Git on traviscj/blog

python attrs

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 08:42:43 +0000

I came across a very interesting library in a HN thread: the python attrs library.

In particular, this seems like a great way to do the “dumb data objects” they talk about in the end of object inheritance, and also related to (but maybe lighter weight than) zope.interface.

This also seems very similar to what I use autovalue for at work.

One particularly interesting application is a “code database” – using static, checked-in-to-version-control definitions of some data model as a sort of very-fast-to-read, very-slow-to-update “Data Model”. I find this fascinating: Code shares a lot of properties with great data stores: ability to rollback (git revert) and accountability/auditability (git blame). It also makes a lot of fairly hard problems much simpler: you don’t need to poll the database for changes. You don’t need to invalidate any caches. You don’t need to consider a “split brain” environment where half of the in-memory caches have updated but the other half haven’t. You don’t need to consider failure cases of how long the in-memory cache is allowed to be invalid: you just fail to boot up on deploy. (Admittedly, there’s still an opportunity window for split brain behavior for the duration of the deploy, but this is a lot easier to reason about than an essentially arbitrary.)

toy/life data models

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been experimenting a lot with some kinda “toy” data models based on random things that I wish there was a database to query, but isn’t. For example:

What was my average arrival time this week?
How much of my equity has vested before a certain date?
When was the last time we had spaghetti for dinner?

I’ve been doing this with flat JSON files. This is a bit of an odd choice for me; I actually love schematizing data models in protobuf and MySQL and designing proper indices for the data models I work on during work hours.

Meta post - How my blog works

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, Sharvil requested a quick overview of how I post stuff to my blog, so I thought I’d post a rundown of it.

At the base, I use a git repository to store files named entryNNNN.txt. Each has the basic format:

title: Meta post: How my blog works
date: 2012/07/27
category: software
---
A while back, Sharvil requested a quick overview of how I post stuff to my blog, so I thought I'd post a rundown of it.
At the base, I use a git repository to store files named entryNNNN.txt. Each has the basic format:

To start a new post and fill in some of this, I have a script called ’newentry.sh’, which determines the latest entry number and adds one to get a new filename (eg, entry0081.txt).

tjtestharness - a language-agnostic DVCS unit-test/continuous integration tool

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to have a way to visualize which unit tests(or sets of them) passed for a given commit, if for no other reason than the sense of accomplishment from watching boxes turn yellow, then green, as they pass tests. The trouble is, I write code in a lot of different languages for a lot of different projects. I also don’t want to bother with running unit tests individually–I want them to run as I perform commits.

A few more exotic uses for older hardware

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There are tons of posts on the internet about what to do with older computers. In general, they say some of the same things: Linux/Firewall, Media Server, and ‘BitTorrent Box’. (Incidentally, the lattermost somewhat confuses me. I guess people want to download files on a separate machine in case it has viruses or whatever… but if you’re using bit torrent so much that it’s worth having a separate box for, you’re probably still gonna be upset if a virus takes it out. Or you could just use antivirus or an alternative OS. But I digress.) Anyways, for the uses I’ll outline here I’m going to assume that you (at least roughly) fit into the prototype of ‘I have a pretty decent computer sitting around that never really gets used.’ In my case, I tend to upgrade and want to keep the old one around because it’s still a pretty decent computer, but want to use the newer one for bigger and better things. Like reading xkcd and refreshing google news over and over again. Heh.