[Twisted-Python] Twisted as a House for Sale

Matt Haggard haggardii at gmail.com
Tue Aug 20 09:15:47 MDT 2013


On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 6:34 PM, Glyph <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 19, 2013, at 10:38 AM, Matt Haggard <haggardii at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ... [a story] ...
>
>
> Very entertaining :-).
>
> My one disappointment with the narrative was that when you were lushly
> describing standing in an open field west of the white house, you neglected
> to mention that there was a mailbox there.

I missed a great opportunity. :)

> I'd be happy to see what you come up with in terms of a site specifically
> for beginners.  I think you might need to do more than one; after all, "do
> you want to make an IRC bot or a name server or an all-singing all-dancing
> website with IMAP and XMPP on the side?" is a tough counter-question to ask
> of someone who just asks "what is Twisted?".

Yes, there will need to be more than one thing (whether that means
different sites or different landing pages on the same site).

> But let's not neglect the existing site!  I can see a lot of value of having
> some alternate entry-points, but there are probably things that you'd like
> those entry-points to link to on the Twisted site proper, which may not
> exist.  If you'd like make them exist by doing some web site maintenance
> ("wiki gardening"), I'd be happy to give you the relevant credentials on
> https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/.  Patches to documentation are always
> welcome too, although (as always) we need help to get the review queue back
> to a manageable size so they can be landed in a timely manner.  Even little
> changes (like this update that I made to the Trial page a few years ago) can
> help a lot.

Agreed.  My goal is to get them into the existing house/library, not
to build and manage an entirely new one.  Really, I just want them to
have a few great experiences AND to realize that a webserver is just
_one_ kind of server.  For example, it made me giddy the first time I
got a netstring state machine working.  And everyone at work was blown
away when I replaced our existing WSGI-server with Twisted (it doesn't
drop connections anymore).

My goal is to make them giddy, then set them loose in the house.

I can also do some wiki gardening (I've noticed Tom Prince has done a
lot of great gardening).  I'm thinking I'll find weeds as I look for
pages to send people to after making them giddy.

> I'm pretty sure we can scare up some hosting resources for things if you
> want to have some kind of demo persistent Twisted services running.
> twistedmatrix.com is no longer buckling under the pressure of its users -
> why, I just ssh'd in, and the load is less than 1.0!  By our historical
> standards that's practically idle! ;-)  And we have some other machines that
> we have not had the system administration bandwidth to make effective use
> of.

Great!  I will start working on a demo.

> It's also worthwhile to periodically really review the state of things, so
> you don't fix problems that are already fixed, or at least you build on
> solutions that are already in progress.  Sometimes us old-timers who
> remember when the docs were _really_ bad and there were _big_ gaps (the
> mention of the "index" makes me think you are remembering when
> <http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/> was just a blank directory
> listing) don't always appreciate how much things have improved in the
> intervening years.

This is why I'm optimistic about Twisted.  Things _do_ improve, though
Google seems to think Twisted is still version 8.2.0 (it was to that
quirk of Google, the Indexer, that I referred in my story)

Here's what I've got already.  (I don't love it yet -- it already
feels too cluttered -- but it's a start):
http://iffy.github.io/twistedftw/




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