For anyone not familiar with these things, SQLAlchemy is “the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper” and Elixir is “a declarative layer on top of the SQLAlchemy library, a fairly thin wrapper, which provides the ability to create simple Python classes that map directly to relational database tables”. Sound nice enough.

But the last days I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get the sessions and rollbacks to work and today I finally gave up. No sessions for this system! Now it’s all auto-commits and manual rollbacks and things are working! This (not so pretty) solution took about one hour to complete, compared to the looong days of frustration I could’ve avoided if I’d just done it the easy way from start.

OK. So Elixir is like bad magic. No concern about databases at all for the developer, and no concern about sessions. It’s a hell to debug and as soon as you want to do something outside what Elixir was primarily built for, prepare to cry.

Elixir uses the scoped SQLAlchemy session, which means that there is one global session that’s supposedly thread local. My problem was that all child processes kept getting the same session returned from the scoped session and there wasn’t really much to do about it.

There are a few ways to manually tell Elixir what session to use, but only on a module level. I needed my sessions on a thread level as the system runs multiple parallell processes and that isn’t doable to my knowledge. SQLAlchemy has support to add objects manually to any session, but as soon as you start bypassing Elixir and go SQLAlchemy instead you might as well just skip Elixir. When removing the default session handling from Elixir, all convenient mappings are gone and those are pretty much what Elixir is made for.

The conclusion is that if I’d built this system from scratch I probably wouldn’t have used Elixir.

It’s been snowing quite a lot in Stockholm lately, and despite Sweden being a country where this snow thing happens every year, it’s now nearly impossible to get anywhere unless you live in the inner city or are prepared to walk. The subway trains now only function below ground (which means only in the inner city), the buses have problems braking at some stops because of icy roads and many buses are being used to replace the subway traffic. There aren’t nearly enough buses for this though, as one full subway train would need 10 buses as replacement!

Combine this with a temperature lower than city people are used to (-20 C yesterday) and we have chaos. Or at least that’s what media are trying to make us believe. We’re actually being told to stay at home if possible.

I’m not sure that I can get to my office by bus, but it’s only a 20 minute walk anyway, so I might go there. My plans for the day are debugging Elixir (oh the joy) and then finish moving a couple of sites from my old vps playground to EC2. I’m starting a new project, one of my own ideas, and was going to upgrade the vps a bit. I run Ubuntu on it and haven’t touched the server in a while.

Problem number one: Making a snapshop of the vps
The snapshot function is provided by Glesys, the server hosting company, but every time I try to make one the system stalls. I then have to ask them what’s going on, after a while they do something, and two hours later I have my snapshot. Their vps system can only handle one task at a time, so as long as the snapshot is (not) being made, I can’t do anything else.

Problem number two: Not enough memory
The snapshot functionality would of course be great if it worked, so would the possibility to temporarily add more memory to the vps. This is something that is necessary for the dist-upgrade as I don’t pay for more memory than I normally need. The problem? As long as I have the extra memory I can’t do anything else with the system from Glesys’ admin, such as rebooting my server.

Last time I tried to do an upgrade something went wrong, the ssh server died and I couldn’t access anything anymore. Neither could I reboot the system from the admin (or log in to it for that matter). I’m pretty sure the upgrade problems were vps related, as a starter the /tmp folder was mounted noexec, which I had to change. I’m guessing other filesystem settings could cause problems as well. I’m not saying it’s impossible to upgrade Ubuntu on a Glesys vps, I’m just saying it takes a lot of unnecessary time.

The solution: EC2
The current project I’m working on uses EC2, and my boyfriend has been talking a lot about Amazon’s cloud services (I think he might be a little bit biased after having met Amazon’s CTO though).

EC2 is something I’ve considered for a while, especially since the pricing would be about the same as for the vps, and with everything being so frustrating and unnecessarily complicated with the vps I decided to give it a try yesterday. Three hours after making this decision, my site was up and running at Amazon and today I’ll get feminetik.se up and running as well.

Hopefully this will be a much better solution, and if my future sites need more server capacity, it’ll be extremely easy to fix.

The problem?

Completely useless error logs, that’s the problem!

Turns out both of the problems that made me want to throw my laptop out of the window was related to different kind of keys and indexes, but this was by no means something the log would give me a clue to. The log typically told me where in the SQLAlchemy python code there was an error, but this information had no connection what so ever to my code or the actual error. Combine this with SQLAlchemys very unpredictable behaviour when adding data to tables where the primary keys of the baseclass and subclass didn’t match (SQLALchemy had generated these tables without complaining ffs!) and we have frustration galore.

ORM can be sweet and quick, I can understand that. But really? All the frustration when something goes wrong, and this way of only thinking “objects”? The resulting database tables after introducing polymorphism and inheritance to my model aren’t pretty. I also wonder exactly how optimized the resulting queries will be? Maybe it’ll work for simpler applications without heavy load, but this is more frustration than fun right now.

Yesterday I’d been struggling with a stupid SQLAlchemy error for hours and the error logs basically said “doing a rollback, something went WRONG”. The more the feeling of resignation came crawling, the smaller the chance of effective debugging. Before freelancing, when I always had a bunch of developers around, I would simply have asked one of them.

Luckily I have in-house expertise, living with a developer, but how do freelancers normally solve this problem?

I’ve been programming for ten years and I used to help teaching programming for years when I was a student, so I tend to underestimate the amount of preparation needed for me. I always do the programming assignments beforehand as they’re new to me, but reading up on what the students are actually learning is something I’ve overlooked.

I’m programming a quite advanced Python application at the moment, so it’s easy for me to believe that I know all about Python. But for that application, I focus on system architecture, performance, subprocesses, queues, error handling, using external applications and logging and that’s not really what’s taught in this course.

Python syntax and datatypes is something I google when I need to, but after the slightly embarrassing realization that I didn’t know the answer of one of the homework questions today, I’ve decided to read the course literature. It’s probably good to know the difference between a tuple and a list anyway, even if getting away with being clueless is easy being a PBL teacher.

How to question students without having a clue about the answer:
Me: “What is a tuple?” (pointing at a student)
Student: “Bla bla bla”
Me: “Mmmhmm… Is everyone satisfied with this answer or does anyone want to add something?”
Another student: “I think a tuple is more like bla bla bla.”
A third student: “Yes, that’s what I answered too, look here in the book bla bla bla.”
Me: “Those are all good points! Can we now agree on that a tuple is bla bla bla?”

Naturally I would never use this method. Never. ;-)

I’ve been looking for an office space for a while. Staying in the apartment all day long simply isn’t working, I just hang around in my dressing gown all day not even bothering to brush my teeth in the morning. Cafés are nice, but not really an option, I have too hard a time focusing on my programming in busy environments.

I like having nice, skilled people to talk to, but I’m (still) not sure if I want to surround myself with IT entrepreneurs to get inspiration, or people with other areas of expertise to have an IT free zone where I don’t have to constantly be representative.

For now, I settled for the second option. At least until the summer, I’ll spend my days with underwear designer Noemi, photographer Elin and linguist Malin.

The office is quite close to home and very cozy and relaxed. It’s also very close to a nice yoga center where I can do my yoga and pilates. I try to make intuition based decisions and this feels good.

I haven’t had any reason to develop a full Facebook app yet, but since I was curious about their API I’ve been playing around with it. The SATS app was originally something I built years ago for my own webpage when I was a member of SATS (the gym). SATS’ search for classes didn’t have the interface I wanted, so I rearranged the search results a bit more to my liking. (It’s all ugly hacking, stripping data from an HTML result.) To my surprise, they haven’t changed their search functionality since then, so I ported the search to a Facebook app as an experiment. The app resides on my server and I rebuilt the whole front-end to return a JSON object with the data to show, then displaying it with FBML. I’d like to implement more of the existing search functionality, but as this has the status of being an ugly hack depending on SATS not rebuilding their search, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Oh, and I think the app is buggy in IE at the moment.

After writing the SATS app I got curious about Google App Engine and wanted to do some sort of Hello World to test connecting GAE to a Facebook app. I built a very simple function just to display your friend list as an XML file.

The reason for this is that many of my friends complained about not being able to trace the people disappearing from their friend lists. This is also a convenient way to get the user ids for your friends if you’re developing an application and need test data. I’m not allowed to save versions of friend lists due to Facebook API user terms, but this way the users can save versions of their list to compare.

This week I started teaching again, entry level programming with problem based learning for KTH engineering students. I have my own group of 12 students who’ll (hopefully) be kick-ass programmers in a couple of months! … or at least know the basics of programming. :-)

A few years ago KTH switched from Java to Python in these courses, a very good decision if you ask me. No more “and please ignore that strange main-stuff, we’ll get to that later, for now just copy it”.

Python is clean and the students can get straight to actually writing code that does things. Very pedagogic:

Java Hello World:
public class Hello {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.out.println("Hello World!");
   }
}

Python Hello World:
print "Hello World!"


But even if Python is great for teaching and I really want to have an intense and loving relationship with the language, some aspects of it are new to me, and don’t seem all that good. Yesterday I was working on my current project and I wanted to create a similar object to one already existing, with the same methods, but with its own implementations. To me, coming from the Java-verse, this screams interface. But Python doesn’t have interfaces.

I know that Python is a dynamically typed language and that I can send whatever object I want to a function and just assume it has the method I want to use, but what if someone fucks up?

I’m the only developer in this project at the moment and I think I can trust myself, but how do people in larger projects solve this? What’s the good way of coding what would have been an interface in another language in Python?

I’m so happy I get to work with projects I believe in. I love developing ideas that other people have come up with as well as my own, but I want it to be good ideas. Something to be proud of having been part of.

I also like to be able to travel whenever I feel like doing so, being able to plan my own life not being restricted to 6 weeks of vacation (I know, we’re lucky in Sweden) that I can’t even fully choose when to use.

Yesterday I booked a flight to Brussels for FOSDEM (free and open source software developers’ European meeting). I’m going with my boyfriend and a bunch of his geek friends, something I really look forward to. The conference is over a weekend, but I’m spending the whole friday in Brussels as well, shopping and hopefully meeting up with my friend Petra, who lives there at the moment. I’m also planning a trip to San Francisco later this spring, combining a developer conference (Web 2.0 Expo? Google I/O?) with visiting my kick-ass friend Lina who works at Google.

Right now I absolutely love my life.

1) Lack of time

I had a full time job. I did work with building a community platform in Java, and learned a lot by doing so, but it was never really my ideas that were implemented.

2) Lack of expertise or a team to back me up

I like to think of myself as the one who actually can build anything online, by myself. This is true, to some extent, I can do almost anything. The problem was that what I wanted to do involved some really complex social connections and to my knowledge, databases weren’t really up to that at the time. I needed some real geek power there, which weren’t available at the moment.

But in the last months I’ve started to realize that technology has reached a level where I actually can get stuff done! The ideas I had back then may be obsolete now, but there is so much potential out there right now.

I can use the existing social websites to handle the logins and accounts (Facebook, Google), which automatically creates a great channel straight to the potential users, and I can use Google app engine to host the projects. Cloud services really has helped reduce server costs and eliminated the server config time!

But, what really may be the key I’ve been waiting for is the graph database Neo4J. Pure geek power!

It’s all there now, like someone is constantly tossing stuff at me, yelling “catch!”, and best of all, I have the time to do my projects now.

I don’t really want to go insane, so my plan is to spend not more than half of the estimated 40-hour-weeks at home. One afternoon a week I’ll be at Il Caffè, The Place To Be for freelancers here in Stockholm. When possible, I also plan to spend one day a week at my customers’ offices, even if most projects are of the type that I can just as easily do from home. It’s nice to hang out with the customers and it’s definitely a good way to make sure the communication works well without any larger effort. I’ll also start teaching programming for a couple of hours a week (preferably early in the mornings) so those days I might work the rest of the day from KTH as I’m already there.

But for the rest of the time I need a place in the apartment that’s not completely unergonomic. Right now I’m using the kitchen table and that’s not good for my back.

Ever since I moved to this apartment, a few months ago, I’ve had a vision of me sitting in the living room on my pilates ball that I use as chair (great for the back) at a glass table with my MacBook Pro, hacking away. IKEA has these kind of tables and they’re really cheap, so I think it’s time for an IKEA visit soon!

Other than that, Stardoll of course has all the common functionality found in most communites. The community has an astounding nearly 50 million users all over the world!

At Stardoll I coded front-end, which included HTML, CSS, JQuery, JSON, integrations with Flash and PHP.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, catching up on TV shows such as Dollhouse and Bones and I’ve barely left the apartment. The first week I almost felt broken. I simply was completely mentally exhausted after a very hectic year, so I’m very thankful that I have the possibility to take a time out like this without having to feel stressed about wasting two precious vacation weeks.

I’m also thankful that I’ve come to realize how important a time out can be. Right now I’m at home, by myself, in Stockholm instead of being in beautiful Jämtland (northern Sweden) with my boyfriend and some of his friends. Now, when I’m back to my normal energy level, I almost regret not going. Trying out the sauna he built (smart AND handy, he’s such a catch) and winter bathing in icy water seems like quite an experience, but I know that this week of solitude was something I really needed. Besides, Stockholm can be amazing during the winter:

My plan was simply to reach the point when doing nothing would bore me enough to make me start wanting to do stuff again. I expected this to take around two weeks (based on my last complete time out in 2006) which turned out to be correct. When I started to clean the whole apartment and doing laundry yesterday I knew I was back. ;-)

Tomorrow I’m starting to work on a really interesting project, which I’ll probably be able to blog more about when it’s finished in about a month. :-D

Nu är det äntligen dags för en välbehövd julsemester. Det senaste året har varit ganska hektiskt och inte innehållit så mycket pausande. Jag får energi både av att det händer roliga saker där jag träffar nya människor och av att ta en time out ibland. Det behöver vara balans mellan dessa ytterligheter och det är det inte riktigt nu, så jag ser verkligen fram emot lite ledighet. Om jag fick välja helt själv vad jag skulle göra så skulle jag placera mig ensam, i en liten stuga mitt ute i skogen utan el och internet och sitta och elda i en brasa och läsa i två veckor. Någon gång ska jag hyra en stuga och faktiskt göra det där.

Men nu tänkte jag göra en utvärdering av tjänsten Middagsfrid som vi har provat i en månad. Man betalar pengar, sen får man hem två kassar med mat varje måndag och recept för fem dagar. Jättepraktiskt kan tyckas. Det blir fyra portioner om dagen så är man två får man matlådor också. Vi var lite trötta på att hitta på maträtter och handla varje dag så vi tyckte att det här lät toppen.

Det var inte toppen.

Det var stressande, frustrerande och faktiskt ganska dåligt.

Middagsfrid verkar INTE vara tänkt att underlätta. Den tiden man sparar på att slippa handla går nämligen istället åt till att stå och laga mat i minst en timme om dagen, ibland upp till tre. Middagsfrid har nämligen något ekologiskt tänk som går ut på att inga tillsatser what so ever får användas, vilket gör att allt ska göras själv, från fiskbullar till lingonsylt(!). De tycker dessutom om rotfrukt, som gärna ska skalas och rivas eller tärnas. Det här börjar snabbt kännas ganska överdrivet och efter några dagar är man rätt trött på det här.

Jag tror att målgruppen för middagsfrid är människor som tycker att det är kul att lägga oändlig tid på matlagning men som verkligen inte vet hur man gör. Om man blir imponerad av de fantastiska rätterna (vilket människor verkar bli) så kan man inte ha lagat mat särskilt mycket. Under den gångna månaden har det bara varit 2-3 rätter som vi har tyckt att wow, det här var ju riktigt gott! Det mesta har varit ok, men inte mer. Det genomgående intrycket är “verkligen inte värt besväret”.

Jag tror att middagsfrids kunder gillar att få känna sig Duktiga, som står och gör så Bra och Ordentliga saker alldeles själva. Men jag förstår inte hur barnfamiljer får ihop det här. Vad gör man när man kommer hem med två hungriga ungar i hasorna och ska slänga ihop en middag, och möts av “marinera köttet i två timmar”?

Jag tycker att fokus ligger helt fel. Allt känns väldigt bara-för-att. Recepten är onödigt tillkrånglade och samma (eller faktiskt mycket bättre) resultat hade gått att få på mycket mindre krångel. Jag gör t.ex. en mycket godare saffransfisksoppa själv på en tredjedel av tiden. Allt måste dessutom inte ha sjutton ingredienser!

Det här verkar vara en livsstilsgrej och jag pallar inte hurtigheten. Jag kan tänka mig att människor som gillar det här gillar Agneta Sjödin och Ernst också. Vi avbokade det här redan efter en vecka men hade tyvärr förbetalt en månad. Nu är det äntligen slut på middagsstressen och vi ska testa någon konkurrerande tjänst istället.

Slutsats: Testa middagsfrid om du verkligen INTE har någon känsla för matlagning men en stor längtan efter att utföra denna syssla 1-3 timmar om dagen. Du bör dessutom värdesätta att få känna dig duktig före en positiv smakupplevelse. Bra om du gillar kål också.

Judging by this description, Stardoll may not seem like the most interesting community out there. What puts it very high up on my list of places to work at is their 45 million users. 45 million!

I mostly do front-end there, but it’s extremely interesting to get an insight in all the technical details of such a large community and to see how they work; the server setup, release cycles and getting a feeling of the place and the people there. I really love my job, but I think my me-doll looks a bit grumpy?

But before I did the audiogram today, I didn’t believe I really had a problem. I have tinnitus, and did an audiogram eight years ago. Back then everything was fine and dandy so I’ve been believing that my tinnitus noises simply were louder than the noises I don’t hear.

Here is my audiogram:

Apparently I don’t hear much at all in the span of 500-1000 Hz. 40 dB is a lot of attenuation, foam earplugs usually attenuate 30 dB, but human speech is only partly in this interval (spanning 512 to 2048 Hz). So it really doesn’t feel like I can’t hear. Sure, I have difficulties when people talk sometimes, but my impression is mostly that they mumble. It definitely doesn’t feel like I’m walking around with earplugs! I wonder if this is what it’s like to not realize you need glasses?

I’m told that this is something genetic and that it’ll be a real problem when I get older and I’ll start losing the higher frequences as well, like most people do. I’m still getting a hearing aid in February though, that I can use in meetings and in other situations that don’t work so well. Constantly compensating and lip reading is tiring in a very unnecessary way. I’m actually curious about what hearing perfectly is really like, as this has come gradually over many years.

I guess the view does help.

Almost everybody know some consultant who has difficulties finding stuff to do. That consultant typically gets miserable over time. Conclusion: Consulting must be a VERY BAD IDEA, that no one should try doing at all.

There is a Swedish word called “trygghet”. There isn’t any perfect translation, but it means something like security, safety or safeness. Trygghet is very important for Swedes, I think that’s why people tend to have such difficulties understanding this. How on earth could I quit my job (I wasn’t even fired!) to do someting so not “tryggt”?

I guess most people try to imagine what it would be like for them to try to find a consulting assignment. But they’re not me.

After having done my morning yoga to get some inner peace, I’m now ready for my first day of my first assignment. I’ll spend december doing front-end-work for a very large community. I’m really looking forward to it!

Teaching is something I’ve been missing the last three years, so my plan was to see if I’m needed in any course. Turns out I am, I believe the exact words were “Yes yes yes!”.

So in January, I’m going back to teaching programming a few hours a week! It’ll be interesting, because I believe I’m a much better teacher now than when I was as a student. New perspectives, better understanding of people. But at the same time, I’ve moved further away from the Johanna that struggled with learning programming ten years ago.

It feels really good to be back, I like KTH and the people at CSC. Everything seems to be the same as three years back, the environment feels so far away from IT-Stockholm and the consultant business but in reality it’s not. After all, the smart students have to end up somewhere after graduation, for example at geek pool number one. Same people, better coffee.

But now it’s time to do some shopping before heading to the wp-fika!

There is some stuff that’s good to have though. One thing is an insurance, in case you mess up and someone sues you. I was planning to get one from Trygg Hansa, the insurance company I’ve used before, that also has a deal with Sveriges Ingenjörer (my union). Unfortunately for them, they messed up by sending me a horrible form containing questions like these:

22) What theoretical education do the leading persons have? List name and education.
23) What practical experience do the leading persons have? List name and education.

I still don’t really know why they want this information, or, exactly what information they want, but I did my best to guess. Then I got to this question:

Vilka interna regler, instruktioner e d finns gällande för avtalsskrivningar i syfte att förebygga eller begränsa “ren förmögenhetsskada” och som gäller som säkerhetsföreskrift i avtalet?

I actually can’t translate this, because I don’t understand the sentence. I’ll run it through google translate, the result will probably be as comprehensible as the Swedish version:

What internal rules, instructions, etc. are applicable to contractual wordings in order to prevent or limit the “pure property damage “and relating to safety regulation in the agreement?

After getting no help from the Trygg Hansa contact person, who only told me I had to answer all the questions, I got tired of the stupid form and called the insurance company If instead. They got me an insurance without any trouble at all.

For book keeping I’m using a service from my bank, Swedbank, which seems really neat. Integrated and simplified book keeping and invoicing and all connected to my bank accounts!

For time tracking, I’ve chosen Harvest. It was one of the alternatives I found when googling, along with Tick. Tick lost because they wanted my credit card number before giving me the free trial month and the screenshots didn’t look that great.

Harvest is liked by Chris Messina, and Chris Messina is liked by my boyfriend Andreas, so Harvest must be good. They also tweeted me after I mentioned them and I like that. Almost on the spam side, but they basically offered me support, so obviously they realize the value of marketing in social media. Another company that tweeted me was Intervals. I signed up for a free account there but Intervals isn’t as pretty as Harvest and more expensive.

Now I have what I need. Time to do business!