Python 101: BYOB (Build your own Blog)

Erik van Brakel — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:43:34 GMT

In my setup I said I was going to learn Python, and at the same time dive into the world of CQRS. After getting my feet wet a little bit, I decided to go with something completely different. I present to you: BYOB, the Python edition! I have to be honest and I’ll mention straight away that this is NOT my own idea. I borrowed it from the honorable Rob Conery, who at a certain time last year mentioned that it’s a good idea for EVERY serious developer to build his own blog. He gives a nice summary of the reasons why:

It’s the perfect app for a geek who wants a blog to build – they’re the perfect domain experts
It’s easy (for the most part) but gets harder and harder the farther in your dive
It’s ubiquitous. What a perfect interview topic: “I’d love to see how you handled asynchronous pings to Technorati and – oh – do you have a POP feature? Also – did you use MetaWeblog or Wordpress?”
It’s your calling card. If your blog rocks – likely you do too. If it sucks and it’s slow – well…
It’s a great way to learn a language. Want to try out ASP.NET MVC? Compare the LOC and features to your Webforms blog – then try Rails…
Luke did it – and that’s good enough for me

If you’re wondering about rule number 6: His reasoning is that if Luke (Skywalker) had to build his own lightsaber, developers should build their own blog.

So I am. I will keep source code on Github. I will try to copy the look and feel of my current blog (this one), with similar features. Basically:

Index page with the last <x> articles, first paragraph. Browsable.
Detail page, showing the full article and comments (possibly powered by disqus).
Archive by month. Works in a similar fashion as the index page.
Archive by tag. Works in a similar fashion as the index page.
Profile page. Basically a static page with a nice picture of me and some info.
Ability to use Windows Live Writer (love you!) to publish my blog.

What I won’t do (yet):

Theming support.
Multi language support.
Multi blog support.
Pingback detection and what not.
Sharing links. Who shares my articles anyway :-(
Web based administration panel. I don’t NEED to do that, I only publish via Live Writer.

For now, I am off to github to create a repository for my new blog: Sir Blogalot!

Diving in the deep end: Getting started with Python

Erik van Brakel — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:37:44 GMT

As a hardcore .NET developer it’s hard to say this, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to stray from the environment I enjoy the most at the moment, to try out something new. It’s not because I don’t like .NET or C#, or because I don’t like the way the community is. The reason I’m going to invest some time in learning this completely new environment is to broaden my horizon, and possibly increase my chances on the market.

That being said, I will be combining this with a bit of research into CQRS (Command-Query Responsibility Segregation) which will hopefully give me something to blog about. Udi Dahan has a very concise explanation on what CQRS actually means for us mere human developers:

CQRS is about coming up with an appropriate architecture for multi-user collaborative applications. It explicitly takes into account factors like data staleness and volatility and exploits those characteristics for creating simpler and more scalable constructs.

A simple example is this. Given we have a contact management system, which incorporates the usuals: Address data, payment terms, payment record. A sales representative just finished a phonecall with the contact, which revealed that the address data of the contact is out of date. The representative changes the address data, and hits the save button. So far so good. However, at the same time, the accountant finds out that this customer has some unpaid bills, and changes the payment record of this contact. Both operations are executed using the same information, so which one is going to be executed first? In most cases, updating the contact record means updating the full record, based on (stale) information used to display the values in the edit screen. How CQRS solves this problem is for a later post, but it’s an interesting problem to wrap your thoughts around.

Either way, for now it’s back to ‘Hello World!’, and after that, perhaps moving into ‘Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow’.

python

Python 101: BYOB (Build your own Blog)

Diving in the deep end: Getting started with Python