Status Update 2010
As you can see from the archives, the activity in this blog was rather low the last couple of weeks. But not only the blog, also my visible programming activity and everything related. There are a couple of reason for that but unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how this will change in the next few weeks.
University turned out to be boring and stressful at the same time and is the main limiting factor of my productivity. While at the same time many courses bore or frustrate me, there is still a lot of stuff that has to be delivered or learned for.
While this is the primary reason for not being active at all, there are a couple of other reasons as well. What I spend most of my time with the last couple of years was certainly Open Source (I guess even free software), Python and web applications. For a time I am interested in other topics as well, I just never had the impression that I would be able to learn was has to be learned to succeed at it.
I still don't know, but without trying I will never know. So my Python / Webdev activity will most likely stay as low as it currently is for a while. That however does not mean that my projects will be unmaintained.
Project Maintenance
So what's happening to the projects in the near future?
Werkzeug's Future
So this little bugger will certainly get a new release soon. I was actually planning a release before the beginning of the new year but there are a couple of things that I want to have sorted out first. I was planning to move the debugger together with a couple of things into a new library called Flickzeug, but because I don't think I will personally need debugging tools any time soon, I will put that plan on hold.
If anyone is interested in helping out there, just drop me a line and I will help you as good as I can. The design of the library is pretty much finished, just the implementation is unfinished.
Until something for Flickzeug is planned, the debugging component will stay in Werkzeug and not be deprecated. The same cannot be said about the Werkzeug templates however. Because it depends on a library that goes away in Python 3 I will only deprecate it for future Werkzeug Python 3 versions.
This is also my biggest grief at the moment. I am totally unhappy how Python is developing currently and especially with the implementation of Python 3 and the plans for it. Graham Dumpleton is doing an insanely great job with maintaining mod_wsgi and I am sure whatever he decides on for Python 3's WSGI will become the standard everybody is using. And I trust him enough that I know whatever is chosen, is an acceptable solution everybody can be happy with. Until then however, I do not plan to port Werkzeug to Python 3.
Jinja
Jinja is a little bit more complicated. The hg tip should work on Python 3 already if you run it through 2to3, so with the next release we should have acceptable builtin Python 3 support. What keeps me from releasing a new version is that the compiler has a couple of scoping issues that arrive from edge cases where Jinja scoping does not properly translate to Python scoping.
All that would not be an issue if I could generate bytecode directly, but that unfortunately is not portable and does not work on the appengine at all, so I can only add further workarounds into the code generator.
Right now I am looking for code that breaks on Jinja2 tip and come up with solutions for these edge cases. If you have templates that break on tip, let me know and file tickets for those.
Zine
Now this is the most tricky project. When I started working on Zine I was extremely motived doing that, mostly because at that time WordPress was really weak and easy to catch up to. However Zine is still a one man project and because it is built in Python it is mostly interesting for other Python developers and as such missing its market.
The hg version is a lot better than the latest release so what I will do is integrating the missing changes into it and release a new version at the beginning of February. From that point onwards however I have no plans.
Why all that
So why the sudden switch away from what I did the last years? It's not that I lost motivation in general for what web development but I don't want to limit myself to that area. There is more I am interested in and because I picked the wrong studies all over again I won't learn enough I will have to start learning that next to my regular studies.
Alex Gaynor wrote an essay about education a while ago to which I wanted to respond, but I never had the time to. Lately however that comes back more and more to me because the situation in Austria regarding education and university is currently just weird for a couple of reasons.
Basically it boils down to me at the same time being incredible unhappy with the way university works in Austria but finding myself over and over again in the situation where I have to defend the system against other stupid students that think it's a good idea to occupy a large auditorium to get more money from the state (and by doing so disrupting other students whose exams get relocated, access to library denied and so forth).
Call for Volunteers
So a while ago there were a couple of people contributing code to various Pocoo projects. This is still true but even though the number of people using Werkzeug, Jinja2 and Zine increased (not mentioning Pygments here which Georg maintains) the number of patches and active developers decreased. This is unfortunate because right now I'm pretty much alone on these and working alone means that in times where I have few time to spare, the amound of new features, improvements and everything declines.
Two projects of mine (CleverCSS and GHRML) either found new owners by sending me a mail or got some better maintained branches on github and I would love to either hand over the project completely (including the pypi page) or getting you on the pocoo team and giving you commit access here.
For Werkzeug, Jinja2 and Zine my plan is to clean up the trackers a lot so that it's easier to work on small tasks which hopefully will both enable external contributions and make it possible for me to work on these next to what I will do otherwise :)
Happy new 2010
So for all of you, a Happy new 2010 and may it have more, and more stable releases, than 2009!
A bit sad but understandable. I think Zine is awesome and would love to contribute... but my time is equally limited. :-( Oh well, maybe in the future. Anyway good luck with whatever you pour your energy into - I'm sure it will be fruitful.
— Michael Foord on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 23:34 #
I have been using one of the github versions of clevercss in production and have forked it here: bitbucket.org/percious/clevercss/I have not made any modifications to it yet, but that doesn't mean I wont. You gotta love DVCS. Access to pypi would be nice, but I'd want to collaborate with the other clevercss contributors, perhaps you can somehow connect all of us.
cheers.
-chris
— Christopher Perkins on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 23:55 #
Hey Armin, good to see some activity again on your blog, even if it's only to indicate there won't be much activity in the near future. Can't say I disagree about Zine, it's hard to beat Wordpress and the multitude of other publishing/blogging systems out there, and anything non-PHP can't expect to get a foodhold in that area anyhow. It's certainly not a bad idea to narrow your commitments if you want to explore other things. We can't all be Ian Bicking ;-) FWIW, though, Werkzeug and Jinja2 are amazing, and kudos to you for making them what they are.
Education is often, ironically, a frustrating experience for the brightest of the bunch. Don't let it get you down. I am very curious though, as to what those "other topics" you're interested in entail :-)
Cheers!
— Stijn Debrouwere on Thursday, January 7, 2010 0:10 #
Just wanted to wish you a happy 2010, too, and thank you for the great tools that you have given to the python community.
Good luck with whatever keeps you busy right now!
— Raz on Thursday, January 7, 2010 1:23 #
Some kind of bad news although understandable... After starting with Python hacking taught by Brian Harring (for pkgcore on gentoo), you made me reach another level in web development and Python in general... Sad to see that'll stop now to some end.
Yet your projects will survive one way or another as the scope for them is clear and has a good userbase already.
Regarding Zine in particular, well, I forked it, removed the Blog-related parts and started a clan cms with it, so I'm into the codebase. Regarding the core, I merged some parts / wrote them like you did as well for solace, so I'd say we bring those together at core level and take next steps from there. I'm willing to help with it.
Other than that, find another task that will keep you busy. I'm with you that university is sometimes crazy and useless but our world requires the cert you get for the work there. Also sometimes uni is not about learning stuff on a particular topic but learning how work with a completely unrelated area of stuff. So just keep up the good work and you'll be rewarded.
— Jokey on Thursday, January 7, 2010 9:45 #
Oh CleverCSS how I love thee. I bumped into CleverCSS about a year ago and have since become unwilling to write css 'the old way'. Every new (django) project gets 'cleverstyle' as an INSTALLED_APP which allows me to write and use CleverCSS files. So thank you for saving me hours with a brilliant idea!
— Lenny on Thursday, January 7, 2010 15:48 #
Does Zine have a mailing list yet? I looked for a way to discuss Zine a while back but the only communication channel I saw was an irc channel. If you want to encourage the growth of a community around Zine a mailing list might be a good idea. But perhaps I just missed it. Since I looked quite a bit, it may be too hard to find out about such a mailing list.
— Martijn Faassen on Thursday, January 7, 2010 17:08 #
Hey Armin - I hope your New Year is off to a great start. While I can't volunteer myself I will definitely keep my ear to the ground for you. All the best!
— Jay :: San Diego Fence Contractor on Thursday, January 7, 2010 17:49 #
Armin, thank you very much for all the blog posts you have about... well, everything! I lurk around and watch for your posts, and I always wait in anticipation of a new post! I hope your New Year is amazing, and hope you have a great day!
— Emerson Matson on Friday, January 8, 2010 1:05 #
I can relate... in the end programming is just programming. There's an excitement to building things, but the excitement of the building and the sense of being part of some technical zeitgeist is not itself enough. And perhaps we make an unnecessarily small world for ourselves in the Python community.
As to education; well, you don't say the problem, but school has always tended to give me a general sense of malaise, so I guess I can relate too. There are many important things in this world have to relation to any professional work... school is the only structure we have to collaboratively pursue these questions. Which is disappointing. (There's the internet, blogging, discussion, etc, but it doesn't really fill the gap either; also disappointing.)
— Ian Bicking on Friday, January 8, 2010 3:30 #
Hello Armin, we are huge fan of your work and use your code as a textbook for web programming using python. We have been using werkzeug quite extensively lately, and believe it is an attractive alternative to django for projects having complex requirements. Our team in Romania will be happy to help with humble tasks this project may require.
— Amvtek on Friday, January 8, 2010 16:37 #
Hi Armin;
Thanks;
GoodLuck..
— Tayfun DEGER on Saturday, January 9, 2010 9:21 #
Hi Armin, I have just started to digg your blog and I like the style. Hope to read more of this stuff in 2010.
All the best for 2010
Dirk
— Dirk on Sunday, January 10, 2010 18:05 #
Hey Armin,
Good luck on your next set of projects. I can totally relate to your University problems but sadly it's a stage we all need to go for, perhaps we can figure out a better system for our children...
— Jorge Vargas on Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:32 #
Hi, Armin
Good to hear from you again. Wish you good luck in 2010.
Werkzeug rocks! Jinja rock! But it's too much for you. I wish you try to involve more developers, make the development more open, and make your life easyier.
— can xiang on Thursday, January 21, 2010 12:23 #
I haven't done anything on Zine in a long time because my fork has a few incompatible changes (using JSON instead of pickles) and I've simply never gotten around to merging all changes from the main tree. I'd be happy to take up maintenance, but my Python-fu simply isn't as good as yours.
Good luck with sorting out your place in the educational system.
— Kiran Jonnalagadda on Sunday, January 24, 2010 11:23 #
Happy new year Armin.
We are using Werkzeug and Jinja2 and we love it. So don't stop working on it.
— Lutz on Sunday, January 24, 2010 14:12 #
Indeed, the werkzeug code is some of the best python wsgi code around (imho).
Your work here is much appreciated and I sincerely hope that werkzeug, flickzeug, etc will see continued development and success. Hopefully, some additional contributors will come forth too.
— Chris on Monday, February 1, 2010 23:19 #
I can relate about school. While your core may be boring up front, unfortunately you have to almost push past the mundane to find yourself actually learning. Best of luck in 2010, and with python, jinja, zine, etc....
— Andrew on Friday, February 12, 2010 16:22 #