The Twisted Think Tank

I'm pleased to announce that we've got a new Divmod site up! We're still making tweaks, but it's ready for public viewing, and open for business.

This change currently doesn't affect our subscriber services... but it will, very shortly :-) JP's working on that now.

Anyone who knows us, knows that we know Twisted. We really know it. And how could we not, with Twisted superheroes like Glyph and JP? We've been solving very interesting problems for the past couple years, and other companies have availed themselves of this expertise. We're no longer trying to hide from our destiny as "the Twisted company."

We've found that providing specialized consulting services has not detracted from our core competency as software developers, but has rather done quite the reverse: provided a great deal of insight and clarity. The two activities have established a complementary feedback mechanism for growth and invention.

Technorati Tags: business, divmod, twisted, web

App Engine Haiku

I've been playing with Google App Engine a bit more tonight, and I've come to some additional conclusions: 

1. For the best results, you gotta drink the whole pitcher of koolaide; and
2. It's really quite tasty koolaide.

One of the things I really wanted to test was imaging. I use Flickr far more than Picasa, but Flickr's authentication API is kind of a pain in the ass (especially when used with App Engine). Google auth is (for obvious reasons) easier to work with. This, of course, led me to explore Picasa. To my surprise, it was delightful to use. I chopped up gdata for only the parts needed to support Picasa and was uploading images within mere minutes. And not only was the effort minimal, but the performance was outstanding.

One of the things that makes application development a more efficient process is having a unified platform on which to work. This is why working with the Divmod platform is so nice when I do extensive Twisted application development: all the infrastructure is already built and ready for me to use. Today, I got to really taste that same experience with the Google platform. And I liked it.

I did notice one interesting psychological side effect of working with the file count limitation: I inadvertently treated it like a game. Not unlike the rules in poetry, it provided a structure and bounds within which I was forced to operate, adjust for, and test my creativity against. I rather enjoyed this microgame, and that was a surprise :-)

Technorati Tags: google, appengine, deployment-poetry

Founding Sponsor Opportunity Closing

Last month we announced that there were only 30 days left to become a Founding Sponsor of the Twisted Software Foundation. There are only two days left, so get your donate on!

We've had some really amazing sponsor conversations during this process, and we're excited about all the new Twisted stories that can be told. We've got enough material for 3 years of Twisted Shows, so I expect you'll be hearing more about how folks are using Twisted in the coming months.

In particular, I want to give a shout out to two different organizations.

Zenoss recently published a press release about their sponsorship, exposing Twisted to an "enterprise" audience that may not have heard of it yet. From the release:

"Twisted provides the foundation for Zenoss' scalable, agent-less collectors. It allows Zenoss daemons to talk to hundreds of enterprise systems simultaneously, with low overheads, using standard protocols like SNMP. In addition, Twisted provides the internal communications between distributed collectors."

United Business Media (formerly known as CMP) has also donated to Twisted, becoming a recent Founding Sponsor.

This was a rather unexpected bit of good fortune... but it gets better: they hadn't heard of Twisted before, and after reading up on it, they were so impressed that they immediately agreed to have three of their research and publication organizations become founding sponsors. They were amazed at the sophistication and power that the Twisted framework provides to a community of developers who are creating the future trends in software. I expect we'll be hearing more from them in the future ;-)

Update: The three UBM companies which sponsored the TSF are Contentinople, Internet Evolution, and Light Reading.

Technorati Tags: tsf, twisted

Twisting the Planet

As Steve blogged the other day, we've been jamming on some Twisted lately. But it's not the kind of thing you usually hear from us. We're not doing something esoteric and mind-blowing. We're doing something much harder: working out how to bring Twisted to the masses.

The motivation for this is philanthropic: we believe in Twisted's goodness :-) As Allen Short paraphrased on IRC the other day after listening to MIT entrepreneur Raffi Krikorian "it sounds like he's saying Twisted makes you smarter." Humor aside, Allen is right. Twisted does make you smarter: with increased familiarity and experience, you start thinking outside the box. Twisted helps you become a more creative problem solver.

In particular, we're reviewing the "Teach Me Twisted" open space session we had at PyCon. A bunch of you showed up for it, and the energy in that room was just phenomenal. 30 minutes after the session, people were still talking excitedly about what they were learning or how they were using Twisted or just sharing their love for the code :-)

For those of you that missed it, Steve Holden was the headliner while Alex Martelli played impromptu co-star. The humor and enthusiasm from these two was just incredible. Glyph, Itamar, and Chris played educators while JP, Zooko and I handled one-on-one questions in the audience. There were more players, but you get the point: it was a highly dynamic, lively and fun experience. Folks were so jazzed that conversations that night lasted long into the wee hours of the morning.

After almost two months' worth of post-PyCon follow-up, we're finally getting around to comparing notes. My biggest concern is for the absolute new-comer and the lack of intuitive and useful metaphors that would help aspiring Twisted users grasp the event-driven concepts of our code quickly. Steve and I are both interested in establishing a Proper and Good motivation for using Twisted. My girlfriend, who has a Masters in anthropology, was also there. Thanks to her insight and background, she has a completely different perspective of the community (and the new-comer dynamic at the session that night) and has some completely unique ideas for crafting a new generation of tutorial materials.

We're just getting started, but it's quite exciting. We expect to have more thoughts to share on the matter... in the form of materials as well as potential news items.

One last parting thought: despite the rumors and well-earned reputation to the contrary, Twisted coders are not exclusionists: everyone's invited to the party. We're just trying to make it easier to get there :-)

Technorati Tags: community, pycon, education, programming, twisted

Synthesis Studios Twisted Interview

This is a re-blog, in case some of you aren't subscribed to http://labs.twistedmatrix.com/ -- we've got a new episode of the Twisted Show up, and it was a excellent interview with Synthesis Studios. Go check it out!

Technorati Tags: community, entertainment, geeks, programming, software, twisted

TSF Founding Sponsor Round

Earlier today, I posted to the Twisted mail list and to our Labs blog about the deadline for the Founding Sponsors (individuals and companies/organizations) for the Twisted Software Foundation, so I thought now would be a good time to give a quick status report :-)

Things are going well. We're still working with 4 major donors (some of whom are surprising!), with an additional 3 outliers who may or may not donate. We're hoping to have all that confirmed and settled within the next two weeks. For the full list of current sponsors, please see the Founding Sponsors page.

So what does all this mean? It means that Twisted has a continually-increasing chance of meeting your needs and exceeding your expectations :-)

Sponsors will have access to a private email list that is managed by the TSF, and this will be the primary forum where desired features and issues to be addressed will be discussed. The donations help us address resource issues and the collective voice of the sponsors will help provide a focus on important topics.

Not only do the current sponsors have their logos+links on the front page, but Founding Sponsors also get this on a dedicated page on the Twisted site in perpetuity. We've got some amazing Google Juice (search), so this works out well for all. We've also been approached by sponsors who are using it as a means of recruiting Python and Twisted talent in their shops. There are all sorts of creative ways that this can be of benefit :-)

If you haven't stopped by the TSF pages, give them a look and see if it's something you or your organization could be interested in.

Update: Thanks to feedback from Grig Gheorghiu, we now have two domains that direct to the TSF page:

• twistedsoftwarefoundation.org
• tsf.name

Be aware that the DNS for those may still be propagating when you click on them :-)

Technorati Tags: tsf, twisted

Twisted on Nexenta/OpenSolaris

A few hours ago, I had the chance to install Nexenta/OpenSolaris in Parallels. The install was pretty straight-forward and quick. Gnome isn't on the .iso, but this was easily addressed with a/etc/apt/sources.list update, and an apt-get (a ~450MB dependency download and install). With Gnome was up and running, I was amazed at its responsiveness: Gnome on Nexenta seems to be much snappier than Ubuntu 7.10. This is the first time I've seen something I could use instead of Ubuntu, and that's saying a lot.

Next up was getting the Twisted and Divmod code installed. This required the following additional package installs:

sudo apt-get install python2.4-zopeinterface
sudo apt-get install python2.4-profiler
sudo apt-get install python2.4-pyopenssl
sudo apt-get install python2.4-crypto

With that done, I ran trial twisted, and watched the tests zip by. The end result? Only 1 failure and 2 errors; that's a pretty significant improvement over Twisted in Solaris 10. The failure was actually a little bit weird: the test can't find /dev/tty, however the device does exist (and I can open it from the python prompt). The two errors came from the UDP "multi listen" test, and were are result of the test timing out.

If I can get those two tests sorted out, I'll start testing the Divmod code. If all goes well, this could very well end up being my new development platform.

Technorati Tags: divmod, gnome, python, solaris, twisted