martes, 13 de septiembre de 2022

Reinventing the Queue

Yesterday, this HN thread Write your own task queue got me thinking again on the NIH and "build vs buy". 

I'm sometimes an advocate for using own implementations of subsystems if you don't need the whole complexity of premade solutions. But...

I usually wouldn't write a task queue, as this is rarely my core business, and that I don't think my needs are anything custom, but I'll take whatever comes with the package.

That said, I've built one task queue in the past, the excuse being I was working on CommonLisp, and the platform already used all the AWS stack: (DynamoDB and Kinesis Streams) for similar things, and no ready-made solution was available. 

In that case, workers were really an active object with an active loop that kept polling the correct stream, and when a job came, an attribute in a dynamoDB table would be used to track the status. It was simple, and it allowed for reimplementations of the queues for local testing. So yeah, I've done it also...

But I can't see myself doing it when using Ruby/Python/... I feel it's very rare I'm gonna have a need that is not covered in your run off the mill job system.

Anyway, wakatime did the same thing, they implemented their own queue. And they all seem to complain about celery.

And more recent projects that approach queues:

- https://github.com/drpancake/chard. async, no threads/process

- https://github.com/thread/django-lightweight-queue. django tailored one.


sábado, 3 de septiembre de 2022

Ratpoison news in 2022?

I've been using the same obscure window manager since about 2003. I remember using it in 'Fedora Core 2'(released in 2004).

Lately I've thought about moving to something that behaves better with Zoom, but I really couldn't find an alternative.

 

There's https://github.com/jcs/sdorfehs , which comes from ratpoison, and it's maintained by jcs. It has the latest ratpoison patches that didn't make it to the last stable ratpoison release, and a few new features.  Well.... it turns out one of the new features breaks my workflow, so for me, this is a "nope".

I also thought about using evilwm, which is a floating wm with ratpoison shortcuts (more or less). But I do like tiling.  So maybe the combination of ratpoison and evilwm (via tmpwm) would be the sweetest spot. I remember using that config years ago, but now you have to make sure to have the latest ratpoison built from git, because tmpwm breaks on multiple screens.

Something I discovered just this week is this youtube channel from a user called root_sti. The videos are great(great music), showing neat configurations and a million scripts and tunings, using dzen2, fzf, evilwm, ratpoison, and voidlinux. And all configs are here. Lots of shellscript there :).

Maybe using sxhkd and emulating the shortcuts via wmctl... not sure

Also, a funny video just from a few minutes ago in hackernews. The first tiling window manager (1988)