
Welcome! I'm a software engineer, and I like blogging about Python and programming in general. I'm the author of several open-source Python libraries, including Peewee ORM, Huey task queue, and lots more. Below you can find a list of my most recent blog posts.
If you don't know what you're doing here, check out some posts I'm not too embarrassed of.
-
Caching trick for Python web applications
I'd like to share a simple trick I use to reduce roundtrips pulling data from a cache server (like Redis or Kyoto Tycoon. Both Redis and Kyoto Tycoon support efficient bulk-get operations, so it makes sense to read as many keys from the cache as we can when performing an operation that may need to access multiple cached values. This is especially true in web applications, as a typical web-page may multiple chunks of data and rendered HTML from a cache (fragment-caching) to build the final page that is sent as a response.
If we know ahead-of-time which cache-keys we need to fetch, we could just grab the cached data in one Redis/KT request and hold onto it in memory for the duration of the request.
-
Peewee now supports CockroachDB
I'm pleased to announce that Peewee now supports CockroachDB (CRDB), the distributed, horizontally-scalable SQL database. I'm excited about this release, because it's now quite easy to get up-and-running with a robust SQL database that can scale out with minimal effort (documentation).
Here is how you configure a
CockroachDatabase
instance:from playhouse.cockroachdb import CockroachDatabase db = CockroachDatabase('my_app', user='root', host='10.1.0.8', port=26257)
CRDB conveniently provides a very similar SQL dialect to Postgres, which has been well-supported in Peewee for many years, allowing you to use features like jsonb and arrays, in addition to the regular complement of field-types. Additionally, CRDB speaks the same wire-protocol as Postgres, so it works out-of-the-box using the popular
psycopg2
driver. -
New features planned for Python 4.0
With the release of Python 3.8 coming soon, the core development team has asked me to summarize our latest discussions on the new features planned for Python 4.0, codename "ouroboros: the snake will eat itself". This will be an exciting release and a significant milestone, many thanks to the hard work of over 100 contributors.
-
ucache, a lightweight caching library for python
I recently wrote about Kyoto Tycoon (KT), a fast key/value database server. KT databases may be ordered (B-Tree / red-black tree) or unordered (hash table), and persistent or stored completely in-memory. Among other things, I'm using KT's hash database as a cache for things like HTML fragments, RSS feed data, etc. KT supports automatic, time-based expiration, so using it as a cache is a natural fit.
Besides using KT as a cache, in the past I have also used Redis and Sqlite. So I've released a small library I'm calling ucache which can be used with these storage backends and has a couple nice features. I will likely flesh it out and add support for additional storages as I find time to work on it.
View more posts