September 2025 – Made by Mikal

Tensorflow, ROCm, and version mismatches

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 21, 2025
Post category:Machine learning Python

I’ve fallen into this pattern where I do an hour or so of self-directed learning in the mornings before going to work. Until recently it was an excellent CMU course on the design of SQL database systems, which I’ve mentioned previously here. I’ve finished that, so I thought I would do something shorter and fun as a break before finding another course to do. I chose The freeCodeCamp.org hot dog or not hot dog tensorflow course. 90 minutes seemed achievable, and I too wish to know if an object in front of me is a hot dog or not.

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High level themes from CloudCon 2025

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 11, 2025
Post category:Conference

I've just been in Sydney for a couple of days for CloudCon 2025. I think depending on how you count this is my third one of these events -- the event has changed names at least twice, so its actually a little hard to work out the lineage of the event. This year's conference was noticeably smaller than last years which is confusing to me for an event which is so competitively priced and branded so heavily with the hot topics dejour. That said the event was well run, in a good venue, and well worth the time. That is, this event really deserves more support than its getting. There were some clear themes from the event for me: ClickHouse is cool. Or at least I think so. ClickHouse observability certainly has potential, but I think the underlying SQL database is actually the most interesting bit. ClickHouse is also investing heavily in the Australian market right now, so I suspect they're seeing strong traction here. No one talks about "devops" any more, because its become a meaningless term where everything is devops if you squint at it right. Instead people are using the term "platform engineering", which doesn't appear to have…

Converting from setup.py and PBR to pyproject.toml

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 9, 2025
Post category:Python

I make no claim to be an expert at this, but I did just need to convert a project from a slightly complicated setup.py / PBR configuration to pyproject.toml and thought I should write up where I landed. I say “slightly complicated” because there are a few very OpenStacky things I like to do in these things. Specifically:

version numbers are driven by git tags not hard coded in the configuration file.
console scripts are a thing.
I often include data files in the built package.

So here’s an example of all of those things that is working ok for me:

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