Meghan Blanchette
Meghan Blanchette is an editor at O'Reilly Media. She has spent the last few years exploring the tech world and tripping into geekdom.
Everyone is a beginner at something
Becoming confident with the fundamentals.
Choose your Learning Path. Our new Learning Paths will help you get where you want to go, whether it’s learning a programming language, developing new skills, or getting started with something entirely new.
I’ve noticed a curious thing about the term “beginner.” It’s acquired a sort of stigma — we seem to most often identify ourselves by what we’re an expert in, as if our burgeoning interests/talents have less value. An experienced PHP person who is just starting Python, for example, would rarely describe herself as a “Python Beginner” on a conference badge or biography. There are exceptions, of course, people eager to talk about what they’re learning; but, on the whole, it’s not something we see much.
I work on the Head First content, and first noticed it there. You suggest to a Java developer looking to learn Ruby that she check out our Head First Ruby. “But I know programming,” she’s likely to reply, “I’m not a beginner, I just need to learn Ruby.” People, by and large, buy into the stigma of being a “beginner,” which is, frankly, silly. Everyone is a beginner at something.
4 ways the Raspberry Pi is being used in education
Get inspired to create, teach, and learn with the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that can be used for a variety of projects, and has been heralded as a great boon to education due to its flexibility and simplicity. While PcPro magazine noted in January of 2014 that Pi’s were “gathering dust” in classrooms, production has not ceased. The usage map is pretty impressive and the Raspberry Pi 2 was recently released.
In February of this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that they’re starting a mentoring program for people 16-21 years old. Here are four other ways that the Pi is being used in education and growing the tech community.
Enterprising open source
Meg Blanchette interviews Continuum's Peter Wang about the growing role of OSS in the enterprise.
If you attend OSCON this year, you may notice a bit more attention paid to the enterprise side of tech. That is on purpose, as we have been noticing the open source and enterprise worlds edging closer and closer. Companies traditionally nervous about open source are either recognizing the inherent value, or their developers are using it and they don’t even realize. Open source is, in turn, seeing the benefits an established company can bring a project and the various opportunities available.
In that spirit, I spoke with Peter Wang, from Continuum Analytics. Continuum is a good example of this new hybrid — offering open source technology, while also having an enterprise side. Here, we discuss the changing landscape and what that can mean for people who embrace change, and for those who don’t.
A software engineer’s role traversal
Software engineer and author Jason Myers on changing roles in a changing market.
We often hear about how the tech job market is booming and has space for newcomers, but what does that mean for the developers already in the market? In December of 2014, Fortune.com predicted that 2015 would be an excellent year for developers to change jobs. Citing Dice.com, they note that jobs are popping up all over the country. In fact, Dice’s survey also reports 40% of hiring managers seeing voluntary departures, a higher number than was seen just six months earlier.
These are all large, general numbers. What does a job change, and the changing market, look like for individual developers? To get a better sense, I spoke with Jason Myers, who is working on our upcoming Essential SQLAlchemy, 2e title. Jason recently went from working for the email marketing service Emma, Inc., to working for networking giant Cisco. Here, he talks about how a change like that feels, and how the market looks to him.
5 ways to improve battery life in your app
Tips and tricks to squeeze the most out of your mobile UI
Editor’s Note: Mobile HTML5 is a book by front-end engineer and frequent speaker Estelle Weyl. It is packed with hands-on examples to make you a stronger web developer–including best practices for SVG, Canvas, and CSS3 tailored to fit mobile devices. In the excerpt below, Estelle walks you through five easy things you can do to improve battery life in your mobile web apps. As throughout the book, the tips she provides come from her own real-life experience with these technologies.
Unlike desktop computers that are tethered to the wall at all times, and even laptop computers that are generally used by stationary users, mobile users do not recharge their devices throughout the day. Mobile users expect their devices to last, at a minimum, 24 hours between recharging.
Your users do realize that calls and GPS usage consume battery power. However, if they think they’re just using their browser to surf the Web, they don’t consider that different websites will drain their battery faster than other sites. It is our job, as developers, to manage the power consumption of our code. Read more…
Simplifying Django
Lightweight Django by example
The following comes to you from Julia Elman and Mark Lavin. Julia is a a hybrid designer/developer who has been working her brand of web skills since 2002; and Mark is the Development Director at Caktus Consulting Group in Carrboro, NC where he builds scalable web applications with Django. Together, they are working on Lightweight Django, a book due out later this year that explores bringing Django into modern web practices.
Despite Django’s popularity and maturity, some developers believe that it is an outdated web framework made primarily for “content-heavy” applications. Since the majority of modern web applications and services tend not to be rich in their content, this reputation leaves Django seeming like a less than optimal choice as a web framework.
Let’s take a moment to look at Django from the ground up and get a better idea of where the framework stands in today’s web development practices.
Plain and Simple Django
A web framework’s primary purpose is to help to generate the core architecture for an application and reuse it on other projects. Django was built on this foundation to rapidly create web applications. At its core, Django is primarily a Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) application framework that provides HTTP request utilities for extracting and returning meaningful HTTP responses. It handles various services with these utilities by generating things like URL routing, cookie handling, parsing form data and file uploads.
Also, when it comes to building those responses Django provides a dynamic template engine. Right out of the box, you are provided with a long list of filters and tags to create dynamic and extensible templates for a rich web application building experience.
By only using these specific pieces, you easily see how you can build a plain and simple micro-framework application inside a Django project.
We do know that there are some readers who may enjoy creating or adding their own utilities and libraries. We are not trying to take away from this experience, but show that using something like Django allows for fewer distractions. For example, instead of having to decide between Jinja2, Mako, Genshi, Cheetah, etc, you can simply use the existing template language while you focus on building out other parts. Fewer decisions up front make for a more enjoyable application building process.
Building an Activity Feed System with Storm
One of many wonderfully functional recipes from the Clojure Cookbook
Editor’s Note: The Clojure Cookbook is a recently published book by experienced Clojurists Luke VanderHart and Ryan Neufeld. It seeks to be a practical collection of tasks for intermediate Clojure programmers. In addition to providing their own recipes, Ryan and Luke accepted contributions from a number of people in the community. One of those contributors was Travis Vachon–in this excerpt from the Cookbook, Travis gives you a tried and true recipe for working with Clojure and Storm.
Problem
You want to build an activity stream processing system to filter and aggregate the raw event data generated by the users of your application.
Solution
Streams are a dominant metaphor for presenting information to users of the modern Internet. Used on sites like Facebook and Twitter and mobile apps like Instagram and Tinder, streams are an elegant tool for giving users a window into the deluge of information generated by the applications they use every day.
As a developer of these applications, you want tools to process the firehose of raw event data generated by user actions. They must offer powerful capabilities for filtering and aggregating data and must be arbitrarily scalable to serve ever-growing user bases. Ideally they should provide high-level abstractions that help you organize and grow the complexity of your stream-processing logic to accommodate new features and a complex world.
Clojure offers just such a tool in Storm, a distributed real-time computation system that aims to be for real-time computation what Hadoop is for batch computation. In this section, you’ll build a simple activity stream processing system that can be easily extended to solve real-world problems.
First, create a new Storm project using its Leiningen template:
$ lein new cookbook-storm-project feeds
In the project directory, run the default Storm topology (which the lein template has generated for you):
$ cd feeds
$ lein run -m feeds.topology/run!
Compiling feeds.TopologySubmitter
...
Emitting: spout default [:bizarro]
Processing received message source: spout:4, stream: default, id: {}, [:bizarro]
Emitting: stormy-bolt default ["I'm bizarro Stormy!"]
Processing received message source: stormy-bolt:5,
stream: default, id: {}, [I'm bizarro Stormy!]
Emitting: feeds-bolt default ["feeds produced: I'm bizarro Stormy!"]
This generated example topology just babbles example messages incoherently, which probably isn’t what you want, so begin by modifying the “spout” to produce realistic events.
The Case for Test-Driven Development
An interview with O'Reilly author Harry Percival
Harry Percival, author of Test-Driven Web Development with Python, discusses how he got into TDD, why you should too, and shares some tips. In the podcast above, listen to Harry talk candidly about the types of tests that make sense, what and what not to test, and at what point a program becomes complex enough to warrant testing. Below is a mostly matching text version of the same interview. Let us know your thoughts on TDD in the comments—your own war stories and what convinced you (or didn’t!).
Why write tests? How do you know it’s not a waste of time?
The theory is that it’s an investment—the time you spend writing tests will get paid back in time you don’t have to spend debugging. Also, the theory goes that tests should help you to write code that’s easier to work with, as well as code with less defects. Because having tests encourages you to refactor, and to think about design, your code should end up cleaner and better architected, and so it should be easier to work with, and your investment pays off because you’re more productive in future as well.
So that’s the theory. But the problem is that there’s delayed gratification—it’s hard to really believe this when the reward is so far off and the time required is now. So in practice, what was it that convinced me?
I first learned about testing from a book called “Dive Into Python”—it’s a popular book, maybe some of the people listening will have read it too? They may remember that Mark Pilgrim introduces testing, in fact he introduces TDD, in chapter 10. He uses the classic TDD example, which is a Roman Numeral calculator, and he shows how, by writing the tests before we even start writing the code, we can really get some help in how we implement our calculator. So he writes his tests, I should be 1 and II should be 2 and IV should be 4, and so on, and he shows how it helps us to build a really neat implementation of a Roman numeral calculator.
Will Developers Move to Sputnik?
The past, present, and future of Dell's project
Barton George (@barton808) is the Director of Development Programs at Dell, and the lead on Project Sputnik—Dell’s Ubuntu-based developer laptop (and its accompanying software). He sat down with me at OSCON to talk about what’s happened in the past year since OSCON 2012, and why he thinks Sputnik has a real chance at attracting developers.
Key highlights include:
- The developers that make up Sputnik’s ideal audience [Discussed at 1:00]
- The top three reasons you should try Sputnik [Discussed at 2:46]
- What Barton hopes to be talking about in 2014 [Discussed at 4:36]
- The key to building a community is documentation [Discussed at 5:20]
You can view the full interview here:
eZ Publish: A CMS Framework with Open Source in Its DNA
Leading eZ Publish advocates look at what lies ahead for CMS programmers and users
There are a variety of options when it comes to content management. We’ve explored Drupal a bit, and in this email interview I talked to some folks who work with eZ Publish. It is an open source (with commercial options) CMS written in PHP. Brandon Chambers and Greg McAvoy-Jensen talk about how the platform acts as a content management framework, how being open source has affected the project, and what we should expect to see coming up for CMS in general.
Brandon Chambers is a Senior Developer at Granite Horizon, an eZ Publish integrator. He has 14 years of web development experience focused on open source technologies such as PHP, MySQL, Python, Java, Android, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, CSS and XML.
Greg McAvoy-Jensen is a member of the eZ Publish Community Project Board. He also founded and is the CEO of Granite Horizon, and has been developing with eZ Publish since 2002.
Q: What problems does eZ Publish solve for users?
A: eZ Publish grew up not just as a CMS, but as a content management framework. It sports a flexible and object-oriented content model (an important early decision), and provides developers an MVC framework as a platform for building complex web applications and extending the CMS. Like any CMS it makes content publishing accessible for the non-programmer, and provides an easy editorial interface. eZ Publish does a fine job of separating content from presentation and providing reusability and multi-channel delivery. It targets the enterprise more than smaller organizations, so the software quality remains pegged at high standards, and high degrees of flexibility and extensibility continue to be required.
Q: How you feel being open source has affected the project?
A: Fourteen years on, eZ Systems is still firm that open source is in its DNA. This foundational commitment created a culture of sharing, and it attracts developers who prefer to share their code and to collaborate with others outside their organization for the benefit of their customers. Contributions flow in as both extensions and core code pull requests. The commercial open source model, similar to Red Hat’s, means the vendor takes primary responsibility for code maintenance and development, and derives its profit from support subscriptions, while leaving customizations to its network of certified partners. Because the source is open, organizations evaluating the software can have their developers compare the code of, for example, eZ Publish and Drupal, and make their own determinations. This, in turn, keeps the vendor accountable for the code: eZ engineers program knowing full well that the world can see their work.
Q: What distinguishes eZ Publish from other CMS options?
A: While there may be a thousand or so CMS’s around, analysts typically look at something more like 30 that are important today. eZ Publish fits into that group, most recently by inclusion on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant beginning in 2011. Not all open source CMS’s have a vendor behind them who both provides support and has full control over the code, a level of accountability required in enterprise applications. eZ is a great fit for particularly complex implementations, or situations where there is no assurance that future needs will be simple. And despite the complex customizations developers do with eZ Publish, they rarely interfere with upgrades.
eZ’s engineers recently became dissatisfied with the merely vast degree of flexibility they had built into the MVC framework, so they’ve now moved the whole system on top of the Symfony PHP framework. eZ Publish is now a native Symfony application, the only CMS to utilize Symfony’s full stack. This leverages the great speed and excellent libraries Symfony provides, and makes eZ easier to learn by those who are familiar with Symfony. Some CMS’s require many plug-ins just to get a basic feature set going on a site, but eZ Publish has long included granular security, content versioning, multi-language support, multi-channel/multi-site capability, workflows, and the like as part of the kernel.
Read more…