Feeds
Sven Hoexter: Google CloudDNS HTTPS Records with ipv6hint
I naively provisioned an HTTPS record at Google CloudDNS like this via terraform:
resource "google_dns_record_set" "testv6" { name = "testv6.some-domain.example." managed_zone = "some-domain-example" type = "HTTPS" ttl = 3600 rrdatas = ["1 . alpn=\"h2\" ipv4hint=\"198.51.100.1\" ipv6hint=\"2001:DB8::1\""] }This results in a permanent diff because the Google CloudDNS API seems to parse the record content, and stores the ipv6hint expanded (removing the :: notation) and in all lowercase as 2001:db8:0:0:0:0:0:1. Thus to fix the permanent diff we've to use it like this:
resource "google_dns_record_set" "testv6" { name = "testv6.some-domain.example." managed_zone = "some-domain-example" type = "HTTPS" ttl = 3600 rrdatas = ["1 . alpn=\"h2\" ipv4hint=\"198.51.100.1\" ipv6hint=\"2001:db8:0:0:0:0:0:1\""] }Guess I should be glad that they already support HTTPS records natively, and not bicker too much about the implementation details.
Robin Wilson: Join the GeoTAM hackathon to work out business turnovers!
Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000!
(Click image for a larger version)
I’m currently working with Rebalance Earth, a boutique asset manager who are focused on making nature an investable asset. Our aim is to mobilise investment in UK natural infrastructure – for example, by arranging investment to undertake river restoration and reduce the risk of flooding. We will do this by finding businesses at risk of flooding, designing restoration schemes that will reduce this risk, and setting up ‘Nature-as-a-Service’ contracts with businesses to pay for the restoration.
I’m the Lead Geospatial Developer at Rebalance Earth, and am leading the development of our Geospatial Predictive Analytics Platform (GPAP), which helps us assess businesses at risk of flooding and design schemes to reduce this flooding.
An important part of deciding which areas to focus on is estimating the total business value at risk from flooding. A good way of establishing this is to use an estimate of the business turnover. However, there are no openly-available datasets showing business turnover in the UK – which is where the hackathon comes in.
We’re looking for participants to bring their expertise in programming, data science, machine learning and more to take some datasets we provide, combine them with other open data and try and estimate turnover. Specifically, we’re interested in turnover of individual business locations – for example, the turnover of a specific supermarket, not the whole supermarket chain.
The hackathon runs from 20th – 26th November 2024. We’ll provide some datasets, some ideas, and a Discord server to communicate through. We’d like you to bring your expertise and see what you can produce. This is a tricky task, and we’re not expecting fully polished solutions; proof-of-concept solutions are absolutely fine. You can enter as a team or an individual.
Most importantly, there are prizes:
- £2,000 for the First Prize
- £1,000 for the Second Prize
- £500 for the Third Prize
and there’s a possibility that we might even hire you to continue work on your idea!
So, please sign up and tell your friends!
C++20 comparison in Qt (even with C++17🤩)
In the Qt 6.7 release, we enabled support for C++20 comparison and also back-ported some of its features to C++17. This blog post will give you an overview of the comparison enhancements we are taking advantage of and offer guidance on implementing them in your custom classes.
Python Bytes: #408 python-preference only-managed 3.13t
Zato Blog: Meaningful automation in Python
This article is an introduction to meaningful automation, integrations and interoperability with Zato, service-oriented thinking and Python.
Zato is a convenient and secure, Python-based, open-source, service-oriented platform for automation, integrations and interoperability. It is used to connect distributed systems or data sources and to build API-focused, middleware and backend applications.
The platform is designed and built specifically with Python users in mind - often working in, and for, industries such as telecommunications, defense, health care and others that require automation, integrations and interoperability of multiple systems and processes.
Sample real-world, mission-critical Zato environments include:
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Systems for telecommunication operators integrating CRM, ERP, Charging Systems, Billing and other OSS/BSS applications internal or external to the operators, including network automation of packet brokers and other network visibility and cybersecurity tools from Keysight
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Enterprise services buses for government, helping in the digital transformation of legacy systems and processes towards modern capabilities
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AI, ML and data science systems that analyze and improve acquisition and supply chain activities in government processes
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Applied observability automation that enables meaningful decision making through the orchestration and coordination of the collection, distribution and presentation of data spread across a pool of independent systems
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Platforms for health care and public administration systems, helping to achieve data interoperability through the integration of independent data sources, databases and health information exchanges (HIE)
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Global IoT platforms for hybrid integrations of medical devices and software both in the cloud and on premises
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Cybersecurity automation, including IT/OT hardware and software assets
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Robotic process automation (RPA) of message flows and events produced by early warning systems
Zato offers connectors to all the popular technologies and vendors, such as REST, Cloud, task scheduling, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Atlassian, SAP, Odoo, SQL, HL7, FHIR, AMQP, IBM MQ, LDAP, Redis, MongoDB, WebSockets, SOAP, Caching and many more.
Running in the cloud, on premises, or under Docker, Kubernetes and other container technologies, Zato services are optimized for high performance and security - it is easily possible to run hundreds and thousands of services on typical server instances as offered by Amazon, Google Cloud, Azure or other cloud providers.
Zato servers offer high availability and no-downtime deployment. Servers form clusters that are used to scale systems both horizontally and vertically.
The product is commercial open-source software with training, professional services and enterprise 24x7x365 support available.
A platform and language for interesting, reusable and atomic servicesZato promotes the design of, and helps you build, solutions composed of services that are interesting, reusable and atomic (IRA).
What does it really mean in practice that something is interesting, reusable and atomic? In particular, how do we define what is interesting?
Each interesting service should make its users want to keep using it more and more. People should immediately see the value of using the service in their processes. An interesting service strikes everyone as immediately useful in wider contexts, preferably with few or no conditions, prerequisites and obligations.
An interesting service is aesthetically pleasing, both in terms of its technical usage as well as its relevance to, and potential applicability in, fields broader than originally envisioned. If people check the service and say "I know, we will definitely use it" or "Why don't we use it" you know that the service is interesting. If they say "Oh no, not this one again" or "No, thanks, but no" then it is the opposite.
Note that focus here is on the value that the service brings for the user. You constantly need to keep in mind that people generally want to use services only if they allow them to fulfill their plans or execute some bigger ideas. Perhaps they already have them in mind and they are only looking for technical means of achieving that or perhaps it is your services that will make a person realize that something is possible at all, but the point is the same, your service should serve a grander purpose.
This mindset, of wanting to build things that are useful and interesting is not specific to Python or, indeed, to software and technology. Even if you are designing and implementing services for your own purposes, you need to act as if you were a consultant that can always see a bigger vision, a bigger architecture, and who can envision results that are still ahead in the future while at the same time not forgetting that it is always a series of small interesting actions, that everyone can relate to, that lead to success.
A curious observation can be made, particularly when you consider all the various aspects of the digital transformation that companies and organizations go through, is that many people to whom the services are addressed, or who sponsor their development, are surprised when they see what automation and integrations are capable.
Put differently, many people can only begin to visualize bigger designs once they see in practice smaller, practical results that further their missions, careers and otherwise help them at work. This is why, again, the focus on being interesting is essential.
At the same, it can be at times advantageous to you that people will not see automation or integrations coming. That lets you take the lead and build a center of such a fundamental shift around yourself. This is a great position to be in, a blue ocean of possibilities, because it means little to no competition inside an organization that you are a part of.
If you are your own audience, that is, if you build services for your own purposes, the same principles apply and it is easy to observe that thinking in services lets you build a toolbox of reusable, complementary capabilities, a portfolio, that you can take with you as you progress in your career. For instance, your services, and your work, can concentrate on a particular vendor and with a set of services that automate their products, you will be always able to put that into use, shorting your own development time, no matter who employs you and in what way.
Regardless of who the clients that you build the solutions for are, observe that automation and integrations with services are evolutionary and incremental in their nature, at least initially. Yes, the resulting value can often be revolutionary but you do not intend to incur any massive changes until there are clear, interesting results available. Trying to integrate and change existing systems at the same time is doable, but not trivial, and it is best left to later stages, once your automation gets the necessary buy-in from the organization.
Services should be ready to be used in different, independent processes. The processes can be strictly business ones, such as processing of orders or payments, or they can be of a deep, technical nature, e.g. automating cybersecurity hardware. What matters in either case is that reusability breeds both flexibility and stability.
There is inherent flexibility in being able to compose bigger processes out of smaller blocks with clearly defined boundaries, which can easily translate to increased competitive advantage when services are placed into more and more areas. A direct result of this is a reduction in R&D time as, over time, you are able to choose from a collection of loosely-coupled components, the services, that hide implementation details of a particular system or technology that they automate or integrate with.
Through their continued use in different processes, services can reduce overall implementation risks that are always part of any kind of software development - you will know that you can keep reusing stable functionality that has been already well tested and that is used elsewhere.
Because services are reusable, there is no need for gigantic, pure waterfall-style implementations of automation and integrations in an organization. Each individual project can contribute a smaller set of services that, as a whole, constitute the whole integrated environment. Conversely, each new project can start to reuse services delivered by the previous ones, hence allowing you to quickly, incrementally, prove the value of the investment in service-oriented thinking.
To make them reusable, services are designed in a way that hides their implementation details. Users only need to know how to invoke the service; the specific systems or processes it automates or integrates are not necessarily important for them to know as long as a specific business goal is achieved. Thanks to that, both services and what they integrate can be replaced without disrupting other parts - in reality, this is exactly what happens - systems with various kinds of data will be changed or modernized but the service will stay the same and the user will not notice anything.
Each service fulfills a single, atomic business need. Each service is deployed independently and, as a whole, they constitute an implementation of business processes taking place in your company or organization. Note that the definition of what the business need is, again, specific to your own needs. In purely market-oriented integrations, this may mean, for instance, the opening of a bank account. In IT or OT automation, on the other hand, it may mean the reconfiguration of a specific device.
That services are atomic also means that they are discrete and that their functionality is finely grained. You will recognize whether a design goes in this direction if consider the names of the services for a moment. An atomic service will invariably use a short name consisting of a single verb and noun. For instance, "Create Customer Account", "Stop Firewall", "Conduct Feasibility Study", it is easy to see that we cannot break them down into smaller part, they are atomic.
At the same time, you will keep creating composite services that invoke other services; this is natural and as expected but you will not consider services such as "Create Customer Account and Set Up a SIM Card" as atomic ones because, in that form, they will not be very reusable, and a major part of why being atomic is important is that it promotes reusability. For instance, having separate services to create customer accounts, independently of setting up their SIM cards, is that one can without difficulty foresee situations when an account is created but a SIM card is purchased at a later time and, conversely, surely one customer account should be able to potentially have multiple SIM cards. Think of it as being similar to LEGO bricks where just a few basic shapes can form millions of interesting combinations.
The point about service naming conventions is well worth remembering because this lets you maintain a vocabulary that is common to both technical and business people. A technical person will understand that such naming is akin to the CRUD convention from the web programming world while a business person will find it easy to map the meaning to a specific business function within a broader business process.
With Zato, you use Python to focus on the business logic exclusively and the platform takes care of scalability, availability communications protocols, messaging, security or routing. This lets you concentrate only on what is the very core of systems integrations - making sure their services are interesting, reusable and atomic.
Python is the perfect choice for this job because it hits the sweet spot under several key headings:
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It is a very high level language, with a syntax close to how grammar of various spoken languages works, which makes it easy to translate business requirements into implementation
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It is a solid, mainstream and full-featured, real programming language rather than a domain-specific one which means that it offers a great degree of flexibility and choice in expressing their needs
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It is difficult to find universities without Python courses. Most people entering the workforce already know Python, it is a new career language. In fact, it is becoming more and more difficult to find new talent who would not prefer to use Python.
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Yet, one does not need to be a developer or a full-time programmer to use Python. In fact, most people who use Python are not programmers at all. They are specialists in other fields who also need to use a programming language to automate or integrate their work in a meaningful way.
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Many Python users come from backgrounds in network and cybersecurity engineering - fields that naturally require a lot of automation using a real language that is convenient and easy to get started with
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Many Python users are scientists with a background in AI, ML and data science, applying their domain-specific knowledge in processes that, by their very nature, require them to collect and integrate data from independent sources, which again leads to automation and integrations
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Many Python users have a strong web programming background which means that it takes little effort to take a step further, towards automation and integrations. In turn, this means that it is easy to find good people for API projects.
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Many Python users know multiple programming languages - this is very useful in the context of integration projects where one is typically faced with dozens of technologies, vendors or integration methods and techniques.
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Lower maintenance costs - thanks to the language's unique design, Python programmers tend to produce code that is easy to read and understand. From the perspective of multi-year maintenance, reading and analyzing code, rather than writing it, is what most programmers do most of the time, making sense to use a language that makes it easy to carry out the most common tasks.
In short, Python can be construed as executable pseudo-code with many of its users already having roots in modern server-side programming so Zato, both from a technical and strategic perspective, is a natural choice for both simple and complex, sophisticated automation, integration and interoperability solutions as a platform built in the language and designed for Python people from day one.
Next steps:➤ Read about how to use Python to build and integrate enterprise APIs that your tests will cover
➤ Python API integration tutorial
➤ Python Integration platform as a Service (iPaaS)
➤ What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? What is SOA?
James Bennett: Three Django wishes
Michael Foord: Python Knowledge Sharing Videos Online
I’ve been teaching Python in one hour knowledge sharing sessions, some of which I’ve put online on youtube.
This is the link to the playlist of the sessions:
The slides for each of the sessions, along with some example code, can be found in this github repository:
So far there are seven one-hour sessions (with more planned) on:
- Python Core Object Model
- Python objects
- Slots
- Attribute lookup and the MRO
- Inheritance, multiple inheritance and super
- Inside Python objects and classes
- Closures and decorators (functional programming)
- Functional programming: higher order functions and functions as objects
- Lambdas
- Closures: functions that build functions
- Variable scoping: global, local and nonlocal
- Decorators: functions wrapping functions
- Decorator factories (decorators that take arguments)
- Class decorators
- Decorator order and using functools.wraps
- Generators and Iterators
- The iteration protocol
- Stateful iteration with generators
- Adding iteration support to objects
- References, assignment and mutability
- Identity versus equality
- Call by object
- Object copying
- Unicode, Floats and regex
- Floating point numbers
- Unicode, encodings and strings
- Regular expressions
- Concurrency (async, threads, processes, the GIL)
- The history of concurrency from AmigaOS to a multi-core world
- Python and the Global Interpreter Lock
- I/O bound and CPU bound tasks
- Threads and processes
- Async programming (green threading, coroutines)
- Concurrency with threads
- Concurrency with multiprocessing
- Looking to the future (Python 3.13): optional GIL (PEP 703) and subinterpreters (PEP 554)
- Testing with pytest
- virtual environments and pipenv (installing pytest)
- pytest command line for collecting and running tests
- Simple test functions and asserts
- Test fixtures and conftest.py
- Testing exceptions
- Test parameterisation for test combinations
- Test marking for running test subsets
- Principles of testing (unit tests versus end to end testing, building test helpers etc)
- Mocking and patching
- Modules and Namespaces
- Import syntax variations
- namespaces and variable lookups
- sys.modules and the import cache
- Module objects
- Module level functionality: __dir__ and __getattr__
- Packages and the filesystem
- Relative import syntax
- Module reloading (how to do it and why not to do it)
- Circular imports, avoiding and fixing
- Executable modules and packages
A selection of some of the talks and interviews I’ve given on Python and software engineering across my career.
- UK Health Security Agency Software Development Practise Conf 2024
- PyCon UK 2023, Metaclasses in 5 Minutes Lightning Talk
- PyCon MEA 2022 How Python Took Over the World
- Test and Code Podcast Episode 145: For Those About to Mock
- PyCon Belarus 2020 How Python Took Over the World
- PyLondinium 2019 The Python Object Model
- Interview on Podcast.__init__ on testing, Mock and the Python community (2018)
- The Role of Abstractions: Lightning Talk PyCon US 2018
- Best Practises for Software Development and Testing (2017)
- PyCon UK Panel 2015
- To the Clouds: EuroPython 2015
- Automated Deployments with Juju: PyCon UK 2014
- Python and Pythons: PyCon NZ 2013
- Testing with Mock: PyCon US 2011
- A Little Bit of Python Podcast (2010-11)
- New and Improved unittest 2: PyCon US 2010
- Michael Foord on IronPython: Hanselminutes 2009
- Michael Foord on IronPython: TechEd 2007
Michael Foord: Agile Alliance Scrummaster Certification
I’ve been a fan of Agile ever since my first programming job with Resolver Systems back in 2006. I had taught myself programming and there I really learned engineering, how to build software products whilst caring about quality. I became passionate about testing as a way to ensure a minimal level of quality and about agile processes which are able to change quickly.
My only experience of Scrum was for a year at a heavily waterfall shop which layered Scrum for project management on top of heavily waterfall software development processes. It wasn’t a fun experience but I still learned a great deal.
I’ve been working with Gigaclear, as team lead on backend API servers, including One Touch Switch, for about a year now. I enjoy our software development practises and processes; we use a combination of agile for software development, devops (devsecops of course) for software deployment and maintenance, and Scrum for project management. It’s a very effective combination.
I recently attended a course with the Agile Alliance, led by John McFadyen, and became certified as a Scrummaster.
The course was fantastic and very inspiring. At Gigaclear we’re systematically evaluating all our systems, systems architecture and processes. This process and the course have been hugely inspirational and I have an article on software development processes coming shortly…
Glyph Lefkowitz: The Federation Deathmatch
It’s the weekend, and I have some Thoughts about federated social media. So, buckle up, I guess, it’s time to start some fights.
Recently there has been some discourse about Bluesky’s latest fundraising round. I’ve been participating in conversations about this on Mastodon, and I think I might sometimes come across as a Mastodon partisan, but my feelings are complex and I really don’t want to be boosting the ActivityPub Fediverse without qualification.
So here are some qualifications.
Bluesky Is EvilTo the extent that I am an ActivityPub partisan in the discourse between ActivityPub and ATProtocol, it is because I do not believe that Bluesky is a meaningfully decentralized social network. It is a social network, run by a company, which has a public API with some elements that might, one day, make it possible for it to be decentralized. But today, it is not, either practically or theoretically.
The Bluesky developers are putting in a ton of effort to maybe make it decentralized, hypothetically, someday. A lot of people think they will succeed. But ActivityPub (and, of course, Mastodon specifically) are already, today, meaningfully decentralized, as you can see on FediDB, there are instances with hundreds of thousands of people on them, before we even get to esoterica like the integrations Threads, Wordpress, Flipboard, and Ghost are doing.
The inciting incident for this post — that a lot of people are also angry about Bluesky raising millions of dollars from Evil Guys Doing Evil Stuff Capital — is indeed a serious concern. It lights the fuse that burns towards their eventual, inevitable incredible journey. ATProtocol is just an API, and that API will get shut off one day, whenever their funders get bored of the pretense of their network being “decentralized”.
At time of writing, it is also interesting that 3 of the 4 times that the CEO of Bluesky has even skeeted the word “blockchain” is to say “no blockchain”, to reassure users that the scam magnet of “Blockchain” is not actually near their product or protocol, which is a much harder position to maintain when your lead investor is “Blockchain Capital”.
I think these are all valid criticisms of Bluesky. But I also think that the actual engineers working on the product are aware of these issues, and are making a significant effort to address them or mitigate them in any way they can. All that work can still be easily incinerated by a slow quarter in terms of user growth numbers or a missed revenue forecast when the VCs are getting impatient, but it’s not nothing, it is a life’s work.
Really, who among us could not have our life’s ambitions trivially destroyed in an afternoon, simply because a billionaire decided that they should be? If you feel like you are safe from this, I have some bad news about how money works. So we are all doing our best in an imperfect system and maybe Bluesky is on to something here. That’s eminently possible. They’re certainly putting forth an earnest effort.
Mastodon Is StupidMeanwhile, not nearly as much has been made recently of Mastodon refusing funding from a variety of sources, when all indications are that funding is low, and plummeting, far below the level required to actually sustain the site, and they haven’t done a financial transparency report for over a year, and that report was already nearly a year late.
Mastodon and the fediverse are not nearly in a position to claim moral superiority over Bluesky. Sure, taking blockchain VC money might seem like a rookie mistake, but going out of business because you are spurning every possible source of funding is not that wise either.
Some might think that, sure, Mastodon the company might die but at least the Fediverse as a whole will keep going strong, right? Lots of people run their own instances! I even find elements of this argument convincing, and I think there is probably some truth to it. But to really believe this argument as claimed, that it’s a fait accompli that the fediverse will survive in some form, that all those self-run servers will be a robust network that will self-repair, requires believing some obviously false stuff. It is frankly unprofitable to run a Fediverse instance. Realistically, if you want to operate a mastodon server for yourself, it is going to cost at least $100/year once you include stuff like having a domain name, and managing the infrastructure costs is a complex problem that keeps getting harder to manage as the software itself gets slower.
Cory Doctorow has recently argued that this is all worth it, because at least on Mastodon, you’re in control, not at the whims of centralized website operators like Bluesky. In his words,
On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server
He concludes:
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none
(Emphasis mine).
This is a beautiful vision. It is, however, an incorrect assessment of the state of the Fediverse as it stands today. It’s not true in two important ways:
First, if you look at any account of a user’s fediverse account migration, like this one from Steve Bate or this one from the Ente project or this one from Erin Kissane, you will see that it is “painful for the foreseeable future” or “wasn’t as seamless as advertised”, and that “the best time to […] migrate instances […] is never”. This language does not presage a pleasant experience, as Doctorow puts it, “without pain”.
Second, migration is an active process that requires engagement from the instance that hosts you. If you have been blocked or banned, or had your account terminated, you are just out of luck. You do not have control over your data or agency over your online identity unless you’ve shelled out the relatively exorbitant amount of money to actually operate your own instance.
In short, ActivityPub is no panacea. A federated system is not really a “decentralized” system, as much as it is a bunch of smaller centralized systems that all talk to each other. You still need to know, and care, about your social and financial relationship to the operators of your instance. There is probably no getting away from this, like, just generally on the Internet, no matter how much peer-to-peer software we deploy, but there certainly isn’t in the incomplete mess that is ActivityPub.
JOIN, or DIE.Neither Mastodon (or ActivityPub) nor Bluesky (or ATProtocol) has a comprehensive solution to the problem of decentralized social media. These companies, and these protocols, are both deeply flawed and if everything keeps bumping along as it is, I believe both are likely to fail. At different times, on different timelines, and for different reasons, but fail nonetheless.
However, these networks are both small and growing, and we are not yet in the phase of enshittification where margins are shrinking and audiences are captured and the screws must be tightened to juice revenue. There are stil possibilities. Mastodon is crowdfunded and what they lack in resources they make up for in flexibility and scrappiness. Bluesky has money and while there will eventually be a need to monetize somehow, they have plenty of runway to come up with that answer, and a lot of sophisticated protocol work has been done. Not enough to make a complete circut and allow users true, practical decentralization, but it’s not nothing, either.
Mastodon and Bluesky are both organizations with humans in them, and piles of data that is roughly schema-compatible even if the nuances and details are different. I know that there is a compatible model becuse thanks to both platforms being relatively open, there is a functioning ActivityPub/ATProtocol bridge in the form of Brid.gy Fed. You can use it today, and I highly recommend that you do so, so that “choice of protocol” does not fully define your audience. If you’re on bluesky, follow this account, and if you’re on Mastodon or elsewhere on the Fediverse, search for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.
The reality that fans of decentralized, independent social media must confront is that we are a tiny audicence right now. Whichever site we are looking at, we are talking about a few million monthly active users at best, in a world where even the pathetic husk of Twitter still has hundreds of millions and Facebook has billions. Interneceine fights are not going to get us anywhere. We need to build bridges and links and connect our networks as densely as possible. If I’m being honest, Bridgy Fed looks like a pretty janky solution, but it’s something, and we need to start doing something soon, so we do not collectively become a permanent minority that mass markets can safely ignore.
As users, we need to set an example, so that the developers of the respective platforms get their shit together and work together directly so that workarounds like Bridgy are not required. Frankly, this is mostly on the ActivityPub and Mastodon devs, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, not a lot of this seems to be public, or at least I haven’t witnessed a lot of it directly, but I have heard repeatedly that the ActivityPub developers are prickly, and this is one high-profile public example where an ActivityPub partisan is incredibly, pointlessly hostile and borderline harrassing towards someone — Mike Masnick, a long-time staunch advocate for open protocols and open patents, someone with a Mastodon account, and thus as good a prospective ally as the ActivityPub fediverse might reasonably find — explaining some of the relative benefits of Bluesky.
Most of us are technology nerds in one way or another. In that way we can look at signifiers like “ActivityPub” and “ATProtocol”, and feel like these are hard boundaries around different all-encompassing structures for the future, and thus tribes we must join and support.
A better way to look at this, however, is to see social entities like Mastodon gGmbH and Bluesky PBC — or, more to the point, Fosstodon, SFBA Social, Hachyderm (and maybe, one day, even an instance which isn’t fully just for software development nerds), as groups that deploy these protocols to access some data that they publish, just as they might publish their website over HTTP or their newsletters over SMTP. There are technical challenges involved in bridging between mutually unintelligible domain models, but that is, like, network software's whole deal. Most software is just some kind of translation from one format or context to another. The best possible future for the fediverse is the one where users care as much about the distinction between ATProtocol and ActivityPub as they do about the distinction between POP3 and IMAP.
To both developers and users of these systems, I say: get it together. Be nice to each other. Because the rest of the social media ecosystem is sure as shit not going to be nice to us if we ever see even a hint of success and start to actually cut into their user base.
AcknowledgmentsThank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more of it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!
Mike Herchel's Blog: Session submission open and featured speakers announced for Florida DrupalCamp 2025
#! code: DrupalCamp Scotland 2024
DrupalCamp Scotland returned after a small hiatus of 5 years on the 25th October 2024, and saw nearly 50 people attend the university of Edinburgh Paterson's Land building for a day of talks and sessions. I had the honor of being invited to speak at the conference, which was the first physical speaking session I've had since 2019.
I arrived early to the conference on a sunny Friday morning after driving up the night before. After a cup of coffee and a lovely chat with the organisers and the first few attendees to arrive we started the conference.
The opening talk was from Billy Wardrop, who is Web Development Team Manager in University of Edinburgh. In his talk, A 7 year journey from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and what we learned migrating over 600 websites, he went through the lessons he had learned in that migration. This was a fascinating run through of all of the challenges that a web master faces and the history of the migration to Drupal 10 for the University of Edinburgh. It also highlighted the challenges of migrating hundreds of websites from different university departments away from their random systems and into a decent managed Drupal environment. Of particular interest was the talk about deployments as I have faced similar challenges with just 20 sites in the same system.
Next on the agenda was me! I have been writing a lot about the Batch API recently so I decided that I should probably conclude this series of articles with a talk on An Introduction to the Drupal Batch API. Thankfully, I had the week before the conference off, which gave me some time to prepare both the talk and the accompanying code examples.
Real Python: The Python Square Root Function
The Python square root function, sqrt(), is part of the math module and is used to calculate the square root of a given number. To use it, you import the math module and call math.sqrt() with a non-negative number as an argument. For example, math.sqrt(9) returns 3.0.
This function works with both integers and floats and is essential for mathematical operations like solving equations and calculating geometric properties. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to effectively use the square root function in Python.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand how:
- Python’s sqrt() function calculates square roots using Python’s math.sqrt() for quick and accurate results in your programs.
- math.sqrt() calculates the square root of positive numbers and zero but raises an error for negative inputs.
- Python’s square root function can be used to solve real-world problems like calculating distances using the Pythagorean theorem.
Time to dive in!
Python Pit Stop: This tutorial is a quick and practical way to find the info you need, so you’ll be back to your project in no time!
Free Bonus: Click here to get our free Python Cheat Sheet that shows you the basics of Python 3, like working with data types, dictionaries, lists, and Python functions.
Square Roots in MathematicsIn algebra, a square, x, is the result of a number, n, multiplied by itself: x = n²
You can calculate squares using Python:
Python >>> n = 5 >>> x = n**2 >>> x 25 Copied!The Python ** operator is used for calculating the power of a number. In this case, 5 squared, or 5 to the power of 2, is 25.
The square root, then, is the number n, which when multiplied by itself yields the square, x.
In this example, n, the square root of 25, is 5.
25 is an example of a perfect square. Perfect squares are the squares of integer values:
Python >>> 1**2 1 >>> 2**2 4 >>> 3**2 9 Copied!You might have memorized some of these perfect squares when you learned your multiplication tables in an elementary algebra class.
If you’re given a small perfect square, it may be straightforward enough to calculate or memorize its square root. But for most other squares, this calculation can get a bit more tedious. Often, an estimation is good enough when you don’t have a calculator.
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-square-root-function/ »[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]
Steinar H. Gunderson: Ultimate rules as a service
Since WFDF changed their ultimate rules web site to be less-than-ideal (in the name of putting everything into Wordpress…), I made my own, at urules.org. It was a fun journey; I've never fiddled with PWAs before, and I was a bit surprised how low-level it all was. I assumed that since my page is just a bunch of HTML files and ~100 lines of JS, I could just bundle that up—but no, that is something they expect a framework to do for you.
The only primitive you get is seemingly that you can fire up your own background service worker (JS running in its own, locked-down context) and that gets to peek at every HTTP request done and possibly intercept it. So you can use a Web Cache (seemingly a separate concept from web local storage?), insert stuff into that, and then query it to intercept requests. It doesn't feel very elegant, perhaps?
It is a bit neat that I can use this to make my own bundling, though. All the pages and images (painfully converted to SVG to save space and re-flow for mobile screens, mostly by simply drawing over bitmaps by hand in Inkscape) are stuck into a JSON dictionary, compressed using the slowest compressor I could find and then downloaded as a single 159 kB bundle. It makes the site actually sort of weird to navigate; since it pretty quickly downloads the bundle in the background, everything goes offline and the speed of loading new pages just feels… off somehow. As if it's not a Serious Web Page if there's no load time.
Of course, this also means that I couldn't cache PNGs, because have you ever tried to have non-UTF-8 data in a JSON sent through N layers of JavaScript? :-)
Guido Günther: Free Software Activities October 2024
Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Besides a phosh bugfix release improving text input and selection was a prevalent pattern again resulting in improvements in the compositor, the OSK and some apps.
phosh- Install gir (MR). Needed for e.g. Debian to properly package the Rust bindings.
- Try harder to find an app icon when showing notifications (MR)
- Add a simple Pomodoro timer plugin (MR)
- Small screenshot manager fixes (MR)
- Tweak portals configuration (MR)
- Consistent focus style on lock screen and settings (MR). Improves the visual appearance as the dotted focus frame doesn't match our otherwise colored focus frames
- Don't focus buttons in settings (MR). Improves the visual appearance as attention isn't drawn to the button focus.
- Close Phosh's settings when activating a Settings panel (MR)
- Improve cursor and cursor theme handling, hide mouse pointer by default (MR)
- Don't submit empty preedit (MR)
- Fix flickering selection bubbles in GTK4's text input fields (MR)
- Backport two more fixes and release 0.41.1 (MR)
- Update with current gir and allow to use status pages (MR)
- Expose screenshot manager and build without warnings (MR). (Improved further by a follow up MR from Sam)
- Fix clippy warnings and add clippy to CI (MR)
- presage: Always set predictors (MR). Avoids surprises with unwanted predictors.
- Install completer information (MR)
- Handle overlapping touch events (MR). This should improve fast typing.
- Allow plain ctrl and alt in the shortcuts bar (MR
- Use Adwaita background color to make the OSK look more integrated (MR)
- Use StyleManager to support accent colors (MR)
- Fix emoji section selection in RTL locales (MR)
- Don't submit empty preedit (MR). Helps to better preserve text selections.
- Collect some of the QCom workarounds in a package (MR). This is not meant to go into Debian proper but it's nicer than doing all the mods by hand and forgetting which files were modified.
- q6voiced: Fix service configuration (MR)
- chatty: Enable clock test again (MR), and then unbreak translations (MR)
- phosh: Ship gir for libphosh-rs (MR)
- phoc: Backport input method related fix (MR)
- Upload initial package of phosh-osk-data: Status in NEW
- Upload initial package of xdg-desktop-portal-pohsh: Status in NEW
- Backport phosh-osk-stub abbrev fix (MR
- phoc: Update to 0.42.1 (MR
- mobile-tweaks: Enable zram on Librem 5 and PP (MR)
- Some further work on the Cell Broadcast to address comments MR)
- Further improve daemon mode (MR) (mentioned last month already but got even simpler)
- Handle Gtk{H,V}Separator when migrating UI files to GTK4 (MR)
- Modernize README a bit (MR)
- Use special event for SMS (MR)
- Another QoL fix when using OSK (MR)
- Fix printing time diffs on 32bit architectures (MR)
- Use endpoints for authenticated media (MR). Needed to support v1.11 servers.
- Switch to GNOME 47 runtime (MR)
- Don't use deprecated pkg-resources (MR)
- Expand on DBus activation a bit (MR)
- Small build improvement and mention phosh-osk-stub (Commit)
- Fix -o option and add help output (MR)
- Don't take focus with header bar buttons (MR). Makes typing faster (as the OSK won't hide) and thus using the header bar easier
- Don't take focus when sending messages, adding emojis or attachments (MR). Makes typing faster (as the OSK won't hide) and thus using those buttons easier
- Use categories that work for both xdg-spec and the portal (MR)
This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is fairly incomplete, hope to improve on this in the upcoming months:
- phosh-tour: add first login mode (MR)
- phosh: Animate swipe closing notifications (MR)
- iio-sensor-proxy: Report correct value on claim (MR)
- iio-sensor-proxy: face-{up,down} (MR)
- phosh-mobile-settings: Squeekboad scaling (MR)
- libcmatrix: Misc cleanups/fixes (MR)
- phosh: Notification separator improvements (MR
- phosh: Accent colors (MR
If you want to support my work see donations. This includes a list of hardware we want to improve support for. Thanks a lot to all current and past donors.
Junichi Uekawa: Doing more swimming in everyday life for the past few months.
This Week in KDE Apps
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
In this issue we discover what developers have been doing to make Dolphin, KDE's most popular (but not only!) file explorer, more accessible. We also take a look at all the new services now integrated into Itinerary that will help you on your travels, the new features for Kate that programmers will enjoy, improvements to Kleopatra to help you manage your certificates and the encryption of your messages, and the flurry of new applications that will soon be available in KDE's software catalog.
This week, we also kicked off our 2024 end-of-year fundraiser just in time for Halloween! Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world. So consider doing a donation today!
Let's dig in!
Dolphin Manage your filesWe improved the keyboard navigation of Dolphin, as pressing Ctrl+L multiple times will switch back and forth between focusing and selecting the location bar path and focusing the view. Pressing Escape in the location bar, will now move the focus to the active view (Felix Ernst, 24.12.0. Link).
Speaking of accessibility, the accessibility of the main view of Dolphin was completely overhauled to make it work with screen readers. This work was funded by NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme (Felix Ernst, 24.12.0. Link).
Another change is that Dolphin will now store its view properties inside the extended file attributes instead of creating hidden .directory files when possible (Méven Car, 24.12.0. Link).
digiKam Photo Management ProgramdigiKam is KDE's powerful photo management software for both professional and aficionado photographers.
Michael Miller fixed an issue where faces from the facial recognition feature were not deleted when a user untagged or deleted a face (Michael Miller. Link).
Elisa Play music and listen to online radio stationsJack Hill fixed a few issues related to the lyrics feature. Clicking on the Lyrics button now takes you to the correct lyric and not the previous one, and the last line of the lyrics is not displayed completely (Jack Hill, 24.12.0. Link).
Jack also reworked the metadata dialogs to be more intuitive and correct some bugs (Jack Hill, 24.12.0. Link).
GCompris Educational game for childrenGCompris, the educational software suite, got a new activity: Sketch! This fun tool lets children express their creativity and draw beautiful artworks (Timothée Giet. Link).
KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistantItinerary now supports extracting reservations from planway.com, flight tickets from VietJet Air and train tickets from the Thai state railway. Additionally, dates from day-specific train tickets from NS (Nederlandse Spoorwegen) are now correctly parsed (Volker Krause, 24.08.3. Link 1, link 2, link 3), and, while on an NS intercity train, you can also access the live journey information provided by the onboard WiFi (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link).
Kate Advanced Text EditorKate continues to become more and more developer friendly with the changes made by Christoph Cullmann where the order of the tabs is correctly restored when restoring a previous session (Christoph Cullmann, 24.08.3. Link), and the options of the LSP Symbols are more easily discoverable as they are not only available via a context menu, but also within a menu button at the top (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link).
Benjamin Port fixed the Appium UI tests and reenabled them on the CI (Benjamin Port, 28.03.0. Link).
Kdenlive Video editorKdenlive is KDE's full-featured video editor, which now lets you resize multiple items on the timeline at the same time. (Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, 24.12.0 Link).
Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography appWe redesigned Kleopatra's notepad and sign encrypt dialog. In the notepad, the text editor and the recipients view are also now side by side (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link).
Additionally, Tobias worked on the notepad's result messages and error dialogs to make them clearer. (Tobias Fella, 24.12.0 Link 1, link 2).
Tobias also fixed a crash on non-kwin Wayland compositors (Tobias Fella, 24.08.3. Link), and Kleopatra has a new website (Carl Schwan. Link).
Kongress Conference companionKongress is an app which helps you navigate conferences and events.
The newest version will display more information about events in the event list. This includes whether the event is in your bookmarked events and the locations within the event (e.g. the rooms) (cah fof pai, 24.12.0. Link).
Speaking of conferences, multiple KDE people will be at the Chaos Communication Congress (38c3) in Hamburg this December! Come by and say hello!
KStars Desktop PlanetariumKStars is KDE's stargazing app that also helps you control your telescope for astrophotography.
We removed the "Simulate Eyepiece View" feature and stripped down EyepieceField. The reason is the offerings of the eyepiece view feature have already been superseded by two more powerful and easier-to-use features in KStars: the HiPS Overlay and the "Views" feature (Akarsh Simha, 3.7.4. Link).
Kwave Sound editorMark Penner wrote a blog post about his work on KWave.
LabPlot Interactive Data Visualization and AnalysisLabPlot is KDE's complete suite of data analysis and visualisation tools.
The LabPlot developers added the RAND_MAX programming constants for GSL (GNU Scientific Library) support. (Martin Marmsoler Link), and rewrote the AsciiFilter to increase the parsing speed, like when parsing livedata from an mqtt feed (Martin Marmsoler. Link).
Kuntal Bar also fixed various issues with HiDPI screens (Kuntal Bar, Link).
Marknote Write down your thoughtsMarknote lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks.
The icons in the app are now correctly displayed when running Marknote on other platforms, like Windows (Gary Wang, Link).
Ruqola Rocket Chat ClientRuqola, KDE's Rocket Chat client, received various fixes for its login, logout and network disconnection features (David Faure & Andras Mantia Link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4), and the unread message bar now uses buttons instead of more subtle links (Joshua Goins. Link).
Spectacle Screenshot Capture UtilitySpectacle is the utility for taking screenshots and screencasts of your desktop and apps. We fixed an issue where Spectacle would take a screenshot of itself (Noah Davis, 24.08.3. Link).
Other StuffThe FormCard components used by most Kirigami application are now more compact on the desktop (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 Link).
Before AfterThe About Page provided by the FormCard component now displays more information about the components used by the application (e.g. Qt, KDE Frameworks) (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0. Link).
PlaygroundThis section contains news about non released applications.
ArkadeArkade, a collection of games written in QML, was updated to Qt6 (Carl Schwan. Link).
WhaleClaudio Cambra ported Whale, a QML based file manager and explorer, to Qt6 (Claudio Cambra. Link). Claudio also added a miller columns view to Whale (Claudio Cambra. Link), and implemented navigation history (Claudio Cambra. Link).
And all this too...Justin Zobel fixed various appstream files to use the new way of declaring the developer's name (Justin Zobel, KRuler, Gwenview, KEuroCalc, ...).
We ported various projects to use declarative QML declaration for better maintainance and performance (Carl Schwan, Koko, Francis, Kalk).
... And Everything ElseThis blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get InvolvedThe KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
Jaldhar Vyas: Sal Mubarak 2081!
Best wishes to the entire Debian and Free Software world for a happy and prosperous Gujarati New Year Vikram Samvat 2081 named Anala.
A fun fact: Although Diwali was on Thursday, because it was a vrddha tithi (a lunar day that spans more than one sunrise,) there was a leap day and that's why the new year didn't start till today.
I haven't posted to this blog for almost exactly three years. I had decided that I wasn't going to until I revamped the blog engine to force myself to actually do it and still managed to drag my feet for this long. This post was supposed to be the first public test of the new version but something has gone unexpectedly gone wrong so this is actually a manually uploaded placeholder until I figure out what happened. I have been regularly taking part in the Perl & Raku Weekly Challenge and I write a little about my solutions with yet another half-finished blog engine.
What else have I been up to? Not a lot Debianwise. I voted a couple of times, sponsored a package and (hopefully) assisted one person in becoming a Debian developer. There's the challenge I mentioned which atleast gets me writing some Perl and Raku every week. I did the 7DRL Game Jam again this year and actually produced a playable game. It needs to be polished though (and open sourced.)
This is my major problem; I have all kinds of things which I've started and left incomplete. It's time to do something about it. In the coming months I am going to do a comprehensive review of all the bits of software I've written or contributed to and either complete them, clean them up or properly abandon them. I shall call this Project 2025.
Michael Foord: Gigaclear One Touch Switch Service
For the last year I’ve been working as a team lead for backend API development with Gigaclear a UK rural ISP who own and run fibre internet to rural communities across the UK. This is alongside my training work.
This image shows the main project I’ve been working on since joining Gigaclear, One Touch Switch. A regulatory requirement for all ISPs to allow automated switching between ISPs. When you sign up with a new internet provider your account is automatically ceased with the old provider and VOIP numbers can be automatically ported.
Our OTS project is just part of the Gigaclear One Touch Switch system which interfaces with Salesforce and Netadmin and the website order flow (the Online Buying Journey) and represents an impressive engineering effort. We were one of the first ISPs with a system ready to take part in industry trials a few months ago, both OTS and our underlying systems passed pen testing with flying colours, and the switch on has been smooth.
Something I’m proud to have been part of. My current project is preparing security awareness training materials based on OWASP for our various engineering departments whilst we also undertake a systematic review of all of our systems and processes.
In the diagram I’m team lead for the Sphinx engineering team.
Michael Foord: Adventures with MicroPython
My first blog post in a few years! I have some articles I’d like to publish, and some adventures to share, so I thought it was time to fire up a blog engine again.
My nine year old son, Benjamin, is really into programming with Scratch and he’s keen to play with electronics and learn MicroPython. Which is awesome because there’s almost nothing I would love to do more with him.
MicroPython is an extremely impressive implementation of Python that will run on embedded devices and microcontrollers, as well as bigger tiny computers like the Raspberry Pi.
I’ve dug out an old MicroBit I had, purchased a Raspberry Pi Pico board/kit and also a ZumoBot 2040 robot which uses the same microcontroller as the Pico, to play with.
I’m now starting to get to grips with the basics, using the Thonny IDE.
I have a bunch of Neopixel LEDs, including a long light strip, I’d like to wire up in my living room controlled by a Pico board and an Android App using Kivy. That’s my goal number 1.
I’d like to program the ZumoBot to explore and map my flat. Goal 2.
Meanwhile Benjamin is enjoying playing with electronics (switches, LEDs, potentiometer and now a motor) with the Pico and on his own he’s programming the MicroBit with Scratch (or at least “blocks” which is the Microsoft equivalent). I’ve also done my first soldering in over a decade.
I have a github repository to track my tinkering, but I’d like to write up some recipes and post them on this blog as I go. (The biggest hurdle is I can’t easily create circuit diagrams. Time to explore.)
The github repository and ZumoBot links:
Brett Cannon: Don't return named tuples in new APIs
In my opinion, you should only introduce a named tuple to your code when you&aposre updating a preexisting API that was already returning a tuple or you are wrapping a tuple return value from another API.
Let&aposs start with when you should use named tuples. Usually an API that returns a tuple does so when you only have a couple of items in your tuple and the name of the function returning the tuple id enough to explain what each item in the tuple does. But sometimes your API expands and you find that your tuple is no longer self-documenting purely based on the name of the API (e.g., get_mouse_position() very likely has a two-item tuple of X and Y coordinates of the screen while app_state() could be a tuple of anything). When you find yourself in the situation of needing your return type to describe itself and a tuple isn&apost cutting it anymore, then that&aposs when you reach for a named tuple.
So why not start out that way? In a word: simplicity. Now, some of you might be saying to yourself, "but I use named tuples because they are so simple to define!" And that might be true for when you define your data structure (and I&aposll touch on this "simplicity of definition" angle later), but it actually makes your API more complex for both you and your users to use. For you, it doubles the data access API surface for your return type as you have to now support index-based and attribute-based data access forever (or until you choose to break your users and change your return type so it doesn&apost support both approaches). This leads to writing tests for both ways of accessing your data, not just one of them. And you shouldn&apost skimp on this because you don&apost know if your users will use indexes or attribute names to access the data structure, nor can you guarantee someone won&apost break your code in the future by dropping the named tuple and switching to some custom type (thanks to Python&aposs support of structural typing (aka duck typing), you can&apost assume people are using a type checker and thus the structure of your return type becomes your API contract). And so you need to test both ways of using your return type to exercise that contract you have with your users, which is more work than had you not used a named tuple and instead chose just a tuple or just a class.
Named tuples are also a bit more complex for users. If you&aposre reaching for a named tuple you&aposre essentially signalling upfront that the data structure is too big/complex for a tuple alone to work. And yet by using a named tuple means you are supporting the tuple approach even if you don&apost think it&aposs a good idea from the start. On top of that, the tuple API allows for things that you probably don&apost want people doing with your return type, like slicing, iterating over all the items as if they are homogeneous, etc. Basically my argument is the "flexibility" of having the index-based access to the data on top of the attribute-based access isn&apost flexible in a good way.
So why do people still reach for named tuples when defining return types for new APIs? I think it&aposs because people find them faster to define a new type than writing out a new class. Compare this:
Point = namedtuple(&aposPoint&apos, [&aposx&apos, &aposy&apos, z&apos])To this:
class Point: def __init__(self, x, y, z): self.x = x self.y = y self.z = zSo there is a clear difference in the amount of typing. But there are three more ways to do the same data structure that might not be so burdensome. One is dataclasses:
@dataclasses.dataclass class Point: x: int y: int z: intAnother is simply a dictionary, although I know some prefer attribute-based access to data so much that they won&apost use this option). Toss in a TypedDict and you also get editor support as well:
class Point(typing.TypedDict): x: int y: int z: int # Alternatively ... Point = typing.TypedDict("Point", {"x": int, "y": int, "z": int})A third option is types.SimpleNamespace if you really want attributes without defining a class:
Point = lambda x, y, z: types.SimpleNamespace(x=x, y=y, z=z)If none of these options work for you then you can always hope that somehow I convince enough people that my record/struct idea is a good one and get into the language. 😁
My key point in all of this is to prefer readability and ergonomics over brevity in your code. That means avoiding named tuples except where you are expanding to tweaking an existing API where the named tuple improves over the plain tuple that&aposs already being used.
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