I tried the Kitten framework as I was quite surprised to see it request permission to change my privileged port permissions on install. I had to read through the post and its related posts before I realised that the nature of restricted ports is so ingrained in my I never asked whether it was genuinely a security risk to have them accessible from userspace. I would recommend taking a look through the posts linked to from the above post because when I realised that often my answer to port restrictions is to sudo onto them and that is a bit of weird way of not actually being secure.

I haven’t done much with Kitten, just working my way through the tutorial. The static serving is fine, the dynamic pages are a bit odd and the default ability to retain server state feels very odd.

I’ve also been continuing to try and learn Koa although if this wasn’t related to work I wouldn’t be bothering. Taking a look at the State of Javascript indicates that Express is the runaway winner and all other frameworks are pretty esoteric.

As an aside the state of in-page linking in the State of Javascript is embarrassing, the page structure is really complicated and doesn’t seem able to assign a simple id to a section tag.

Koa is from the school of “everything is a plugin” so out of the box it is completely anaemic and you have the zero-joy experience of trying to figure what libraries and plugins you should use. Most of the core plugins haven’t been updated in years, which is good in terms of stability but makes it hard to understand which libraries are actually unmaintained and which are fundamental. I much prefer the Python approach of having batteries included but being able to swap things out if you have particular needs.

One thing that Koa does differently to Express is to use a combined Context object instead of explicit request and response objects. I don’t think that is really very helpful and I did manage to mix the concept up with Go Contexts. Koa contexts are just a big ol’ object that includes some default values and the response kind of magically fires after all the middleware has fired. I feel it is a bit of step backwards in terms of clarity. My guess is that it makes it easier for plugins to add functions into the context object rather than having to explicitly import them and use them within the handler code.

I’m building a basic old school webapp so I needed some templating and that was a bit of journey in terms of what is popular but Nunjacks is work-friendly and based on jinja2 so it feels very familiar.

I’ve been slowly continuing to replace my various Python database libraries with a simpler and faster set of string queries executed through psycopg3. Next on the chopping block is Pony, which while it is relatively enjoyable as an ORM is needlessly clever in its use of generators and lambdas to do queries. I found a broken query and despite reading through the documentation I couldn’t fix it. If you already know SQL an abstraction has to be pretty powerful to be worth the overhead on things like queries which are fundamental a string and a map of data bindings and not much more.

I attended the State of the Browser conference this month and it was a good edition that balanced the input of practicioners, browser makers and had practical technical advice and reminders. It also managed to limit itself to only one non-technical related talk. I’ll write up a few notes in a separate post but this felt like a great return on the time invested.

I also discovered Rosie Pattern Language this month, a parser based alternative to regular expressions, I was intrigued but it lacks a helpful tutorial or introduction article so it has gone into the backlog to investigate later.

I started reading the book The Logic of Failure this month and I’m about halfway through it. It is a fascinating read and describes a series of experiments done with computer simulations of various situations from a town, a sub-Saharan ecosystem to a fridge with a broken thermometer. The outcomes are then mapped to the participants voiced thoughts to try and identify patterns of behaviour and the underlying rationales that drive them. Obviously the goal of reading such books is to try and temper the causes of failure in yourself but some of the problems the book highlights such the behaviour of complex inter-related components and exponential behaviour are just things that all humans are bad at.