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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?"
Slopification and Its Discontents
O sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees
In Paradise! of operation blest
To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed.
A couple weeks back Anthropic announced a promotion offering six free months of their maximum Claude plan to open-source developers. I submitted an application, and a few days later an invitation arrived in my inbox and I was up-and-running on the latest Opus 4.6 model.
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
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heav'n.
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.
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.