Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging, Python

PyCon UK 2022

This was the first in-person PyCon since the start of the pandemic. It had slightly changed format as well, now being mostly single-track (plus workshops) and not having a teacher/youth day. Overall I found the changes welcome. I’m generally a big fan of single track conferences because they simplify the choices and help concentrate the conversation amongst the attendees.

A lot of talks were by developer advocates but some of the most interesting talks came from the core language maintainers talking about the challenges in balancing the needs of different parts of the community while the least interesting were from the company sponsors who generally didn’t seem to have refined their content for a general audience.Typescript

A simple lightning talk about the need to sanitise the input of the builtin int function was illuminating about the challenges of reconciling web needs versus data science. However the general point about whether unlimited number functions are necessary or not was interesting. Similarly the challenge of when to adopt new syntax and keywords in the case of the addition of Exception Groups to the language.

There were a few talks about how the process of maintaining a language and community actually works. How conferences get listed on the Python website, how performance benchmarks are built and used and the desire to have a single place to centre conversation about the language.

There were talks about how to interface to various technologies with Python (Kafka, Telegram) and the inevitable talk about how to improve the performance of your data science code by using NumPy. There were also quite a few talks about Hypothesis; which probably still isn’t used as much as it should be in the community. The library now includes a test generator that can examine code and suggest a test suite for it which is quite a cool feature and certainly would be a boon for those who dislike test-first approaches (whether it has the same quality benefits is another question).

The other talk that had a big impact on my was the introduction to using PyScript in static websites. Python is going to start targeting WebAssembly as a platform which will help standardise the various projects trying to bring a fully functional interpreter to the browser and provide a place to pool efforts on improvements.

PyScript aims to allow Python to also script DOM elements and be an alternative scripting language in the browser. That’s fun but not massively compelling in my view (having done many compile to Javascript languages in the past I think it’s easier to just do Javascript (with an honourable exception for Typescript). Being able to run existing code and models in the browser without change maximises the value and potential of your existing Python codebases.

Cardiff remains a lovely venue for the conference and I think it is worth taking time out from the tracks to enjoy a bit of the city and the nearby Bute Park.

Links

  • Pyjamas, a 24 hour online conference
  • Pyrogram, a Python library for interacting with Telegram
  • HPy, an updated API for writing C extensions in Python
  • Discuss Python, the general Python community forum
  • Trustme, a testing library that allows local certificates as testing fixtures
  • PyScript, Python in the browser via Web Assembly
  • PyPerformance, benchmarks for testing Python implementations
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Blogging, Work

Trivialising stress with “Wellness at Work”

Burnout is a complex topic but employer responses to it are even more complex. Some definitions of burnout make it a direct occupational health hazard and therefore something that all employers need to consider and manage.

But the way that many companies are responding is facile and, as many other people have already pointed out, patronising to employees and minimising the employer’s own responsibilities. Occupational stress is not something that is resolved by reminders of “mindfulness” and the offer or an meditation app and an employee helpline.

Stress at work is probably inevitable for most workers employed by organisations. The friction and pressures of work continually generate stress which needs to be managed through conventional tools like support and leave. An employee does need to be aware of the indicators and behaviours associated with their own stress but this is probably something that requires some individual coaching rather than an app and a video lesson.

By offering inadequate or lackluster support employers seem to put themselves in the worst possible position, acknowledging their responsibility for the occupational nature of the problem and yet not offering a meaningful solution to it. Ultimately some reckoning seems inevitable in this situation.

A deeper review of the origins of stress within the organisation is needed. Things like client interactions, challenging targets, arbitrary deadlines, interpersonal issues may all be deemed a necessary part of an organisation’s management but acknowledging the consequences of these sources of stress and figuring out how the consequences can be managed and ideally neutralised through more positive activities is vital management work.

Commercialised wellness is an almost meaningless marketing concept, mixing it with the realities of workplace stress seems a recipe for disaster rather than the cheap, effortless fix some employers seem to think it is.

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Blogging, Programming

Clojure Exchange 2016

At one point during this year's Clojure Exchange I was reflecting on the numerous problems and setbacks there had been in organising the 2016 exchange with Bruce Durling and he simply replied: "Yeah it was a 2016 type of conference". So that's all I really want to say about the behind the scenes difficulties, despite the struggles I think it was a decent conference.

Personal highlights

James Reeves's talk on asynchronous Ring was an excellent update on how Ring is being adapted to enable asynchronous handlers now and non-blocking handlers in the future. I didn't know that there isn't an equivalent of the Servlet spec for Java NIO-based web frameworks.

The Klipse talk is both short and hilarious with a nicely structured double-act to illustrate the value of being able to evaluate code dynamically on a static page.

David Humphrey's talk, Log all the things was pretty comprehensive on the subject of logging from Clojure applications. It was one of those talks where you felt "well that's been sorted then".

Both Kris's keynote and Christian's Immutable back to front talked not just about the value of Clojure but how you can apply the principles of Clojure's design all across your solution.

One of the most interesting talks was a visualisation of prisoner's dilemma strategies in the browser. It was visual, experimental and informative.

Henry Garner's data science on Clojure talk was interesting again with some nice dynamic distributions and discussions of multi-arm bandit dynamic analysis. Sometimes I feel lots of the data science stuff is too esoteric with too little tangible output. This talk felt a little more relatable in terms of making dynamic variant testing less painful.

Disappointments

Not everything sings on the day. Daan van Berkel's talk on Rubik's Cubes suffered a technical failure that meant his presentation was not dynamically evaluating and therefore became very hard to follow. We should have tried to switch talks around or take a break and try and fix it.

The AV was a general rumbling problem with a few speakers having to have a mic switch in the middle of their talks.

Hans Hubner's talk on persistence was interesting but too quick and too subtle.

We should have had the two Spec talks closer together and earlier in the day. The things that people are doing with it are non-trivial and it is still a relatively new thing.

clojure.spec

Spec is kind of interesting generally for the community. It has become very popular, very quickly and it is being used for all kinds of things.

One theme that came up in the conference was the idea that people wanted to share their spec definitions across the codebase. This seems a bad idea and a classic example of overreach, if someone said they defined all their domain classes in a single Java jar and shared it all across the company then you'd probably thing that is a bad idea. It's not better here because it is Clojure.

The use of Spec was also kind of interesting from a community point of view as the heaviest users of Clojure seemed to be doing the most with it. The bigger the team and the codebase the quicker people have been to adopt Spec and in some cases seem to switch from using Schema to Spec.

On the other hand the people using Clojure for data processing, web programming and things like Clojurescript have not really adopted Spec, probably because it simply doesn't add a lot of benefit for them.

So for the first time in a while we have something that requires some introduction for those new and unfamiliar with it but is being used in really esoteric ways by those making the most use of it. There is a quite a big gap between the two parts of the community.

The corridor track

Out of the UK conferences I went to Clojure Exchange felt like it had the best social pooling of knowledge outside of Scale Summit. Maybe it was because I knew more people here but the talks also had all kinds of interesting little tips. For example during Christian's talk he mentioned that S3 and Cloudfront make for one of the most reliable web API deployment platforms you can choose to use. I ended up making a huge list of links of reminders and things to follow up on. I've also included links to lots of the Github repos that were referenced during the talks.

Next year

And so with a certain inevitability we are looking to the next Clojure Exchange. We're going to have a slightly bigger program committee which should make things easier.

The other thing that we didn't really do that well this year was to try and have some talks transfer from the community talk tracks to the event. In 2017 we'll hopefully be more organised around the community and also have a series of talks that are tied in to the conference itself. If you're interested in being involved in either the organising or the talks you can get involved via London Clojurians.

See you there!

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Blogging, Programming, Web Applications

An overview of Javascript reactive frameworks

This post is only meant to be a snapshot of the current state of the various DOM virtualising webframeworks that are around. I’m partly publishing it to try and discover more that I may not be aware of.

Many of these frameworks trace an ancestry back to Om and React. However each one tries to deal with perceived problems with the original frameworks. The most common being that React is too heavy and opinionated while not providing a consistent data model for components. Om on the other hand is in Clojurescript and therefore represents too much to learn in terms of a new language and build process.

Libraries

Most of the libraries build on a few common building blocks that I’m not going to elaborate on here. Virtualdom was an early attempt to separate the core idea of React from the rest of the library code. Virtualdom is only concerned with creating, manipulating and stringifying DOM structures in-memory. Browser DOM APIs involving linking to the actual rendered document so managing virtual DOM is more efficient and simpler because you’re not interacting with these underlying libraries.

ImmutableJS provides a Javascript-idiom interpretation of the Clojure data structures that Om uses (and which are available as the standalone library Mori).

Omniscient

The first interesting framework to discuss is Omniscient, which as its name suggests is heavily influenced by Om but is written in Javascript and therefore does not require you to learn Clojure to use the same techniques that Om uses. Omniscient is built on top of React and ImmutableJS and uses its own library Immstruct to add reference cursors to ImmutableJS structures. Reference cursors allow a component to observe and change sections of a data structure without having to manipulate the whole thing. So for example a component can be given a single sub-key in an object that represents its state and it cannot access or change anything that is not under that key. The code can also be simplified to behave as if the sub-key was actually just the whole data object.

Omniscient doesn’t suggest an alternative to Om’s CSP, instead providing a mechanism for passing event flow functions down the component tree. You’re free to choose your own event libraries. It also means that you’re free to make your own mistakes here as no guidance is really given as to how to structure your event scheme appropriately.

Omniscient is one of the earliest frameworks to re-implement Om and therefore has one of the better sets of documentation on its Github pages. That said there’s not a lot of documentation and the framework does not have a massive community. The situation is worse in most of the other frameworks though so this might tip you over in favour of Omniscient.

Ractive

This is a bit of a Guardian shout out as the primary developer Rich Harris is a Guardian interactive developer.

Ractive (Github) is a little be different from the other frameworks as you can essentially think of it as Mustache templates backed by Observables. You declare a data-binding and write templates in normal Mustache syntax but behind the scenes Ractive is driven by changes in the data and then writes new section of DOM in-memory according to what has changed rather than DOM diff’ing.

Also Ractive sticks with two-way databinding rather than unidirectional data flow so failures in synchronisation or rendering can be problematic.

If what you want to do is render content over a Javascript data model then there is a lot in Ractive that is very compelling. It uses templates with a standard syntax that is well understood and is a soup and nuts framework that sticks to core Javascript syntax and features. However if you want to use your own event or data model you are out of luck.

Mercury

Mercury on the other hand prides itself on modularity. A microframework it attempts to create a glue layer that allows other libraries to interact in a sensible and consistent way. The default components are Virtualdom and its own observer pattern to wrap state.

Mercury’s biggest problem right now is its lack of documentation. There is an expectation that you are going to read the source code to understand what the framework is doing and how to interact with the API. I frankly think this is unrealistic. The project doesn’t currently supply the incentive to do that. Unless you have a very particular desire to avoid any framework lock-in or you want to use a very specific combination of libraries that is not supported elsewhere its hard to understand why you would invest your effort here rather than in frameworks that offer more support.

Cycle

Cycle is similarly experimental, its biggest claim is that it is truly reactive and that the rendered page is purely the result of change in state. The introduction is couched in computer science theory but it would seem that at its heart Cycle wraps RxJS and Virtualdom in a glue layer that has the programmer writing the transform sequence between the event and the DOM structure.

I think it is a positive feature that Cycle re-uses a popular library to manage its state-transitions rather than implementing yet another custom version of the Observable pattern. It also makes the framework easier to get started with if you are familiar with the Rx.

Using established libraries also makes the lack of documentation more acceptable as the Cycle readme only needs to explain how the glue works in the framework.

As something built on reactivity you have to get used to dealing with intermediate state which can be bit difficult for the beginner.

Essentially any event where the user would expect feedback means you need write the conditional structure in the output. So if the user types a character in an input box then you need to write the value of the input box to be the characters the user has typed so far. Most frameworks work at a higher level of abstraction or rather they map closer to the DOM APIs, so getting a working application means grokking the way the dataflow works.

If you’re looking for purity (and a resulting simplicity in implementation) but not to have to learn a bespoke API Cycle is nicely positioned.

WebRx

WebRx is similarly built on top of RxJS Observables but is a much fuller-fat framework that is much more a spiritual successor to Knockout than owing much to the influence Om or React.

Rather like React WebRx doesn’t really provide generalised event handling but instead has special sauce bindings for DOM events and a MessageBus system built over Rx.

It is also written in Typescript and generally looks to play well within the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s interesting to me as an example of how different a language has to be before its regarded as a barrier. Clearly the use of Typescript means there are people who will refuse to use the framework regardless of whether it works for their use case. Other people are going to be attracted exactly because it uses Typescript.

Deku

Language choices are also interesting in Deku which is another attempt to re-implement React in a superficial way.

Deku makes use of ES6 and 7 features and doesn’t aim to support a broad range of browsers (unlike say Ractive). Again that is going to rule it out for some people but this is a more interesting as now we are within dialects of the same core language. Language choice for implementing frameworks is not straightforward. What are you looking for? Conciseness? Editor support?

Deku aims to take the dom diffing approach but avoid getting caught in React’s framework and approach. In particular components are defined just as Javascript objects rather that classes and instances. Something I think makes it more elegant that normal React Components.

It does however still use JSX which is quite interesting as the framework claims to be taking a functional approach but actually uses a DSL for all its DOM construction.

The lifecycle hooks are slightly different with more hooks for different stages of the process and Deku uses some interesting function passing to send changed data down the tree to components.

Deku doesn’t take much influence from Om though. It doesn’t have sophisticated event handling and uses mutable data with generous access and callbacks on data write to do re-renders. This means bugs and state issues are no less likely to happen than with any other framework. It does adopt the single atom idea with a single tree representing the app and the app renderer being bound to the body element.

As such if you like the idea of React but don’t want to bound into its concept of how a Component should be defined but do like JSX and trust the implementors to create a better dom diff than Facebook or Virtualdom, this is the project for you.

Conclusion

I’ve only chosen a handful of frameworks to look at here, mostly based on the ones I know, I’m expecting people to point out more in the comments. I also haven’t used all of these frameworks. Road-testing all of them would be a bigger task than just trying to describe the design choices they’ve made.

The most common pattern is to try and improve the rendering time versus React by using different virtual dom difference algorithms. Usually this is combined with Observed variables that provide a Reactive component that allows changes in the data model to be conveyed to the DOM model with no coding required.

Few of the frameworks engage with the functional reactive programming paradigm by building abstract event streams or indeed any abstraction over discrete events.

The idea that the app should be a single data structure that represents the whole page seems to be gaining significant traction with several of the frameworks recommending this as an approach.

The explosion of frameworks resulting from the release of React is, I think, a positive thing. Initially it seems really daunting that you have all these choices but when you look at the real level of difference between them you can see that they are actually quite tightly coupled around a few common and core ideas and that mostly they express differences about the concerns that a framework should have which feeds into the wider conversation about micro or comprehensive frameworks.

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Blogging

Stemming the spam

One of the features I particularly value on WordPress has been the ability to have fairly open comment threads on my blog posts. In the past Askimet used to keep these spam free and people were able to submit comments fairly freely.

Over the course of this year though, comment spam has been getting vaguely more sophisticated. The most common spam has been backlink SEO spam that consists of reasonable emails and pieces of genuine comments mixed with product keywords and generic praise.

This kind of spam seems to be massively problematic to detect. Large numbers of comments have been made to historic posts that presumably have ended up ranking well in Google.

Moderating that stuff has been a chore and if I am away from the internet for any period of time the comment were on the site for a while and this seemed to be encouraging more. I presume the bots are smart enough to detect when their comemnts have not been deleted for more than eight to twelve hours and then they pile in.

The only reasonable way forward seems to me to be switch on someone kind of pre-moderation. I’ve gone for the mildest level of control that seems to work, namely that the first post by a user will now be moderated but once someone has a valid post they will be able to post freely.

This seems to strike the right balance between allowing people to tell me I know nothing about Clojure, Scala or Javascript and avoiding people having to sign-in to post comments.

As for the creators of these ingenious bots, a decidedly slow handclap; well-played.

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Blogging, Programming

CSS learnings from 2013

I don’t do masses of CSS in my work but this year was an interesting one because there was acres of CSS being created due to the general acceptance that we just need to get on with implementing the responsive web. Leaving the fixed-width grid also meant having to rethink the structure and architecture of CSS and modernise the legacy styling which if we’re all honest is actually created organically and piecemeal as requirements drift in.

CSS Architecture

I struggled and fought with SMACSS but I’m now over it and think that the result in practice has shown that it is the most sensible way to do things today.

BEM felt overly complex and fussy while covering pretty much the same ideas as SMACSS. OOCSS was off-putting due to its weird appropriation of object-orientated programming concepts.

I did like its idea of using multiple classes to allow for composition of styles. But using the idea of multiple inheritance as a metaphor for this seemed to be bizarre. Don’t these people know how painful inheritance is?

Isolation

One of the big things I took from SMACSS is that isolation is more valuable than re-use. Using a system that guarantees that your styling rules are not going to have side-effects is massively powerful.

When you then try to abstract components and share rules between them you lose some of that isolation and you begin to recouple components.

Seeing CSS as a conflict between isolation and duplication was a powerful metaphor for making decisions as to how to structure things.

Pre-compilers

I’m pretty sure that when we look back at 2013 the invention of Turing-complete CSS pre-compilers is not going to be a high-point. The CSS generation languages have been important as a way of pushing the CSS specification forward and of proving ideas in practice. I’ve certainly been grateful to be able to use Less in prototyping for example.

The agreement of the need for CSS variables and for being able to do calculations with those variables is a credit to the pre-compilers. The problem they create is the complexity of their abstraction. Turning a declarative language into something more programmatic is problematic for all the reasons that programming languages have problems. DRY is good but compilation errors in your CSS doesn’t feel like progress to me.

Just as with user agent extensions I think that pre-compilers are a great test bed for innovation but what they need to lead to is a better syntax for declaring intention rather than a new language.

Migration

Having new ideas for organising and structuring CSS is great but we also need to reflect our new ideas in our old work. Well, that’s easy right? Now we have new ideas we’ll just call all our existing assets legacy and re-write the whole thing. It’ll probably only take three months or more…

For the project I worked most on I applied a rule of thumb that seemed to serve pretty well. All the new CSS architectures organise themselves around a concept of components or modules. If your existing CSS is more or less built around the same concept you should be able to adapt whatever structure you choose and retroactively apply it to your existing code.

If your existing code though is designed more around concepts of pages or tag styling then you need to rebuild it piecemeal. Introduce the new component with its styling build on the new standard and then go back and

Hacks and shame

I was quite taken by the idea of having the file of shame. However in practice developers preferred to have commented sections of the files with hacks in. And before long we had people accidentally adding non-hack rules after the hack commment-line and we also have hacks liberally sprinkled all over the place.

I lost the battle but the result has convinced me that you want one place for the hackery and you want it right at the bottom of the cascade.

The incentive should be to one day delete the file of shame.

Simplicity

Clearly this year the only person who was talking any sense in CSS (apart from Jonathan Snook) was Harry Roberts as I also liked the presentation where he pointed out that design needs to be regularised in the name of sanity. If we have some components that have a margin of 1rem and and some with a margin of 1.1rem because it looks better we need to be taking into account the cognitive burden of having those additional rules.

Creating independent components encouraged me to allow every one to be a special snowflake. It was good to have a counter-balancing principle to make sure that principal of least surprise applied.

Harry also made the sensible suggestion (in 2012!) that padding and margins be defined in just one vertical and horizontal direction. Thing about flow from top to bottom and left to right also helped me to stop make special cases and look for a more general declaration of what I was trying to describe.

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Blogging

Baby Punching or Not Loving Enough

One of things that kind of pisses me off about blogging is that when you discuss something that is inherently your view of a subject, particularly a technical one, the most common comments are: a) have you tried doing something else entirely (yes, but y’know the point of the post was talking about this thing) and b) how can you say X about Y?

The weird thing is that sometimes in the latter case you can say all this positive stuff and what gets commented on is the couple of things you didn’t like. Evanglists or just frothing converts can’t seem to consider that the thing they support is anything less than perfect. I’ve decided to call this Baby Punching. Every parent considers their baby to be the most special thing in existence; any kind of negative feeling is like punching that baby in the face.

These parental feelings are strongest early on when perhaps people are concerned that any kind of negative feedback from early adopters will kill their favourite outright. Which is a ridiculous attitude, feedback from early adopters is a chance to change things before it gets out to the wider public. The truth is that once something is established no-one goes back to look at what the early adopters thought.

Look at Steam, today its an invaluable tool that trys to balance the needs of game developers and gamers. Who remembers how awful it was initially? It was slow, Half-Life 2 took forever to decrypt and authorize and if you didn’t have always-on broadband then it was a pain to play, authorisation for other games was broken. It was not fun. Steam has improved over the years and not because it tried to stomp on the complaints of the early adopters.

So please, just because I don’t think your baby is as perfect as you do, don’t think I’m punching it.

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Blogging

Experimenting with Tumblr

I have recently hived off a few bits of posting that used to be in this blog to Tumblr, a startup that ValleyWag described as being, like Twitter, “unencumbered by revenue”. It’s been an interesting experience.

As this blog has become a bit more work-focussed and more formal I was feeling like writing about Doctor Who wasn’t quite the right thing to mix with the more esoteric tech stuff. I like WordPress a lot and I thought about starting up a second blog here. However I did feel that I wanted something that was a little bit lighter and light-hearted as the topics were going to be relatively trivial.

Signing up was easy (all very Web2.0: massive fonts, custom urls, etc.) but when I saw that you could use Markdown to write up posts rather than WSIWYG editors I was sold. Since I know it anyway it saves me a lot of time not frigging around with generated HTML. I also liked the AJAX UI that made it seem quite easy to just post a few thoughts.

In my mind Tumblr fits a kind of position between Twitter and WordPress. Where you have something to say that is more than a sentence but it isn’t a whole lot more than a paragraph. It is the kind of thing that Blogger should have become after it was clear that WordPress had completely whupped it on almost every front.

I have found Tumblr to be fun and also something that entices you into just jotting down a few thoughts. In terms of the experience it is all light, responsive and dynamic up front but you can dig around behind the scenes to take control of the visual aspects of your site via CSS and HTML (something that is paid for in WordPress) as well as get more options for posting.

So what do I miss from WordPress? Well the first thing is the Stats crack, obviously. WordPress has a killer feature in telling you exactly how many people are reading your articles and how they came to read them. There are also a lot of features that surround this like auto-promotion of articles to Google, the related articles list and the Blogs of the Day. Publishing something in WordPress feels like launching it into the world, by comparision Tumblr posts are a much more muted affair. It feels more like a secret club. I know Tumblr does the promotion as well but I guess WordPress does a better job of closing the feedback loop.

Not having comments on Tumblr is also part of that. Given that comments on your blog can be a very mixed bag I was surprised to find myself missing them. Somehow I must have gotten used to them and their lack now feels like silence. I know some people have used Intense Debate to add in comments but if I was really that bothered about it then I would probably have gone back to WordPress.

So I’m enjoying Tumblr but I am also hoping that they keep it simple and don’t get tempted to add every feature there is from other blogging software.

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Blogging

How many microblogging sites can there be?

Last time I was on Identi.ca I noticed that most of the messages were being posted from Ping.fm. This means that people are effectively are broadcasting there but who is listening? Possibly no-one.

Tomorrow the Today Programme on Radio 4 is going to ask whether Twitter is replacing blogging. I know that because they Tweeted about it.

Twitter might not be the best service or the first but it certainly seems to have hit some critical mass where it is now crossing over into the mainstream and before long it seems likely that it will be synonymous with microblogging in the way that Flickr and online photos are.

I’m currently following Stephen Fry’s wildlife documentary making on Twitter and even John Cleese is on there. When you have that kind of penetration I think most of your rivals can run up the white flag and retreat to the niche areas where they excel.

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