Always great to be attending the one of the best #operas in the world (#carmen , put on by one of the best companies in the world (I might be biased)! #capetown

Great to have Richard Gevars from the South African Digital Services Unit talking at the City of #capetown about the (latest) #digital transformation of the #southafrica government. As he says, hopefully this one sticks! #civictech #data

I was only made aware of this (frankly awesome) case of LLM poisoning today: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y. A researcher made up a disease and published two evidently fake preprints about it (including sentences such as “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up […]

For all the permutations, you're (particularly) appreciated today (cartoon by Mari Andrew)

🆕 blog! “NHS Goes To War Against Open Source” The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still […]

#startrek #voyager #tgif

It only took me two years - but, I've finally published my Drakensberg Trip Report Blog, recounting favourite and daily memories from my multi-day #BackPacking trip across the #SouthAfrica #Mountain range. If you'd like to read about it, and see some of the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Back of the envelope calculation was that it would take about a hectare of spekboom to offset the carbon emissions of my 2010 Honda Jazz. Given that it grows in fairly crummy soil, and really doesn't need a lot of care, again back of the envelope, the cost came to a few thousand rand per month […]

#ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is released! https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-lts-resolute-raccoon Well done to all those involved, this is an excellent release!

I can't imagine much that beats Cape Town in Autumn. The heat of summer has left, but winter is running late (probably the traffic). The coastal walk along the coast from Muizenberg to Kalk Bay is one of the nicest things you can do. #capetown #southafrica

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116341596656110215 Been quite a while since humans have been in a position to take photos like this!

RE: https://mastodon.africa/@GrahamDowns/116327682342438447 😬

Very niche post but I didn't realise my favourite clothing brand, Jonsson Workwear, has an entirely African (Lestho, Mauritius and South Africa) supply chain, which they control. They'll also fix any of their clothes for free, which is quite a statement of confidence.

Happy #commonwealthday to everyone in the club

@HolosDiscover follow

One of the weirder cold contacts I've gotten: > I cannot write this email opener. > > The research signals explicitly disqualify this contact and company. City of Cape Town operates municipal infrastructure (water, sanitation, electricity, waste) with no database technology stack, distributed […]

Nothing to make you feel *l33t* like setting up #openwrt on your home network. Such great #foss tech that makes very modest commodity hardware fly!

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

Hello from South Africa! #helloworld #southafrica #language #linguistics

JOB: Research Scientist at Wikimedia "We’re hiring a Research Scientist strongly committed to the principles of free knowledge, open source, privacy, and collaboration to join the Research team. As a Research Scientist, you will conduct applied research on the integrity of Wikipedia knowledge […]

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! (To those observing, of course)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/115724716433423512 Great bit of thinking through what Goodhart's Law is really trying to articulate. It comes up fairly often at work, where we're often in the odd position of trying to convince people to use a more slippery and ambiguous "outcome" […]

Low key product launch to end the year: https://cct-development-management-bot.cct-datascience.xyz/index.html It's a long story, but we've put out a very niche RAG bot relating to development management in #capetown #southafrica Please give it a whirl, and let us know what you think! […]

This year is refusing to let go, in terms of busyness, but there are signs that I'm winning...

Right after graduating in 2015, I was offered a job at the #bbc, working on scaling iPlayer. Well, continuing to scale iPlayer. It's one of my great what ifs. It's an organisation I hugely admire, for many of the reasons that it is being attacked so viciously right now. Truth matters. Finding […]

Another year, another article from a Ruby person saying they avoided #python because of its "one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do things" attitude. Two points: 1. The load-bearing word is not "one", or even "preferably": it's "obvious". If something comes along that is more […]

4 Senior Data Engineers Answer 10 Top Reddit Questions https://motherduck.com/blog/data-engineers-answer-10-top-reddit-questions/ #dataengineering

Good morning from the global #dpi summit in #capetown! Opening remarks from Nandan Nilekani of InfoSys and Sanjay Jain of the Gates Foundation

If you're getting to the weekend, and really grateful, maybe you're doing the wrong job? Come build cool stuff at the City of #capetown instead! https://fosstodon.org/@Gord1i/115462447955764486

We have another #data job at the City of #capetown, this time for a Senior #dataengineer We build & support data-intensive systems, not just digital plumbing! We're looking for strong software eng skills & open-source focus (Airflow, Trino, Python). Come work on interesting problems with a […]

This is clever! https://dsi.nextcloud.com

I really like this interview with Guido von Rossum, Python creator and original Benevalent Dictator for Life (BDfL) of Python development. The questions keep pushing AI as something formidable to be looking forward to, and most of the answers are either a) AI is not special in many regards; b) […]

@pyconza and @pyconafrica let's goooo!!!! Will do my normal conference thread in due course

Very excited for @pyconza &/ @pyconau (they've joined forces this year) this coming week, not in the least because I'll be talking about our experience building a RAG bot at the City of #capetown - https://za.pycon.org/talks/266-not-losing-our-rag-a-thoughtful-approach-to-knowledge-bots/ I […]

Heh, I get 1 minute free for every 3 minutes someone calls me and Voice-powered spambot does not appear to hang up when you put it on hold. Currently on 11 minutes - let's see how long I can keep this going...

One last push - these posts close EoD on Sunday, so why not apply? https://fosstodon.org/@Gord1i/115059983055985430

One last push - these posts close EoD on Sunday, so why not apply? https://fosstodon.org/@Gord1i/115059983055985430

I'm going to do some longer post on our new #data jobs at the City of #capetown over the next day or two. I would greatly appreciate it if you could read, and share with anyone that you think has the right stuff! And also just boost for general reach. Something that we really prioritise, other […]

We have a slate of jobs opening up - apologies, only have a LinkedIn link for now: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/delyno-dutoit_city-of-cape-town-jobs-linkedin-activity-7361684604451221504-hJb1 Will update and do a longer thread when I have the job application URLs #getfedihired #data […]

Come work with me at the City of #capetown - https://uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/2025-08/com-e25810-datascientist-jpal-saldru-soe.pdf The job says data scientist, but really this is a #dataengineering position. We run a decent Open Source, modern data stack, but what sets us apart is our […]

Evergreen post - the longer I work in government, the more I end up repeating bits verbatim https://theatl.social/@ShmosKnows/114881277746999591

Come work with me at the City of #capetown - https://uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/2025-08/com-e25810-datascientist-jpal-saldru-soe.pdf The job says data scientist, but really this is a #dataengineering position. We run a decent Open Source, modern data stack, but what sets us apart is our […]

With the launch of Ghost 6.0, every publication that runs on Ghost becomes part of the #fediverse. You can follow and comment on Platformer or 404 Media articles without leaving your Mastodon feed. This is the future of social media. Congratulations to @johnonolan and all the team at Ghost!

A fixture of the local and continental #python, @PyConUK has done well with their keynote this year! https://fosstodon.org/@PyConUK/114952309897869774

Do you think his user agent string is "Gecko"? Considering we're hitting -4°C at night, you've got to get warmth wherever you can find it! #dadjokes

Number 35k! https://mastodon.africa/@coct_service_alerts/114818015707394307

🚧 Burst Water Main Alert in Vredehoek 📍 Clifford Avenue ⏰ Jul 8, 1:00 PM. Water streaming down the road; motorists should exercise caution. Maintenance team on-site for repairs. Use request number 9120304951 for updates. #waterandsanitation #capetown Content generated automatically from […]

It's a small thing, the syntactic sugar of using `/` to concatenate paths and strings is reason enough to use pathlib. And then you find out about all the built in methods... https://mastodon.social/@treyhunner/114778741547764668

Those who use #python for Data Science. Have you explored Polars? Or built production-grade applications with this? Coming from #rstats , Polars feels more intuitive (and apparently it is much faster!) #datascience