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(photo cour­tesy of Sean MacEn­tee via flickr)

Some inter­est­ing bits and pieces (left­overs) from the week­end — I have a ten­dency to queue up a pile of “read later” stuff or email­ing myself a pile of things to talk about/link to/etc. Some­times, I actu­ally get to go through it all. Today — I get to share it to!

First up — Michael Foord (fuzzy­man) did two excel­lent posts — the first is on pri­vacy in Python — not big-P pri­vacy, but rather the programming/object pri­vacy. It’s a good read because it reen­forces the point that even if you think you’re being clever and hid­ing some­thing in a clo­sure to make it pri­vate, you can still get access to it. Remem­ber too — dun­ders (__foo) are just name-mangling. In Python, noth­ing is pri­vate (insert bad tast­ing joke about Python being face­book here).

Michael’s sec­ond post is on the Named­Tu­ple ker­fluffle that was stirred up Krist­jan Valur’s post on the use of exec() and named­tu­ple (short ver­sion: named­tu­ple cre­ates a string defin­ing the class and then calls exec to cre­ate the object. I think Michael is spot on — I think exec() gets a bad rap frankly, sure — it’s some­thing of a hand-grenade, if you use it wrong, you’re going to get hurt, but in this case I have to agree with Ray­mond in his com­ment on bug 3974 — the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion is clear and main­tain­able. I don’t like the stern­ness of the reply — but he is right. Kristjan’s use-case is an inter­est­ing one, but I don’t think it’s one that war­rants the removal of the exist­ing imple­men­ta­tion. I’m won­der­ing if a “fall­back if exec doesn’t exist” is worth inclusion.

Then again, I’ve spo­ken to peo­ple who refuse to use named­tu­ples because they now know how the sausage is made. I still think the sausage is deli­cious.

Next is a pretty inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on a pre­sen­ta­tion that came out of Pixar on get­ting over embar­rass­ment in order to get things done — I don’t have much to add above the com­ments on hacker news, except to say I think the same men­tal blocks they talk about for ani­ma­tors apply to pro­gram­mers, writ­ers, etc. We hide from code reviews, we hide our writ­ing until we think it’s “Pitch Per­fect” — when in real­ity, we shouldn’t. We should be shar­ing, dis­cussing and col­lab­o­rat­ing ear­lier, more fre­quently and more often.

Share and Ship early and often — see also “Don’t Go Dark”.

Finally, I was happy to see the “Quick and Easy Debug­ging in Python” post from Jeet Suku­maran — it’s always nice to evolve past sprin­kling print fairy dust all over your code for debug­ging — even if we all still do it despite know­ing or using PDB. Just to add to his post, if you want to increase your PDB-Fu, I rec­om­mend this “Debug­ging in Python” post by Steve Ferg, and the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion for PDB. We should really add a HOWTO for this.

p.s. For addi­tional good-reading, check out “Pri­or­i­ties Don’t Exist in a Vac­uum” and “First Care”- while not ger­mane to what’s I’ve already writ­ten about, they’re a good essays on pri­or­i­ties. Thanks to the lat­est “Back to Work” pod­cast.

(photo courtesy of Sean MacEntee via flickr) Some interesting bits and pieces (leftovers) from the weekend - I have a tendency to queue up a pile of "read later" stuff or emailing myself a pile of things to talk about/link to/etc. Sometimes, I actually get to go through it all. Today - I get to ...

Pre­am­ble

There’s been some recent dis­cus­sion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speak­ers should have to pay for admis­sion as well — see Chris Wanstrath’s (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Con­vore thread for exam­ples. Obvi­ously, as PyCon is the “big dog” so to speak for Python con­fer­ences, every­one looks to “us” for a model to work from, or how we man­age things. I’ve seen a lot of poop slung towards the Djan­go­Con orga­niz­ers, mainly due to a lack of know­ing “why” cer­tain poli­cies (such as “Every­one Pays”) exist for Djan­go­Con, PyCon, and other conferences.

As co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair last year, and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years — I fig­ured it might be good to take a moment to explain the ratio­nale behind PyCon’s approach — as well as some sta­tis­tics about the bud­get. I’m not going to state that this pol­icy is per­fect; nor that it won’t be changed; I also will not release the bud­get pub­licly — I don’t think giv­ing every­one a spread­sheet with­out the con­text of the hun­dreds of man hours of work that go into it is use­ful, at all.

Impor­tant Note: PyCon is orga­nized and man­aged by the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this means that, as part of being a 501c3 char­ity, some of the finan­cials from past PyCon is avail­able as part of pub­licly acces­si­ble finan­cial doc­u­ments of the foun­da­tion. You can find those on the PSF’s site.

The same rea­son­ing may not apply to a con­fer­ence that is orga­nized by a com­mer­cial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a com­mer­cial con­fer­ence, so hav­ing speak­ers get in free is gen­er­ally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the mid­dle — it is orga­nized for profit by a com­mer­cial entity, but it also con­tributes heav­ily back to the Django Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. DjangoCon.eu is man­aged dif­fer­ently as well.

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Preamble There's been some recent discussion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speakers should have to pay for admission as well - see Chris Wanstrath's (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Convore thread for examples. Obviously, as PyCon is the "big dog" so to speak for Python conferences, everyone looks to ...

I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday’s blog post “On Fam­ily, Crank­ing and Chang­ing” — the “code equiv­a­lent” for the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way’s con­cept of “Morn­ing Pages”/750Words and the Writ­ing Down the Bones con­cept of “Keep­ing the Hands Moving”.

I made the mis­take how­ever, of ask­ing on twit­ter — never, ever ask a bunch of pro­gram­mers quote “What do you think the char count or line num­ber of a rea­son­ably sized Python mod­ule is?” — never. Just don’t. I’m not even ask­ing that here. Instead, I’m giv­ing you a sim­ple idea for a web appli­ca­tion. Take the imple­men­ta­tion of github’s gist’s/paste­bin, mash it up with a built in code edi­tor (such as Ace), and kick out a programmer’s ver­sion of 750 Words. The goal is not to force peo­ple to share code pub­licly — if they want, let them flip that bit (or just post/link to github’s gist sys­tem). The goal is to encour­age programmers/hackers to explore/write some new:

• code
• tests
• docs

And I mean new — not some­thing bogged down by their every day projects. It could just be a clever one liner ala Raymond’s python tips. It could be a few-hundred-line piece of code that just tracks how many times they’ve watched their favorite show using some cool mod­ule. Just keep the hand mov­ing; just take 3, 10 or 30 min­utes a day and keep a pri­vate code jour­nal of new ideas, con­cepts, etc. Write some morn­ing pages.

Project Euler is algo­rithm prob­lem solv­ing, so it doesn’t ful­fill the goal. Code Kata’s come damn close (see also Cod­ing Horror’s take) — but again, those are focused on pro­vid­ing a prob­lem, and then hav­ing some­one come up with a solu­tion. I’d like some­thing that just sets forth the ideas exposed for writ­ers above, and sets it in a pro­gram­ming context.

If you want, allow users to seed it with sug­gested ideas. So that when a user logs in, they might have set a “pre­ferred pro­gram­ming language(s)” and get a a lit­tle javascript popup with a prob­lem sourced from another user, like say “use python threads” or “write an appli­ca­tion that forks”. This lat­ter part ties into an idea I had stem­ming from Zed’s orig­i­nal “Learn Python The Hard Way” post­ing — too many of these prac­tice sites focus on algo­rithms and math­e­mat­i­cal things that prob­a­bly won’t help you in the next 8 hours. Some­thing that had prob­lems like “send a receive UDP mes­sages from a socket” and the like — focus­ing on com­mon, prac­ti­cal things.

Any­ways so what are the require­ments for “XXXcode” or “xxxlinesaday”/etc:

• Allow signup/signin
• Allow pub­lic shar­ing of journals/non public
• Allow sub­mit­ted “ideas”
• Out­line the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way/Writing Down the Bones.
• Make it look decent (I’m tired of ugly pro­gram­mer sites. Go get some­thing from the­me­for­est if you need it)

There ya go. Take it and run with it if you want. Just stop both­er­ing me about lines of code in a mod­ule. Man you guys can be pedantic.

I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday's blog post "On Family, Cranking and Changing" - the "code equivalent" for the idea stemming from the Artists Way's concept of "Morning Pages"/750Words and the Writing Down the Bones concept of "Keeping the Hands Moving". I made the mistake ...

Intro­duc­tion

Some­time on May 6th — over two weeks ago now — I shot out a innocu­ous tweet ask­ing what might be a good blog topic. I think I said some­thing like “python, fam­ily, .…” — the over­whelm­ing major­ity of them responded with “write some­thing on fam­ily”, iron­i­cally, as I was read­ing those responses sit­ting at a stop light (yeah, I know — don’t yell at me) I got a phone call from my wife ask­ing me to come home imme­di­ately. You see, my wife is very, very preg­nant with our sec­ond child, and it’s not been an easy preg­nancy for her. We’ve had a lot of scares, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time in and out of our local hos­pi­tal — so when she said “come home right now” — you can expect that every­thing else pretty much evac­u­ated my brain except that.

I guess the twit­ter responses acted as sort of a cos­mic hint as to what was com­ing — the abbre­vi­ated ver­sion being that my wife, bless her soul, was deemed “high risk” and admit­ted to the hos­pi­tal on the 6th — with the expec­ta­tion that she would not leave until she gave birth. Fast for­ward two weeks in the hos­pi­tal, a myr­iad of tests, blow­ing out bud­gets on gas (what the hell) and being a “Sin­gle Dad” for most of that that time, and I can hap­pily report that mommy and baby are sta­ble, but still hang­ing out inside my wife.

These past two weeks taught me a lot about myself, about my fam­ily — some things that I thought I knew were brought to task and tested — heck, some of the things I was going to write about were put to the ulti­mate test. You may not really care about any of this — I’d go some­place else at this point if that’s the case. I do hope to out­line my thoughts on bal­anc­ing things (though I remain ter­ri­ble at it) and find­ing the time. You’re not going to find a cure all, or a hack that will “just make things work” — that doesn’t exist.

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Introduction Sometime on May 6th - over two weeks ago now - I shot out a innocuous tweet asking what might be a good blog topic. I think I said something like "python, family, ...." - the overwhelming majority of them responded with "write something on family", ironically, as I was reading those responses sitting ...

Pre­am­ble

A recent post on Hacker News enti­tled “Why I still don’t con­tribute to open source” raised a series of thoughts in my head — but then, before I could even take the time to gen­er­ate the small­est of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made prob­a­bly one of the sin­gle best com­ments in reply, and on the sub­ject of con­tri­bu­tion that I’ve ever read. The orig­i­nal post; and Brian’s excel­lent reply were enough to get me obsess­ing about this sub­ject again — eager to share my thoughts and feel­ings on it.

A while ago (almost exactly a year, oddly enough) I posted a ques­tion here to my blog — “Why aren’t You Con­tribut­ing (to Python)” — the replies to that post, both in the orig­i­nal com­ments, Hacker News, Red­dit and other thought­ful responses by Tim Golden, Yaniv Aknin and Brian Curtin made me sit back and think for a long time what we — as a “python core” team could do to help reduce the fric­tion and over­all bar­rier to con­tribut­ing to core itself. It also made me take a step back and ask myself why I con­tribute to Python — not just via core, but also to PyCon and the PSF.

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Preamble A recent post on Hacker News entitled "Why I still don't contribute to open source" raised a series of thoughts in my head - but then, before I could even take the time to generate the smallest of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made probably one of the single best comments in reply, ...

On Fri­day of last week, a new post I wrote for my employer (Nasuni) went up — “Encryp­tion Keys, User Data and Sub­poe­nas”. In that post, I got to out­line, in clear “non slip­pery” lan­guage how my employer man­ages encryp­tion keys, what data they have access to, etc. One of my favorite quotes:

If a cus­tomer has pro­vided their own encryp­tion key(s) — Nasuni, or the cloud provider, do not have those keys, and can not pro­vide them as part of a sub­poena or other legal process. We can not decrypt or access your data. We can not sup­ply a key which we do not have. This is not pol­icy or trust level pro­tec­tion: It’s impossible.

We offer auto-generated and escrowed keys as a con­ve­nience to the user — the ben­e­fits of hav­ing this fea­ture out­weigh the cost. A user or com­pany who knows noth­ing about encryp­tion keys and key escrow can still have strong data secu­rity and instan­ta­neous dis­as­ter recov­ery, they can install a Filer in min­utes and imme­di­ately be up and running.

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On Friday of last week, a new post I wrote for my employer (Nasuni) went up - "Encryption Keys, User Data and Subpoenas". In that post, I got to outline, in clear "non slippery" language how my employer manages encryption keys, what data they have access to, etc. One of my favorite quotes: If a ...