Compound Thinking

TG2 Status

Well, it’s official now, I have a new job with Predictix, doing open source TurboGears and Python web dev stuff. Predictix is very much invested in helping the TurboGears community to grow and thrive, and I’m proud to be working with their team. And I’m even more excited about the fact that they want me to do work on TurboGears 2 as part of my “real job.”

One of my main goals when looking for this job was to make sure that whoever I worked for was committed to growing and takeing care of the TG development community. And I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Working for Predictix will help me to polish up the good work that’s already been done to get us to a TG2 beta release, and they already have a lot of fantastic stuff that they would like to open source, which I’m really excited about.

TG2 is moving forward like crazy. In the last three weeks, we’ve had two sprints, both of which had several people working on docs, and on adding the last few features needed for the beta, and cleaning up the show-stopper bugs in our ticket system.

I’m a bit burned out by all the activity, but at the same time I’m very excited about where we are going. I think 2008 is shaping up to be a really busy year for the TG dev team. I see my job in the very short term as creating some stability and consistancy in the midst of the firestorm of new development that’s going on. So, my highest priority right now is getting a stable beta release out the door, and helping us to move forward the docs so that anybody who wants to try out TG2 has a stable base to work on.

My plan will be to do releases about once a month for the rest of the year (or until we have a TG2 final release), because there’s a lot going on, and I want to make that stuff available to people as soon as possible.

So many revolutions, so little time.

Tim Bray is blogging about “inflection points” in the uptake of various technologies.

Python get’s a very positive review:

Today you’d be nuts not to look seriously at PHP, Python, and Ruby.

So, the rise of the so-called scripting languages is one of the inflection points, but it’s not the only one.

He singles out web-framework development as one place where there’s a lot of stuff happening, and a lot of new “rails-like” frameworks are cropping up all the time. TurboGears will live or die in the context of a much larger web-development revolution, and we need to be prepared to make our way forward in the midst of that.

What comes after rails will not be a rails clone. It will learn the right lessons from rails, avoid the pitfalls of rails, but it will also need to carve out something new and better than rails. For RDBMS users, I think the key difference between TG and Rails is the power and flexibility of SQLAlchemy. We need to “sell” this better.

There are a lot of other revolutions coming according to Tim. And I do think we’re looking at big changes in terms of everything from programming language choice, to web-development tools, to end-user desktops, and data persistence mechanisms. We’re also just beginning to see what the world of high-end javascript and other “rich” internet applications is going to do to our view of end-user software.

He doesn’t even mention the rise of EC2 and the Google App Engine as sea-changes in the way we buy computational resources, and I think that’s going to have a huge impact.

In the end my prediction is that the way we develop applications will change more in the next 5 years than it did in the last 5, and it’s time to start getting our heads wrapped around these issues, or we’ll be left behind.

One Python Per Child

The Michigan Unix Users Group will be hosting a talk on the one laptop per child laptop. Ivan Krstik will be doing the talk, and I saw him talk about the OLPC at PyCon 2007, and he was a huge hit talking to a packed out (500+ people) room. I’m flying back to michigan overnight tonight, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it out to the talk.

They are doing some fantastic things with Python in the One Laptop Per Child project.

Change the world with TurboGears, and get paid to do it!

I’ve done a bit of consulting work with the Law School at Stanford University recently, and they are looking for a full time coder to help them change the way patent law is handled in the US.

They have a very cool TurboGears application that will radically improve the transparency of the way out legal system handles “intellectual property.” And they plan to make orders of magnitude more intellectual property data publicly available than we’ve ever seen, and they intend to do it with a python/TurboGears based system.

Ultimately I think this data has the potential to:

• to expose people who abuse patent, copyright, and trade secret laws,
• and to highlight problems with the way intellectual property laws are enforced,
• and ultimately to give us the raw data we need to make intelligent and lasting changes in the whole system.

At the same time it can help to prove that you can build high-traffic, robust systems with Python and TurboGears. They are also doing all kinds of interesting things with search, language processing, and have some amazingly smart people on their team. But they need a fantastic web developer to help them get this amazing stuff into the hands of real people soon.

Which is where you come in, if you’re available or can make yourself available, and you want to be part of something really impressive, feel free to drop me an e-mail at compoundthinking@gmail.com, and I’ll put you in contact with the right people.

TurboGears 1.1 Sprint May 26th

I’m trying to help organize a globally distributed TurboGears sprint for may 26th. And it would be a great place to get your feed wet with developing for the TurboGears core. So, if you’re up for a learning experience, and you’ve got some time it would be great if you could lend a hand.

If anybody is willing to show up in Ann Arbor, I can provide food, a place to hack, and some good clean post-sprint debauchery. For, unfortunately those sprinting outside of the Ann Arbor area will have to provide their own space, food, and most of all their own debauchery.

If you’re interested in participating in the sprint, please join the Sprint Coordination mailing list.

We’ve got folks committed to:

• Migrating test infrastructure to CherryPy 3
• Finalizing the TurboGears 1.1 configuration system, and implementing what we decide on
• Workiing on the turbogears SQLAlchemy integration to make it easier to use multiple databases
• Doing some general clean up of open tickets

My personal goal is to help get the trunk into a usable state, which means tackling the configuration issue. Once people can run their existing projects on the trunk, TG developers (like me) will be able to do our daily work on turbogears projects on the trunk. Which in turn should help us to attract more developers and testers and continue to make TurboGears a great tool for rapid web application development.