James Bennett (b-list.org)

Everybody seems to agree we’re in the middle of something, though what, exactly, seems to be up for debate. It might be an unprecedented revolution in productivity and capabilities, perhaps even the precursor to a technological “singularity” beyond which it’s impossible to guess what the world might look like. It might be just another vaporware hype cycle that will blow over. It might be a dot-com-style bubble that will lead to a big crash but still leave us with something useful (the way the...

Way back in 2005, lots of people (ordinary people, not just people who work in tech) used to have personal blogs where they wrote about things, rather than using third-party short-form social media sites. I was one of those people (though I wasn’t yet blogging on this specific site, which launched the following year). And back in 2005, and even earlier, people liked to have comment sections on their blogs where readers could leave their thoughts on posts. And that was an absolute magnet for s...

A few years ago at work, I had a project which offered an opportunity to look at the new generation of async-first, type-hint-driven Python web frameworks. For reasons which aren’t particularly relevant today, on that project I ended up choosing Litestar, which is the one that doesn’t have a ravenous all-consuming hype machine surrounding it. And I’m very glad I did, because today I’m more convinced than ever it was the right choice, and for the last 18 months or so every new project I’ve sta...