Blog Entries all / by tag / by year / popular
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
"Hold on a sec-". My new boss' now-familiar MacOS desktop appeared in the video call window, browser with Claude open, filling the display. I watched as he copied the transcript of our call up to that point (he records transcripts of every call in order to feed the text into AI), and began a new chat with the prompt: "Say where Charlie's right, and where he's wrong. Say where I'm right and where I'm wrong." He pasted the transcript and hit enter. I consulted my avatar in the lower-right. We both waited in silence while Claude thought. We were 45 minutes into a call about product roadmap and a possible customer announcement. Soon the cursor started skipping along as words began filling the screen. We then read aloud through the findings one-by-one, helpfully bulleted, an even number for each of us. I felt called-upon to act the part of the gentleman, gallantly agreeing with Claude's softly (oh-so-softly) couched criticisms of my viewpoint, while conceding everywhere Claude expressed subtle (oh-so-subtle) approval of my boss. The call ended shortly afterwards, somewhat awkwardly for both of us, I think. I had just experienced the most baffling mixture of radical transparency and impossible opacity.
Children's Games
I try all things; I achieve what I can.
A year ago, as I was going through a mound of keepsakes my Mom transferred to my custody (I have reached that age, yes), I came across a little book I made in kindergarten describing my first bicycle crash, which I attributed to rolling over a pine-cone. I have very little recollection of the crash itself - I only recall sitting, high up on the passenger seat of the minivan, with a towel pressed to my forehead and anxiously asking, "B-but can you see any BRAINS?"
Redis and the Cost of Ambition
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
What happened to dear old Redis, I wondered. And the more I thought about it, a satisfying explanation started to coalesce which explains all the above phenomena. To me, the picture that emerges is that of a solution that lost its identity through ambition.
Tokens and Dreams
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.
The recurring theme running through my mind the last few months has been complexity within a software application. Forget coding. Sales is using AI to write all new code, so for us engineers there's not a hell of a lot to do besides think (and be there to hold the bag).
cysqlite - a new sqlite driver
Back in the spring of 2019, I began working on cysqlite,
a from-scratch DB-API compatible SQLite driver. I intended one day to use it as
a replacement for pysqlite3. Seven years later, the project is ready. It provides an API and performance similar to the standard library sqlite3 module, with many additional features.
Ghost in the Shell: my AI Experiment
A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. An evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.
This isn't a post about the machines, though. It is always the human builder that comes first and last.
Asyncio Finally Got Peewee
I feel that it is high time that Peewee had an assyncio story. I've avoided this for years, but asyncio is not going anywhere. Peewee remains a synchronous ORM, but in order to work with the ever-widening sphere of async-first web frameworks and database drivers, it was time to come up with a plan.
AsyncIO
I'd like to put forth my current thinking about asyncio. I hope this will answer some of the questions I've received as to whether Peewee will one day support asyncio, but moreso I hope it will encourage some readers (especially in the web development crowd) to question whether asyncio is appropriate for their project, and if so, look into alternatives like gevent.
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.