2026, Setting Up

This is part of my weekly notes, note-taking, and sometimes reading later. I have never been consistent with newsletters. I hope this changes that...

Shipped

Articles and Newsletter Scraper Automations

• Updated my articles and newsletter automation scripts to get quality and more reliable content from specific sources. I made my list of sources more intentional, instead of scraping all of dev.to and Medium articles (filtered by tags): https://github.com/achingachris/automations
• I added a newsletter scraper: https://github.com/achingachris/automations/tree/main/daily-newsletters

Startup

• Haaafla is back live, again... I made so many mistakes last year on the startup. I'm doing better this year: https://haaafla.chrisdevcode.com/
• No crazy features — just normal buy ticket user flows

Work

• Building a data lake, started in Dec 2025. My PR was merged successfully (happy!)

Learned/Learning

• How to carefully use LLMs for my code, making me a better executor
• Database indexing and caching — making queries faster. I am using a Postgres DB
• Task scheduling using Django-Q (I don't like it though, thinking of switching to Celery)

Broke / Fixing

• My lookup scripts and APIs are not looking "it" up well. Super buggy (Django + Postgres)
• My scraping skills are kinda rusty, need to keep up

Top Reads (Articles and Newsletters)

Newsletters

• Django News Issue 318 - the 2025 reviews are super great!
• Django News Issue 320 - the djangopackages updates
• TSBT56: Morning Pages - Velda shares some cool and insightful resources. I loved How AI fixed my procrastination.

Articles

• Preparing for conference sprints
• Your AI coding agents need a manager
• AI writes code faster. Your job is still to prove it works.

Podcasts

• Building a Django API Framework Faster than FastAPI - Farhan Ali Raza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4V6dy5rLg

• Phones Cost More, but This Camera Is Free?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfycp2kvOQg

Events & Conferences

• None that I am aware of or attending this week.
• I did a fireside chat: Allouve Fireside Chat: Technology for Social Impact