jpt.sh

I wound up doing some nice tool upgrades this year.

I just want to host some HTML… For years I hosted my static sites on AWS CloudFront, but about six years ago, in an effort to move away from Amazon, I wound up on Netlify.

I’ve released a new Python library for making HTTP requests to less-than-reliable websites: careful repo careful documentation It offers: configurable retries. retry on timeouts or other errors, with exponential back-off. simple request throttling. set a…

learn to like your terminal I’ve met a lot of people that have learned to use the terminal just enough for it to remain a perpetually frustrating experience.

I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts since April.

In the spring, I teach a project-based software engineering course titled Software Engineering for Civic Tech.

As mentioned in my last post, this was my third year teaching CAPP 30122, the second CS course in the program I teach in.

I’ve decided to make the course notes public for a course I just finished teaching for the third time.

I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in civic tech.

(Notes from a brief introduction I gave at the 10th Annual Civic Scopeathon, put on by my students.

A while back I got asked to do a usesthis.com interview, and it is now up here: https://usesthis.com/interviews/james.turk/.

I’d had this draft ready and fortuitously found out today is World Wide Web Day even though nobody knows why.

Back in 2010, my colleague Michael created a Python library with C implementations of a bunch of common string distance algorithms.

Media Party 2023 Presentation: Web Scraping with GPT Media Party is a conference that “facilitates the intersection between the media and technology industry in an innovative, international and hands-on way.”

A couple of days ago I wrote about using GPT-4 to automate web scraping.

(Part 2 now available: Automated Scraping with GPT-4, Part 2) Like most people I know, I’ve been watching the pace of improvements to LLMs like ChatGPT and GPT-4 with a mix of awe and trepidation.

Update August 2025 VS Code is clearly deep down the path of enshittification.

What We Lost If you’re around my age, you remember an internet dominated by niche message boards.

Earlier this week, Django 3.1 beta 1 was released.

May 29th, 2007 On May 29th 2007 I’d been living in DC for a little under a week.

Like many developers, I’ve written my own blog software half a dozen times.

Note: Another old one that I thought was interesting enough to migrate.

Note: An old post I brought over because at least two people started small dotfiles projects based on this :) I now use chezmoi for this!

Note: an old post from 2008… not the best post but a nostalgic look back at my introduction to organizing developers.

Note: This is an old post from a blog I had in 2007, I put it up here for posterity.