Getting Started with render-engine and Teahouse

Published June 01, 2025

When I was at PyCon US 2025 I did a lot of very cool, and very fun things. I met a lot of very nice people. I was introduced to a lot of very interesting ideas and projects. This is the story about how those people, things, ideas, and projects led to me putting together this website.

Let's start with the people, because they should always come first. Heading into PyCon I had already met Piper and Jamie on Mastodon and knew about their new company, Teahouse Hosting, and that they were doing a soft launch at PyCon. During the conference I got to spend a not small amount of time with them. Those interactions which included (among many other things) some training in lightsaber fighting (Jamie does this professionally) and discussion over dinner about cursed things that can be done in programming. We also talked about Teahouse and I realized that if I wanted to put up a site of my own - one that was completely me - it would be a great solution.

I also got the chance to spend time with Jay and get to know him a little bit. I had met Jay briefly the year before during PyCon when I told him how moved I was by his keynote but we didn't have a chance to talk or really get to know one another. Fast forward a year and during the closing part of PyCon US 25, when all of the projects that are sprinting have a chance to tell a bit about their projects, Jay comes up to the microphone and asks for help with 2 projects - the Black Python Devs website, and the static site generator that he wants to move it to, render-engine. When sprints start the following morning, I took a walk down the hall to room 318 where Jay had set up and asked him what I could do to help. At this point he had a bunch of people working on the website so he asked me for some help updating the CLI for render-engine, which I gladly gave.

So here I am, sitting in the sprint room with the idea of doing a site that I control completely already in my head from my conversations with Jamie and Piper, working on a tool that will let me do just that. Around when I got home Jon (the PyCon co-chair) posted a toot about PyCon recaps that made me decide that I should write one of my own. So I did. And I realized I didn't have a good place to put it.

Now I have this idea in my head that I should have a website I own. I have friends with a company that will host it. I have an open source project that I have contributed to that will give me the tools to make the site. And I have something that I actually want to post. It kinda all came together. And just like that, I started working on this site.

The first task was actually getting something together. So I setup a repo for it, used UV to get started with the various installations, and got down to writing some stuff. When I was finally at the point where I felt there was enough stuff to actually launch it (very minimal and still needing some style work,) I setup the hosting. Then I had a lot of "fun" tweaking the GitHub Actions examples that I had to actually work for my site (I'm ashamed to say how many tries it took because I missed something that I should've known to change) and got to to actually deploy it to the hosting.

I'm not going to go into the technical details of what I did - I don't think that's going to be of too much interest to many people (if you are one of the people who is interested or has questions, reach out to me on Mastodon or Bluesky and I'll happily talk about it.) Suffice it to say that with some help from Jay, Jon (he also contributes to render-engine,) Jamie and Piper I was able to get the site to a happy place - your web browser. Thanks to everyone for the inspiration and the technical help in accomplishing this goal! I couldn't have (and probably wouldn't have!) done it without you.