Can I organize a conference alone?

We strongly recommend that a team of people submit an application.

I/we don’t have a legal entity yet, is that a problem?

Depending on your jurisdiction, this is usually not a problem. But please share your plans about the entity you will use or form in your application.

Do I/we need experience with organizing conferences?

The support group is here to help you succeed. From experience, we know that many core groups of 2-3 people have been able to run a DjangoCon with guidance from previous organizers and help from volunteers.

What is required in order to announce an event?

Ultimately, a contract with the venue confirming the dates is crucial, since announcing a conference makes people book calendars, holidays, buy transportation and accommodation etc. This, however, would only be relevant after the DSF board has concluded the application process. Naturally, the application itself cannot contain any guarantees, but it’s good to check concrete dates with your venues to ensure they are actually open and currently available, before suggesting these dates in the application.

Do we have to do everything ourselves?

No. You will definitely be offered lots of help by the community. Typically, conference organizers will divide responsibilities into different teams, making it possible for more volunteers to join. Local organizers are free to choose which areas they want to invite the community to help out with, and a call will go out through a blog post announcement on djangoproject.com and social media.

What kind of support can we expect from the Django Software Foundation?

The DSF regularly provides grant funding to DjangoCon organizers, to the extent of $6,000 in recent editions. We also offer support via specific working groups:

• The dedicated DjangoCon Europe support working group.
• The social media working group can help you promote the event.
• The Code of Conduct working group works with all event organizers.

In addition, a lot of Individual Members of the DSF regularly volunteer at community events. If your team aren’t Individual Members, we can reach out to them on your behalf to find volunteers.

What dates are possible in 2026?

For 2026, DjangoCon Europe should happen between January 5th and April 27th, or June 4th and June 28th. This is to avoid the following community events’ provisional dates:

• PyCon US 2026: May 2026
• EuroPython 2026: July 2026
• DjangoCon US 2026: September - October 2026
• DjangoCon Africa 2026: August - September 2026

We also want to avoid the following holidays:

• New Year's Day: Wednesday 1st January 2026
• Chinese New Year: Tuesday 17th February 2026
• Eid Al-Fitr: Friday 20th March 2026
• Passover: Wednesday 1st - Thursday 9th April 2026
• Easter: Sunday 5th April 2026
• Eid Al-Adha: Tuesday 26th - Friday 29th May 2026
• Rosh Hashanah: Friday 11th - Sunday 13th September 2026
• Yom Kippur: Sunday 20th - Monday 21st September 2026

What cities or countries are possible?

Any city in Europe. This can be a city or country where DjangoCon Europe has happened in the past (Vigo, Edinburgh, Porto, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, Florence, Budapest, Cardiff, Toulon, Warsaw, Zurich, Amsterdam, Berlin), or a new locale.

References Past calls

• Interested in organizing DjangoCon Europe 2016?
• Could you host DjangoCon Europe 2017?
• DjangoCon Europe 2019 - where will it be?
• Could you host DjangoCon Europe 2023?
• Last Chance for a DjangoCon Europe 2023

PyPy v7.3.17: release of python 2.7 and 3.10

The PyPy team is proud to release version 7.3.17 of PyPy.

This release includes a new RISC-V JIT backend, an improved REPL based on work by the CPython team, and better JIT optimizations of integer operations. Special shout-outs to Logan Chien for the RISC-V backend work, to Nico Rittinghaus for better integer optimization in the JIT, and the CPython team that has worked on the repl.

The release includes two different interpreters:

• PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7 including the stdlib for CPython 2.7.18+ (the + is for backported security updates)

• PyPy3.10, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 3.10, including the stdlib for CPython 3.10.14.

The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the dual release. This is a micro release, all APIs are compatible with the other 7.3 releases. It follows after 7.3.16 release on April 23, 2024.

We recommend updating. You can find links to download the releases here:

https://pypy.org/download.html

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project. If PyPy is not quite good enough for your needs, we are available for direct consulting work. If PyPy is helping you out, we would love to hear about it and encourage submissions to our blog via a pull request to https://github.com/pypy/pypy.org

We would also like to thank our contributors and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: bug fixes, PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, or general help with making RPython's JIT even better.

If you are a python library maintainer and use C-extensions, please consider making a HPy / CFFI / cppyy version of your library that would be performant on PyPy. In any case, both cibuildwheel and the multibuild system support building wheels for PyPy.

RISC-V backend for the JIT

PyPy's JIT has added support for generating 64-bit RISC-V machine code at runtime (RV64-IMAD, specifically). So far we are not releasing binaries for any RISC-V platforms, but there are instructions on how to cross-compile binaries.

REPL Improvements

The biggest user-visible change of the release is new features in the repl of PyPy3.10. CPython 3.13 has adopted and extended PyPy's pure-Python repl, adding a number of features and fixing a number or bugs in the process. We have backported and added the following features:

• Prompts and tracebacks use terminal colors, as well as terminal hyperlinks for file names.

• Bracketed paste enable pasting several lines of input into the terminal without auto-indentation getting in the way.

• A special interactive help browser (F1), history browser (F2), explicit paste mode (F3).

• Support for Ctrl-<left/right> to jump over whole words at a time.

See the CPython documentation for further details. Thanks to Łukasz Langa, Pablo Galindo Salgado and the other CPython devs involved in this work.

Better JIT optimizations of integer operations

The optimizers of PyPy's JIT have become much better at reasoning about and optimizing integer operations. This is done with a new "knownbits" abstract domain. In many programs that do bit-manipulation of integers, some of the bits of the integer variables of the program can be statically known. Here's a simple example:

x = a | 1 ... if x & 1: ... else: ...

With the new abstract domain, the JIT can optimize the if-condition to True, because it already knows that the lowest bit of x must be set. This optimization applies to all Python-integers that fit into a machine word (PyPy optimistically picks between two different representations for int, depending on the size of the value). Unfortunately there is very little impact of this change on almost all Python code, because intensive bit-manipulation is rare in Python. However, the change leads to significant performance improvements in Pydrofoil (the RPython-based RISC-V/ARM emulators that are automatically generated from high-level Sail specifications of the respective ISAs, and that use the RPython JIT to improve performance).

PyPy versions and speed.pypy.org

The keen-eyed will have noticed no mention of Python version 3.9 in the releases above. Typically we will maintain only one version of Python3, but due to PyPy3.9 support on conda-forge we maintained multiple versions from the first release of PyPy3.10 in PyPy v7.3.12 (Dec 2022). Conda-forge is sunsetting its PyPy support, which means we can drop PyPy3.9. Since that was the major driver of benchmarks at https://speed.pypy.org, we revamped the site to showcase PyPy3.9, PyPy3.10, and various versions of cpython on the home page. For historical reasons, the "baseline" for comparison is still cpython 3.7.19.

We will keep the buildbots building PyPY3.9 until the end of August, these builds will still be available on the nightly builds tab of the buildbot.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a Python interpreter, a drop-in replacement for CPython It's fast (PyPy and CPython performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

We also welcome developers of other dynamic languages to see what RPython can do for them.

We provide binary builds for:

• x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS 64 bits, Windows 64 bits)

• 64-bit ARM machines running Linux (aarch64) and macos (macos_arm64).

PyPy supports Windows 32-bit, Linux PPC64 big- and little-endian, Linux ARM 32 bit, RISC-V RV64IMAFD Linux, and s390x Linux but does not release binaries. Please reach out to us if you wish to sponsor binary releases for those platforms. Downstream packagers provide binary builds for debian, Fedora, conda, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo, and more.

What else is new?

For more information about the 7.3.17 release, see the full changelog.

Please update, and continue to help us make pypy better.

Cheers, The PyPy Team

Qt for MCUs 2.5.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) has been released and is available for download. This patch release provides bug fixes and other improvements while maintaining source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.5. It does not add any new functionality.

por Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls)

Listamos abaixo os links para os relatos e notícias do Debian Day 2024 realizado em Belém e Poços de Caldas:

• Belém - PA
• Poços de Caldas - MG

Setting up a multilingual website in Drupal opens the door to a global online marketplace, allowing businesses to reach different cultural audiences by presenting content in multiple languages. In this article, we will discuss the process of configuring a multilingual site on Drupal.

Greetings, Pythonistas- thank you so much for supporting the work of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and the Python community! The current PSF Board has decided to invest more in connecting and serving the global Python community by establishing a forum to have regular conversations. The board members of the PSF with the support of PSF staff are excited to introduce monthly PSF Board Office Hours on the PSF Discord. The Office Hours will be sessions where you can share with us how we can help your community, express your perspectives, and provide feedback for the PSF.

What are the PSF Board Office Hours?

Similar to the PSF Grants Program Office Hours where PSF staff members help to answer questions regarding the PSF Grants Program, during the PSF Board Office Hours you can participate in a text-based live chat with PSF Board Directors. This is a chance to connect, share, and collaborate with the PSF Board and staff to improve our community together. Occasionally, we will have dedicated topics such as PyCon US and the PSF Board Elections for the office hour sessions.

Here is some of the work that we collaborate with staff and volunteers on:

• Promotion and outreach for the Python programming language
• Supporting local Python communities
• Organizing PyCon US
• Diversity and Inclusion in our community
• Support handling of Code of Conduct within our communities
• Support regional Python communities via the PSF Grants Program
• Furthering the mission of the PSF

Unless we have a dedicated topic for a session, you are not limited to talking with us about the above topics, although the discussions should be focused on Python, the PSF, and our community. If you think there’s something we can help with or we should know, we welcome you to come and talk to us!

Joining the office hours

The office hour sessions will take place on the PSF Discord server in the #psf-board channel. If you are new to Discord, make sure to check out a tutorial on how you can download the Discord app and sign up for free– then join us on the PSF Discord! To make the office hours more accessible, the office hours will be scheduled at alternating times so no matter where you are based, you can find a time that is most convenient for you! Here is a list of the dates and times:

• September 10th, 2024: 1pm UTC
• October 8th, 2024: 9pm UTC
• November 12th, 2024: 2pm UTC
• December 10th, 2024: 9pm UTC
• January 14th, 2025: 2pm UTC
• February 11th, 2025: 9pm UTC
• March 11th, 2025: 1pm UTC
• April 8th, 2025:  9pm UTC
• May 13th, 2025: 1pm UTC (Live from PyCon US!)
• June 10th, 2025: 9pm UTC
• July 9th, 2025:  1pm UTC
• August 12th, 2025: 9pm UTC

Each session lasts for an hour. Make sure to check what time these sessions are for you locally so you don't miss out! Sessions after August 13th, 2025, will be announced in the future.
 

Who will be at the office hours?

Some of the board members of the PSF will be attending each office hour, as well as members of the PSF Staff. The list of the PSF Board Directors can be found on our website. We are passionate Python community members who are happy to listen, help, and provide support to you. We are happy to follow up with you if there are any issues we cannot address immediately during the office hour sessions. As always, you can email us at psf-board@python.org with inquiries, feedback, or comments at any time.

A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We’ve looked at KCrash previously. This time we look at coredumpd.

Coredumpd

coredumpd collects all crashes happening on the system, through the core_pattern system. It is shipped as part of systemd and as such mostly available out of the box.

It is fairly sophisticated and can manage the backlog of crashes, so old crashes get cleaned out from time to time. It also tightly integrates with journald giving us a well-defined interface to access crash metadata.

But before we dive into the inner workings of coredumpd, let’s talk about cores.

What are cores?

A core, or more precisely: a core dump file, is a copy of the memory image of a process and its process status (registers, mappings, etc.) in a file. Simply put, it’s like we took a copy of the running process from RAM and stored it in a file. The purpose of such a core is that it allows us to look at a snapshot of the process at that point in time without having the process still running. Using this data, we can perform analysis of the process to figure out what exactly went wrong and how we ended up in that situation.

The advantage is that since the process doesn’t need to be running anymore, we can investigate crashes even hours or days after they happened. That is of particular use when things crash while we are not able to deal with them immediately. For example if Plasma were to crash on logout there’d be no way to deal with it besides stopping the logout, which may not even be possible anymore. Instead we let the crash drop into coredumpd, let it collect a core file, and on next login we can tell the user about the crash.

With that out of the way, it’s time to dump a core!

Core Dumps

We already talked about KCrash and how it intercepts crashes to write some metadata to disk. Once it is done it calls raise() to generate one of those core dumps we just discussed. This actually very briefly turns over control to the kernel which will more or less simply invoke the defined core_pattern process. In our case, coredumpd.

coredumpd will immediately systemd-socket-activate itself and forward the data received from the kernel. In other words: it will start an instance of systemd-coredump@.service and the actual processing will happen in there. The advantage of this is that regular systemd security configuration can be applied as well as cgroup resource control and all that jazz — the core dumping happens in a regular systemd service.

The primary task here is to actually write the dump to a file. In addition, coredumpd will also collect lots of additional metadata besides what is in the core already. Most notably various bits and pieces of /proc information such as cgroup information, mount information, the auxillary vector (auxv), etc.

Once all the data is collected a journald entry is written and the systemd-coredump@.service instance quits again.

The journal entry will contain the metadata as entry fields as well as the path of the core dump on disk, so we can later access it. It essentially serves as a key-value store for the crash data. A severely shortened version looks like this:

Tue 2024-08-27 17:52:27.593233 CEST […] COREDUMP_UID=60106 COREDUMP_GID=60106 COREDUMP_SIGNAL_NAME=SIGSYS COREDUMP_SIGNAL=31 COREDUMP_TIMESTAMP=1724773947000000 COREDUMP_COMM=wine64 COREDUMP_FILENAME=/var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.wine64.….zst … Example

Since this is all rather abstract, we can look at a trivial example to illustrate things a bit better.

Let’s open two terminals. In the first we can watch the journal for the crash to appear.

journalctl -xef SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=systemd-coredump

In the second terminal we run an instance of sleep in the background, and then trigger a segmentation fault crash.

sleep 99999999999& kill -SEGV $!

In the first terminal you’ll see the crash happening:

Aug 27 15:01:49 ajax systemd-coredump[35535]: Process 35533 (sleep) of user 60106 terminated abnormally with signal 11/SEGV, processing... Aug 27 15:01:49 ajax systemd-coredump[35549]: [🡕] Process 35533 (sleep) of user 60106 dumped core. Stack trace of thread 35533: #0 0x0000729f1b961dc0 n/a (/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 + 0x1cdc0) ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

So far so interesting. “But where is the additional data from /proc hiding?” you might wonder. We need to look at the verbose entry to see all data.

journalctl -o verbose SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=systemd-coredump

This actually already concludes coredumpd’s work. In the next post DrKonqi will step onto the stage.

#644 – AUGUST 27, 2024
View in Browser »

Exploring Astrophysics in Python With pandas and Matplotlib

This course uses three problems often covered in introductory astro-physics courses to play in Python. Along the way you’ll learn some astronomy and how to use a variety of datascience libraries like NumPy, Matplotlib, pandas, and pint.
REAL PYTHON course

What’s the Deal With setup.py, pyproject.toml and Wheels?

Packaging in Python has a bit of a history and if you’ve come across the variety of ways of specifying and building packages you might wonder “why?” This article gives you the history and current best practices.
BITECODE

Accelerate Your Data Science Workflows End-to-End Self-Paced Course

Discover how to create, accelerate, and deploy data pipelines with RAPIDS for GPU-accelerated data science workflows. Take this course for free when you join the NVIDIA Developer Program →
NVIDIA sponsor

How to Build a Query Language in Python

This guide walks you through how to build a custom query language in Python. The example given is a language to search through song lyrics.
JAMES G

Quiz: Python’s Built-in Exceptions

REAL PYTHON

Quiz: Getting Started With Testing in Python

REAL PYTHON

Articles & Tutorials Build a Blog Using Django, GraphQL, and Vue

In this step-by-step project, you’ll build a blog from the ground up. You’ll turn your Django blog data models into a GraphQL API and consume it in a Vue application for users to read. You’ll end up with an admin site and a user-facing site you can continue to refine for your own use.
REAL PYTHON

Exploring Robotics and Python Through Electronic Projects

Are you interested in learning robotics with Python? Can physical electronics-based projects grow a child’s interest in coding? This week on the show, we speak with author Marwan Alsabbagh about his book “Build Your Own Robot - Using Python, CRICKIT, and Raspberry Pi.”
REAL PYTHON podcast

How Pre-Commit Works

As a user of pre-commit hooks, do you know what happens when you run pre-commit install or why you have to run it in the first place? How does pre-commit actually work with Git? In this article, Stefanie takes you behind the scenes of how your pre-commit setup works.
STEFANIEMOLIN.COM • Shared by Stefanie Molin

Python range(): Represent Numerical Ranges

Master the Python range() function and learn how it works under the hood. You most commonly use ranges in loops. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to iterate over ranges but also identify when there are better alternatives.
REAL PYTHON

Practices of Reliable Software Design

The author was asked what he would considered if he wrote a in-memory cache. This article talks about the eight principles he would use, many of which he wouldn’t have considered when a younger developer.
TWO WRONGS

Python’s Preprocessor

Every now and then you hear outrageous claims such as “Python has no preprocessor”, well it is there if you’re willing to dig deep enough. Learn how to hack Python’s compile step.
PYDONG

500 Python Interpreters

Work continues on removing and/or optimizing the GIL in Python. This article gives a little history so you can better understand why the GIL is there and what changes are coming.
IZZY MUERTE

Python Top Language of 2024

“Python continues to cement its overall dominance, buoyed by things like popular libraries for hot fields such as A.I.” Read the article to see where other languages have placed.
IEEE SPECTRUM

10 Python Programming Optimization Techniques

Optimization should be your last step, but once you’re there, just what can you do? This article covers ten different techniques that address memory size and code performance.
JAMES ONONIWU

uv: Unified Python Packaging

A new release of of uv is out and it has added a lot of features. This post talks about what is new and how it can simplify your packaging process.
SIMON WILLISON

PyPI Slashes Malware Response Time

“PyPI has drastically improved its malware response times, resolving 90% of issues in under 24 hours and removing 900 projects since March 2024.”
SARAH GOODING

Projects & Code Gists-Gone, a CLI for Bulk Deleting Your Github Gists

GITHUB.COM/BEN-N93 • Shared by Ben Nour

deltadb: A Lightweight Database Built on Polars and Deltalake

GITHUB.COM/UNAME-N

django-public-admin: A Public and Read-Only Django Admin

GITHUB.COM/CUDUCOS

sqlfluff: A Modular SQL Linter and Auto-Formatter

GITHUB.COM/SQLFLUFF

authentik: The Authentication Glue You Need

GITHUB.COM/GOAUTHENTIK

Events Weekly Real Python Office Hours Q&A (Virtual)

August 28, 2024
REALPYTHON.COM

PyCon PL 2024

August 29 to September 1, 2024
PYCON.ORG

SPb Python Drinkup

August 29, 2024
MEETUP.COM

PythOnRio Meetup

August 31, 2024
PYTHON.ORG.BR

Melbourne Python Users Group, Australia

September 2, 2024
J.MP

EARL 2024

September 4 to September 6, 2024
DATACOVE.CO.UK

PyCon Estonia 2024

September 5 to September 7, 2024
PYCON.EE

Happy Pythoning!
This was PyCoder’s Weekly Issue #644.
View in Browser »

[ Subscribe to 🐍 PyCoder’s Weekly 💌 – Get the best Python news, articles, and tutorials delivered to your inbox once a week >> Click here to learn more ]

KubeCon China 2024 was a whirlwind of innovation, community and technical deep dives. As it often happens at these community events, I was blown away by the energy, enthusiasm and sheer amount of knowledge being shared. Here are three key takeaways that stood out to me:

1. The focus on AI and machine learning

AI and machine learning are increasingly integrated into cloud-native applications. At KubeCon China, I saw numerous demonstrations of how these technologies are being used to automate tasks, optimize resource utilization and improve application performance. From AI-powered observability tools to machine learning-driven anomaly detection, the potential for AI and ML in the cloud-native space is astounding.

Mer Joyce and Anni Lai introduced the new draft of the Open Source AI Definition (v.0.0.9) and the Model Openness Framework. 

We also saw a robot on stage demonstrating that teaching a robotic arm to use a spoon to help disabled people is not a programming issue but a data issue. This was probably my biggest learning moment: A robot can be “taught” to execute tasks by imitating humans. Follow Xavier Tao and the dora-rs project.

2. The growing maturity of cloud-native technologies

It’s clear that cloud-native technologies have come of age. From Kubernetes adoption to the rise of serverless platforms and edge computing, the ecosystem is thriving. In his keynote, Chris Aniszczyk announced over 200 projects are hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and half of the contributors are not in the US. The conference showcased a wide range of tools, frameworks and use cases that demonstrate the versatility and scalability of cloud-native architectures.

The presentation by Kevin Wang (Huawei) and Saint Jiang (NIO) showed how Containerd, Kubernetes and KubeEdge power the transition to electric vehicles. Modern cars are computers… no, cars are full datacenters on wheels, a collection of sensors feeding distributed applications to optimize battery usage, feeding into centralized programs to constantly improve the whole mobility system.

3. AI technology is removing the language barrier

I was absolutely amazed by being able to follow the keynote sessions delivered in Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese but I could read the automatic translation in real time superimposed on the slides behind the speakers. This technology is absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing! Within a few years, there won’t be a career for simultaneous translators or for live transcribers.

Final thoughts

KubeCon + AI_Dev China was a testament to the power of Open Source collaboration hosted in one of the most amazing regions of the world. The conference brought together developers, operators and end-users from around the world to share their experiences, best practices and contributions to Open Source projects. This collaborative spirit is essential for driving innovation and ensuring the long-term success of cloud-native technologies.

BOSTON (August 27, 2024) -- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board Member Odile Bénassy has stepped down from the Board after four years of service.

There’s a concept that I’ve heard called by a lot of different names, but my favorite name for it is “the Highlander problem”, which refers to the catchphrase of the campy-yet-still-quite-fun Highlander movie/TV franchise. In Highlander, immortal beings secretly live amongst us and sword-fight each other in hopes of being the last one standing, who will then get to rule the world forever. And when one of them is about to eliminate another, …

Read full entry

At Drupal GovCon 2024, an analysis of Federal government websites revealed Drupal as the leading CMS, powering 55% of identifiable sites. The presentation highlighted Drupal’s superiority in accessibility, with 9 of the top 10 most accessible government sites using the platform. Emphasizing the importance of Web Vitals, the discussion urged agencies to prioritize customer experience through performance improvements.

Here at KDE neon tower we have been busy rebasing our KDE software builds from Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) to Ubuntu 24.04 (noble). This always takes longer than you’d think, mostly because it’s a moving target so we also have to keep updating the incoming releases from Plasma, Frameworks, Gear and even Calligra. We had a couple of delays when Jonathan caught Covid (4 years after it was worth sympathy to do so) and then the build server had issues and needed itself rebuilding. But the package archives are there and the Docker images are there and today the first ISO got built which boots successfully. Next steps are making sure all the software is up to date and getting the upgrade solid. Be with you soon!

First KDE neon ISO based on Noble

The Breeze icons used in message boxes always felt a little odd with a status icon placed inside some kind of speech bubble, effectively an icon within an icon. Three months ago they got replaced by more simplistic ones that I felt didn’t fit very well either. Therefore I put my Inkscape skills to the test and created a new set of Breeze-style dialog icons.

As you may know I have a secret passion for vector graphics. I am not very good at it but I love that you have proper shapes and objects to work with as opposed to a mush of pixels. Sure, more sophisticated graphics programs have layers and masks and what not but my proficiency there doesn’t go much beyond Kolourpaint. More importantly, though, I can easily copy paste together various bits and pieces of other icons to implement the icon I had in mind.

A few of the file icons I have worked on but didn’t finish (feel free to take as an inspiration)

Over the years I have created a couple of Breeze icons, mostly for (exotic) file types since I am on a quest to have a thumbnailer or at least a proper icon for every file type imaginable. Take for example the Apple Wallet icon we use for KDE Itinerary, our fantastic travel companion app: it’s just a ZIP file with a JSON description and graphical assets for a boarding pass or event ticket. I used a generic blue file icon combined with the wallet-open icon. My original idea was actually a plane alongside a QR code but I couldn’t help but view it as a plane that crashed into a building.

The other day I received concert tickets in the form of an Apple Wallet bundle which contains multiple passes, something I didn’t know existed and probably didn’t back when I created the original icon. For this purpose I used the generic package icon in the same light blue, zipper shifted to the right to match the Android APK icon, and wallet emblem added.

How the Apple Wallet passes icon came to be

Friday night I sat down to finally create some new dialog icons for error, warning, question, and information. Breeze come with has shield-shaped security icons similar to the message box icons we used to have. I just wanted a triangle with a Breeze-style gradient and angled drop shadow, how hard can it be? I ended up twisting the security-medium icon (an orange shield with exclamation mark), removing nodes, stretching objects, and straightening Bezier curves until I got what I wanted.

For the error icon I initially wanted a simple circle with an X. This time security-low (a red shield with a cross) served as a base. I drew a simple circle and used the shield’s gradient as fill. I couldn’t figure out how to bend the shield-like outline at the bottom to match the circle so I went looking for a similar circular icon I could steal it from. Luckily, there was exactly one circular 64 px icon I could copy. For question and information I also used purple and blue circles, respectively.

First iteration of the new dialog-error icon

Afterwards I figured I probably want a different shape for the error icon so it’s not all circles and to keep it from looking like a close button. That’s actually the main reason our message widget lost its icon, people confused the error symbol on the left with a close button to dismiss the message. I checked what other icon themes did and found squares were quite popular (also used by the KDE 4 Oxygen theme) as well as octagons. I tried a square by modifying the utilities-terminal (Konsole) icon but that just looked way too massive. After consulting the KDE Visual Design Group we settled on an octagon like a stop sign (reminds me of the glorious Windows 3.1 days which used an actual stop sign). Finally, Janet Blackquill and Andy Betts gave the icons some finishing touches and needed polish, taking into account our Colorful Icon HIG.

This post illustrates (in more than one sense of the word) nicely that contributing to KDE is more than writing actual source code. Creating artwork, writing translations, doing promo work, managing IT infrastructure, and of course hosting community events like Akademy is just as important for a community to thrive!

This course covers two problems from introductory astronomy to help you play with some Python libraries. You’ll use Astropy, NumPy, Matplotlib, and pandas to find planet conjunctions, and graph the best viewing times for a star.

In this course you’ll learn about:

• Astronomy concepts of conjunction and optimal viewing
• The Python package Astropy
• Using pandas to process data
• Building graphs with Matplotlib
• Python’s warning module

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

The back-end heart of Experience Builder (XB) is its two-property field type. Thanks to Ted “tedbow” Bowman, the tree field property is now strictly validated, which is essential to ensure both data integrity and the ability to evolve the codebase rapidly and confidently. Crucially, this validation constraint is used to validate both content and configuration, just like the validation that was added in week 10.

That validation finally unblocked #3446722: Introduce an example set of representative SDC components; transition from “component list” to “component tree”: now that Ted landed the necessary validation, it makes sense to add Kyle “ctrladel” Einecker’s set of Single Directory Components (SDCs) that Lauri has confirmed to well represent the spectrum of SDC functionality XB must support.
Ted will change the default component tree that XB configures for articles, so that we’ll start seeing Kyle’s two_column SDC by default!

To assist Ted, I updated the XB field type’s computed hydrated property to support hydrating component trees instead of just component lists, and updated the “preview” route to use that logic 1.
Ted already landed validation, I took care of rendering, so now Ted can focus on the remaining bits … because until now, we’d been testing/developing XB with only a handful of sample components — we fully expect this to reveal a bunch of missing things. That’s exactly why getting a representative set of SDCs into the XB codebase is important, even if eventually they may only be used in tests.

Hopefully that will land next week!

Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.

Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!

For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!

Hearing the term “routing” in a Drupal context typically means “server-side routing”. But for an extensive JS application, client-side routing is important too: it allows sharing a URL with a friend/colleague to invite them to collaborate on a particular bit in the content being created. That’s why Jesse “jessebaker” Baker and Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins landed client-side routing for XB, after having asked for feedback from the community on which direction to take (thanks Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri, Ronald “roaguicr” Aguilar, Kyle and Lee “larowlan” Rowlands for your input!), landed on React Router. The implementation will likely evolve, but a basic implementation is now in place, and includes test coverage.

Related to routing, but on the back-end side: Lee updated XB’s server-side routes to expect an entity type + ID, rather than hardcoding them all to node one. This is a welcome improvement, but would not have happened if not for Lee or somebody else in the community: for the team working full-time on XB this isn’t a priority yet, because we’re prioritizing the hard stuff — the known unknowns. Still, we definitely welcome MRs like these, and will happily review & merge them!

I know y’all are waiting for interesting progress on the experience of using XB — this week’s key progress on that front is brought to you by Ben!
Choosing a component to pick just based on the name might be okay … but an instantaneous visual preview would be better, right? That’s exactly what he landed in #3462636:

Previewing a component upon hovering it in the component list. Components temporarily have a loud background color. Issue #3462636, image by Ben.

The funniest bugfix of the week is brought to you by Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”: the SDC prop labels were present on field widgets, but were invisible :D

Finally, in the “improve DX & velocity” department, the eslint prettier configuration was updated, which gets us closer to Drupal core’s configuration for JS. Thanks to Ivan “finnsky” Berdinsky, Ben, Gaurav “gauravvvv”, Daniel “DanielVeza”, Lee and harumi “hooroomoo” Jang — Harumi captured the impact well:

Looks good! Will save headaches

:)

Computing a StorablePropShape

Back to the back-end side, to end this week’s update in a very deep place (but also a very interesting place!): XB gained the ability to compute a field type + storage settings + instance settings for a given SDC prop shape (the normalized subset of an SDC prop’s JSON schema that affects the shape of data it expects — the title, description, examples etc. in the JSON schema are irrelevant from this point of view; I named this a PropShape).
Until now, XB has only been using matching. But that can only get us so far — for example, SDCs often have props whose JSON schema looks like this:

style: type: string enum: - primary - secondary

To populate this SDC prop, XB must store a string (logical choice: Drupal core’s string field type), but not just any string: only primary or secondary. Drupal core has an answer for this too: the list_string field type. But the matching that was hitherto used requires either a field type that allows precisely those 2 values, or an existing list_string field instance that is configured to allow those 2 values. Clearly, that’s likely to result in zero matches, because the chances are vanishingly small that a Drupal site has a pre-existing field instance configured exactly like that. And that is just one example: many SDCs will have different allowed values.

That’s where computing rather than matching becomes relevant: use logic to compute what exact shape (in this case: a type: string that also specifies an enum: […]) requires which field type (list_string) and which corresponding field storage+instance settings (here only storage settings: allowed_values: [ {value: primary, label: primary}, {value: secondary, label: secondary} ]). The computed result is represented by a StorablePropShape.

And that is necessary for XB users to fully benefit from the work Ted is doing on #3446722: many of those representative SDCs are indeed using enum: otherwise you’d not be able to edit component instances that will be placeable once Ted’s done!

This infrastructure also paves the path to something else: allowing those computed field type + widget decisions to be altered. For example, when the Media Library module is installed and a media type that uses the image MediaSource plugin is present, an SDC with a prop that expects an image should no longer use the image field type + widget, but the Media Library widget. So I worked with Ted and Ben to introduce hook_storable_prop_shape_alter(), and made XB implement it on behalf of the media_library module.

This doesn’t mean that matching goes away: that will remain relevant for identifying which existing structured data can be used to populate an SDC prop. Much more work is needed to make XB’s matching ability complete, but that work is for after the 0.1.0 goals for DrupalCon Barcelona.

Week 12 was July 29–August 4, 2024.

1. Instead of having its own logic that was somewhat different: DRY. ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• Previewing a component upon hovering it in the component list. Components temporarily have a loud background color.

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, August 30 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

Calligra is the office and graphics suite developed by KDE and is the successor to KOffice. With some traditional parts like Kexi and Plan having an independent release schedule, this release only contains the four following components:

• Calligra Words: Word Processor
• Calligra Sheets: Spreadsheet Application
• Calligra Stage: Presentation Application
• Karbon: Vector Graphics Editor

The most significant updates are that Calligra has been fully transitioned to Qt6 and KF6, along with a major overhaul of its user interface.

General

Words, Sheets, and Stage now feature a new sidebar design. Currently, this is implemented using a proxy style, which will no longer be necessary once the related merge request in Breeze is merged.

Sidebar with the new immutable tab design

I revamped the content of each sidebar tab, addressing various visual glitches and making the spacing much more consistent.

The “Custom Shape” docker has been removed, and custom shapes are now accessible through a popup menu in the toolbar across all Calligra applications.

Custom shapes popup

Regarding the toolbar, I streamlined the default layout by removing basic actions like copy, cut, and paste.

The settings dialogs were also cleaned up and are now using the new FlatList style also used by System Settings and most Kirigami applications.

Settings Dialog

Words

Word now features the new sidebar design, and the main view uses a shadow to define the document borders.

Calligra Words

The Style Manager and Page Layout dialog were also updated.

Style Manager

Page Layout

Stage

Stage didn’t really change aside of the sidebar redesign. But I am using it to work on my slides for Akademy and it is a pretty solid choice.

Calligra Stage

The tooltip for the slides are now compatible with Wayland.

Tooltip showing a slide

Calligra Sheets

As part of the Qt6 port, Sheets lost its scripting system based on the unmaintained Kross framework. In the future, it would be possible to add Python scriping, thanks to the work of Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano on getting Python bindings for the KDE Frameworks.

Visually a noticable change is that the cell editor moved from a docker positioned on the left of the spreadsheet view by default to a normal widget on the top. This takes a lot less space which can be used by the spreadsheet.

Calligra Sheets

Karbon

Karbon didn’t received much change outside of the one affecting the whole platform.

Karbon

Launcher

The intial window when opening one of the Calligra application was redesign and adopted the new “frameless style”.

Custom Document tab of the launcher page

Template tab of the launcher page

Other

• Braindump is now able to compile again, but since it lacks an active maintainer, the component is disabled in release builds.

• The webshape plugin has been ported from the outdated QtWebkit module to QtWebEngine and is no longer exclusive to Braindump. This means you can now embed websites directly into your word documents, slides, and spreadsheets.

Webshape

• The AppStream id of every components is prefixed by org.kde.calligra. This allow Flatpak to expose every Calligra applications to your application launcher.

Get Involved

Calligra needs your support! You can contribute by getting involved in development, providing new or updated templates, or making a donation to KDE e.V.. Join the discussion in our Matrix channel.

Credits

This release would not have been possible without the high quality mockups provided by Manuel Jesús de la Fuente. Also big thanks to everyone who contributed to this Calligra release: Evgeniy Harchenko, Dmitrii Fomchenkov and bob sayshilol.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) design are the backbone of any successful digital product. They don’t just create pretty interfaces—they shape how users interact with your website or app. A well-crafted UX and UI keep users engaged, make their journey smooth, and leave them satisfied. When done right, they turn casual visitors into loyal users. In this article, you'll learn what UX is, how it differs from UI design, and why both are crucial in crafting engaging, intuitive experiences for users. We'll break down the UX design process, from research to testing, and highlight key goals like accessibility, usability, and delight.  What is UX UX is all about how someone interacts with a digital product. It’s the user’s thoughts, feelings, and actions before, during, and after they use it. Good UX meets their needs efficiently and leaves them with a positive vibe. It’s not just about usability—it’s about making sure it’s accessible, useful, and emotionally satisfying too. UX vs UI: The Ketchup Bottle Example To get the difference between UX and UI, think about a ketchup bottle: UI: This is the look and feel of the ketchup bottle—the shape, color, label design, and even the texture. UI design is all about making it visually appealing and easy to interact with. UX: UX goes beyond just the bottle. It’s everything about how you use the ketchup and how it makes you feel. From how easy it is to open, to the consistency and taste, to your overall satisfaction. UX design focuses on making sure every part of your experience, from start to finish, works smoothly and leaves you happy. Image Source: UXDesign.CC Image Source: Patrick Hansen.com In a nutshell, UI is all about the look and feel of a product's interface. UX, on the other hand, covers the whole user experience. It’s about making sure interactions are meaningful, intuitive, and match what users need and expect. Looking to boost engagement and increase conversion rates with expert UI/UX design and research services? Let’s create a website your users will love. Talk to us today. Goals of UX: Accessibility, Usability, Utility, Delight Effective UX design revolves around four key goals: Accessibility: Design for everyone. Accessibility means making digital products usable for people with all abilities. It’s about adding features that cater to diverse needs so everyone can access and use the product easily. Usability: Keep it simple and engaging. Usability is all about reducing friction and making sure users can accomplish their tasks smoothly and with satisfaction. Utility: Make it useful. Utility means ensuring the product does what users need it to do. It’s about understanding what users want and designing features that meet those needs. Delight: Add a little joy. Delight is about creating experiences that evoke positive emotions and build loyalty by surprising and exceeding user expectations. Now, let’s talk about the UX of a banana: Accessibility: The peel is easy to remove, whether you like it ripe or unripe. Usability: It’s straightforward to eat, with minimal mess. Utility: Bananas provide quick energy and nutrition. Delight: They smell great, taste good, and even come in biodegradable packaging. Green Banana: Not ready for consumption yet—still ripening. Best to wait for optimal flavor and texture. Brown Banana: Overripe—Not ideal for eating fresh; may be too mushy. The outside color clearly signals that it’s not suitable for immediate consumption. A perfect example of a banana. Image Source: accubits A perfect banana vs. rotten banana. UX Design Process A process is a mix of different methods all aimed at one goal: creating a delightful user experience. It’s a structured sequence of stages designed to understand what users need and improve the final product to go beyond their expectations. Research:The first step is research. This means talking to users through interviews and surveys to gather insights into their preferences, expectations, and challenges. We also analyze data from tools like Google Analytics to spot user patterns and behaviors. Checking out what competitors are doing gives us a look at industry standards and opportunities for improvement. Analysis:Next up is analysis. We take all that data and look for patterns and insights that can guide our design. Creating user personas helps us represent key user types. Journey mapping shows us the user experience step by step, highlighting where things go right or wrong. Defining user goals helps us focus on features that make the biggest impact. Design:Design is at the heart of everything. Here, we come up with solutions that meet user needs and align with business goals. We start with wireframing—simple sketches that outline key screens and interactions. Then, we build interactive prototypes to test how users will interact with the design. Finally, we add visual elements like branding, typography, and colors to make the design look and feel just right. Testing:Once the designs are ready, we move to testing. We let real users interact with the prototype to see how it works for them. Usability testing helps us spot any issues and gather feedback. We refine the design based on this feedback, ensuring it’s as user-friendly and satisfying as possible. By following this structured UX design process, teams can keep improving the user experience. The result? A product that not only meets but exceeds user expectations and aligns with business goals. Each stage adds valuable insights, making sure the design is user-centered and effective. Final thoughts UX/UI design matters because it affects how appealing and functional a product is. By focusing on accessibility, usability, utility, and delight, designers create experiences that resonate with users, boosting engagement and satisfaction. This approach is especially important in Drupal development, ensuring that websites and apps are not just visually appealing but also optimized for a great user experience.