A few months ago I wrapped up some work on a fun little project I developed for some teaching exercises. Let me tell you about it!

If you're a nerd like me, you can probably think of your favorite self-hosted application right now. Better yet, you can probably think of all the reasons you love it. You know, one of the staples of a great self-hosted application is its ability to make the configuration your own and do so easily! I've been working on a number of little applications lately and they all need configuration, so I've started setting this up with the help of Python and TOML!

Somehow, I've managed to build quite a few random Python package, and contribute to others. I've recently been working towards converting all of the Python projects I manage to the new pyproject.toml standards for packaging, and I've recently had to work through an interesting little challenge for some of the projects which only contain a sigle Python file. No module folder, no __init__.py. Just a single file.

Finally! Python 3.11 is out! It's new, it's fast(er than previous Python versions), and it's got some dandy new features. And if you wanted to know how I go about putting it on a Windows machine, let me show you...

Model railroading has always played close to new technology. I mean, after all Lionel used an electric motor back when they were still relatively new to make the first electric toy train. I'm continuing in that tradition, but doing it at my own speed, making an electric toy train speed-control that I can control from the palm of my hand. That's right, from my phone!

We all love our pets, but nobody likes cleaning up after them when they "do their business," right? Well, I'm in that same boat. It's the reason I have a "Cat Closet," where my automatic litterbox is located. Trouble is, when he uses it, that thing gets to stinkin' - and pretty quick too! Thus, I've come to a resolution with a new home-automation system. I call it "ScentAssist." Let me explain...

What better way to learn, then by doing. That, after all, is the ethos of 4-H. The very esence of how 4-H teaches youth effective life-skills every day. This "photo upload app" that I've been working on relies on some of the newest, prettiest, fanciest web framework technologies available to make the common user-interaction experience very smooth so that youth may engage in digital activities easily, without having to learn new hoops to jump through. Still, it's being built for youth, by youth, so wouldn't it be disappointing if there weren't aspects that were clearly touched by youth? Clearly inspired by them? Sharing their energy and creativity?

Over the last few months, I've been working with a 4-H member to develop and build a smart, simple, and elegant web-application for 4-H members to upload photos they take while participating in a youth conference. Since I'm working with a 4-H member to develop the website, everything needs to have a focus on education, and I need to spend as little time as possible fussing with the infrastructure side of things, since that's not what we're focusing on. I decided that we should make a system using my self-hosted GitLab and Jenkins instances to automagically deploy changes so that the youth doesn't have to learn how that's done, and fight with the server all the time!

Shadow boxes deserve a shadow... right? Well, if there's a shadow, there has to be some light! That's what I've been working on; adding a little intelligent lighting to my shadow boxes! But, I've also been going crazy in the kitchen with some lights around the cabinets.

So if you're gonna use Python to help bring photos from youth together; how, exactly, do you do it? This article will look at how we're using Lychee, Python, FastAPI, and React.js to make an ultra-simple, highly effective photo upload service for a youth conference.