Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Opensource”
Post
Open Source Science?
Let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine submitting a scientific paper for publication, then getting an email that reads something like this back:
Thank you for your submission to the Journal of Online Thinking and Futurism*. Your paper has been processed, but before we can proceed further with publication, please submit verfication that you have properly accessed the following cited papers:
… list of every cited work
Or what maybe it’s even more insidious.
Post
My First Docker
I’ve been told I should check out Docker for over a year. Chris Chang and Noah Seger at the Tribune were both big proponents. They got excited enough I always felt like I was missing something since I didn’t get it, but I haven’t had the time to really dig into it until the last few weeks.
After my initial glance at it, I couldn’t see how it was better/different than using Vagrant and a virtual machine.
Post
The Case for Django
I get asked a lot where to start if you’re looking to python for web backed work. A lot of people look at Django and Flask and feel that Flask is where they should start. It’s nice and small, very simple, and after all they’re not doing anything big and complicated, so why start with a big, complicated framework?
This reminds me if something that happens in the running world. People get started running then either a) read Born to Run, or b) hear someone talking about the benefits of so-called barefoot running.
Post
Past, Present, and Future of Armstrong
Most of you who know me have heard me talk about Armstrong, the open-source news platform that I helped create when I first joined the Texas Tribune. I have and continue to talk at length about Armstrong and its future, but I’ve never collected those thoughts into one cohesive document outlining how we got to where we are now, what the current state of the project is, and where I hope to see it go.
Post
Open Source Licenses
IANAL, but I like to pretend like I am on the Internets. This past week at NICAR, the discussion of open source licenses came up in one of the evening tracks over a few bourbons, or it might have been wine by that point, but I digress. The general theme: licenses are confusing.
I know a little bit about them I’m hoping to shed some light on them for fellow journalisty type developers who are thinking about releasing their code but aren’t sure which license they should use.
Post
Generic Dangers
Here at the Texas Tribune, we started using a project called django-chunks some time last year. Consider this post a cautionary tale and think long and hard before you start using. We didn’t. We’re paying the price.
The Promise django-chunks gives you the ability to inject arbitrary chunks of HTML into any template inside Django. You load up a template tag library, call a templatetag, and you’re off to the races.
Post
Importance of Context
Today I discovered the 99% Invisible podcast on architecture and design. Their latest podcast, Pruitt–Igoe Myth, tackles the problems associated with the Pruitt–Igoe housing project which was built in the 1950s in St. Louis to provide affordable housing in the St. Louis urban core. Due to a variety of reasons, which the podcast explores, it was torn down in the 1970s. From Wikipedia:
[Pruitt-Igoe’s] 33 buildings were torn down in the mid-1970s, and the project has become an icon of urban renewal and public-policy planning failure.
Post
Using Basketweaver with GitHub
Last month I blogged about using Travis CI with Armstrong. Things have been going along fine until the last few weeks. Tests were failing due to network timeouts while talking to PyPI. Never one to take failing tests lightly, I set out to fix it.
From local testing, it appeared that there was some sort of selective filtering happening at the server level on PyPI that was causing our tests to fail.
Post
Travis and Python
Today I took my name back and got Armstrong tests running on Travis CI. Travis CI is the distributed, community run continuous integration server that the Ruby community has put together. It lets you do all manner of fun things, like testing in dozens of different Ruby version configurations.
You’re probably wondering what Armstrong is doing there with all of this talk of Ruby. No, I didn’t rewrite Armstrong in Rails last night.
Post
50 Days
Shh… Don’t tell my editor I’m blogging. I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post instead of working on Programming Node. I’ll still get to that, but this is on the brain right now.
Today marks the 50th straight day of pushing code to GitHub. My work on Armstrong has made a lot of this possible—it’s easy to push code when you’re getting paid to write open source software—but not every day has been Armstrong related code.
Post
Armstrong on Vagrant
We released our first version of Armstrong this past Wednesday. After taking a quick breather, I set out on getting Armstrong setup inside a Vagrant virtual machine to make evaluation easy. I finally got it running. There’s more information about getting started in the README, where it belongs, but I ran into some interesting technical issues while setting it up that I want to document here.
Vagrant + Puppet + pip I initially wanted to create a full build-script inside Vagrant that could be used to setup the entire environment.
Post
Tag Feeds
Two weekends ago I quietly rolled out a new feature that people have been clamoring for here at TravisSwicegood.com. Feeds for tags. So say you’re only interested in following my personal posts, you can add that tag page to your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to it.
Or if you’re geeky, you might want to subscribe to my armstrong feed but don’t like the automagical discovery. In that case, just add /atom/ to the end of the URL and you’ve got your RSS feed.
Post
Show me the Code
I’m lazy when it comes to code. Not in a bad way, but in an efficient way. I want to get to the crux of the matter quickly and move on. Truth be told, that’s why I like TDD—I don’t have to remember anything more than I need to know right now. My tests remember everything else I knew, but I digress.
When I start evaluating a new library to see if its something I want to use, code is what I want to see.
Post
Old code, new home
Finally got around to converting some old code from SVN to Git and getting it up on GitHub. It’s like looking back through a time-warp actually, as most of the code hasn’t been touched since the summer of 2007.
Nearly all of the code is usable, but it’s all abandoned at this point. If there’s something there that strikes your fancy and you’d be interested in forking it into your own project, feel free.