Compound Thinking

TurboGears on Sourceforge

No, we’re not moving the TG2 hosting to SourceForge. Instead, Sourceforge is now using TG2 to display the front pages, project pages, and download pages for all projects. This comes with a new look for SourceForge, but more than that it’s the first step in a fundamental rethinking of what SourceForge does. We’ve been given the opportunity to focus on improving the experience of users of SourceForge hosted software. We’re not ignoring developers, and lots of good stuff is going on for developers, but this latest update is all about the users. We wanted to make downloading software from SourceForge faster and easier, because this will help projects attract and maintain users. And more than 9 out of 10 of page views on SourceForge are by end-users, which means that the vast majority of page views on the SourceForge site are now going through TG2.

It’s all about users.

The big user experience wins come from some heuristics that we’ve developed to guess the best file to download. We’re analyzing your browser’s user agent for information about your operating system. And when the project has not told us about their preferred download, we’re analyzing file names and other data to get our best guess as to which file is the most relevant for a particular operating system.

This means we can generally give you a direct link to the right version of the file, right on the project page, so there’s no need to browse through a complex array of pages, and links just to finally get to the file you came to download in the first place.

Now with TG2 goodness.

Under the hood, there’s a new TurboGears 2 app powered by MongoDB. We’ve put this all together very quickly, and there have been a couple of rough spots here and there. Fortunately, none of the rough spots were in the TG2 or the TG2 stack.

But we did have a couple of rough patches. For example, we couldn’t use a mongo replica pair for the master database and have slaves on each node. So, we chose to try running the site all against a single replica pair rather than to do master-slave everywhere. This was compounded with a coding issue that, we were trying to pull tons more data out of MongoDB than we needed, and we ended up saturating a 2 gigabit network connection between the mongo master and the local slaves. Which if you think about it is kind of amazing, since MongoDB was still only using a few percent of the CPU on the box.

At this point though, all those issues are resolved and we are very confident that we’ll be able to add more user-facing improvements to SourceForge project pages and make the download side of things even better.

Ann Arbor ArbCamp Registration open again

I’ve been very, very busy trying to get TurboGears 2 beta 1 ready to go, as well as a few other interesting projects, and had neglected to blog about a ArbCamp before, then it was sold-out, and I didn’t blog about it because I didn’t want to raise people’s hopes only to have then dashed upon the rocks. But, we’ve secured a new venue, so ArbCamp registration is now Un-Sold-Out. It’s UnSold because it’s free, and it’s un-Sold-Out because we can now fit everybody in. We had over 160 people registered and on the wait-list, but could only let 100 people in. Now we have space for 200, so those on the wait-list and those who didn’t sign up in time have a second chance.

ArbCamp will be tomorrow night, in the upstairs of the downtown Cottage Inn’s, so this is kind of last minute, but I think it’ll be a very cool event. It’s an UnConference, and people will be self-organizing a variety of sessions, and the possibilities are endless.

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.