Comments for Compound Thinking

Comment on Coupling Django Style by Nick Fitzgerald

Nick Fitzgerald — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:06:30 +0000

If you want truly loose coupling and replaceable components, don’t use Django. Use Werkzeug or something. You are completely right that there are costs and benefits on both sides.

However, I think something is missing from the discussion: You don’t have to go all or nothing with any of the components you choose to use.

We use SQLAlchemy, Django’s ORM, and an in house CouchDB library at WWU Housing. We can still use django pluggable applications, we have the power of SQLAlchemy for mapping objects to the atrocious tables in Banner, and we have the flexibility of a schema free document database with CouchDB. Why should we limit ourselves to one?

Its ridiculous; use the tool for the job.

Comment on Things I’ve learned about Time Management by GTD

GTD — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:08:26 +0000

[...] http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/01/things-ive-learned-about-time-management/ [...]

Comment on Things I’ve learned about Time Management by Felix

Felix — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:45:51 +0000

Im so confuse about time manage,thx

Comment on Things I’ve learned about Time Management by Dave Allan

Dave Allan — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:35:27 +0000

Good tips. I definitley agree with leaving a little slack in your life. I did the opposite for along time and learned the hard way as well. Does anyone know about scheduling/ calendar programs? I know of meebee.com and meet-0-matic.com. Do you think they’re worth using? Thanks

Comment on Things I’ve learned about Time Management by Bonne Vie - Wholestyle on the Web: Week of 12/11/2009

Bonne Vie - Wholestyle on the Web: Week of 12/11/2009 — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:24:01 +0000

[...] Compound Thinking: Things I’ve Learned about Time Management Don’t do it, avoid thrashing, and how saying “no” lets you say “yes” [...]

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Jacob

Jacob — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:45:41 +0000

I don’t think it is decidable in the abstract whether a “salt umbrella” is good or bad in general. But for a particular set of site authors and maintainers, it may be clearly decidable. My team stopped using django templates with django some time ago, because the template authors and the programmers are the same people, and hence there is no group of less experienced webmonkeys who need the protection of a sandboxed language (a language, incidentally, which is in some respects more intricate and harder to learn, while being less capable, than an uncrippled language like Python); and the cost of having to write a tag whenever you want to do almost anything besides interpolate just became silly. So we’re using mako, even with reusable apps from other sources (this is quite possible, via our django-smorgasbord app), and although mako syntax is in some respects less pretty than django’s, it has been a big hit.

I should stress this: Mark, you say that if you are using django you absolutely should use django templates — but in my experience there has been no penalty to swapping them out with mako — zero.

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Alex

Alex — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:29:13 +0000

I too like the salt analogy, and I think this development cycle for Django is proving why that works. Django’s template engine basically started as the least logic humanly possible to do design. However, this release of Django adds a more expressive syntax to the {% if %} tag, which is turns out is really handy for design logic. I do however prefer the approach of using templatetags for anything more complicated than this. You and James both pointed out they are *way* too hard to write, but I think that’s being addressed by projects like templatetag-sugar (mine), tagcon, or surlex.

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Tom Swirly

Tom Swirly — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:36:27 +0000

What about Clearsilver? I used it successfully for a templating project at my last job and it worked very well with Python…

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by kpd

kpd — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:41:42 +0000

I don’t have enough practical experience with Django
templates to add anything meaningful to the conversation.

My experience is with Cheetah, which I tend to hook into the framework early on. The Django work I’ve done ends up being mostly Cheetah with some Django templates in place where it’s easier. Unfortunately I’m not dealing with designers writing pages.

I did want to say it was a great article, and I look forward to the rest of your series. Thanks.

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by James Bennett

James Bennett — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:51:44 +0000

Mark, for me at least it’s a theory of wanting to start with the simplest (i.e., least amount of logic) that could work for a significant number of people, then selectively adding more “salt” as good use cases come up. Which, really, is how Django’s template language has been evolving; quite a few of the most useful tags were added around the 1.0 push, when we had a good solid base out there to understand what people were really missing.

Comment on Rule Mongo with an Iron Fist by Mark Ramm

Mark Ramm — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:49:01 +0000

Well, mongoDB’s built in abstraction is more like a traditional DB, you have connections which are long lived, and cursors and all of that.

But MongoDB does provide for some simple async use cases like throwing data at the DB and not waiting for a response.

As for the session handling magic in Ming, there’s really not much at all over the top of what mongo-python provides in terms of connection/cursor handling.

The entirety of the ming session code can be found here:

http://merciless.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=merciless/merciless;a=blob_plain;f=ming/session.py;hb=HEAD

Comment on Rule Mongo with an Iron Fist by Kevin Horn

Kevin Horn — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:18:54 +0000

I learned about Ming after reading Rick’s blog post the other day and it looks great. Just wondering if you’ve thought about whether similar concepts could be applied to async (like Twisted, etc.) connections to MongoDB. It looks like this would be pretty tricky to do with something like Ming, since it seems to handle things similarly to how SQLALchemy does things.

How much magic is there in the session handling in Ming?

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Mark Ramm

Mark Ramm — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:52:48 +0000

James,

I love the salt analogy.

But the thing with template languages is that features aren’t “baked in” until you use them. Jingja, Genshi, and Mako all *allow* you to add lots and lots of salt to your templates, to the point where they are absolutely unusable by designers. But they don’t *require* you to add salt.

Meanwhile Django Templates require you to jump through hoops if you want even a little bit of extra salt.

That said, there are people who *should* have the salt taken away from them. I had a college roommate who put 1/2 cup of vanilla in some ground beef that he was planning to turn into lasagna. After that we wouldn’t let him near the spice drawer… ;)

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Bob

Bob — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:29:13 +0000

Would it be hard to change the code to support early failure better?

From what I have read it looks like a (somewhat) minor fix, but for some developers it would be a great gain.

Comment on Python Template languages (Part 1 — Django) by Antoine

Antoine — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:41:09 +0000

I guess the advent of cheesy download sites means Linux has become a true mainstream platform :)