Last Friday the PyPy Status Blog had its first anniversary. Yay! After not really buying into any of this new-fangled "blog" stuff for a long time we just bit the bullet and got started. Totally surprisingly it even worked. We posted 76 post in the last year, more than one per week. By now we have more than 800 subscribers (according to feedburner), which is quite cool for a rather niche blog.
To make our blog even more interesting, I would like to ask for some feedback via the comments:
- Which posts did you like in particular?
- What sort of posts would you be interested in getting more of?
- Any other improvements we could make?
18 comments:
For me the most interesting posts is about status of PyPy project. It will be great if you could post more frequently.
It's been great to read about PyPy progress, congratulations for surviving a year and many thanks.
I also like to hear the status updates - and wouldn't mind a bit more technical detail.
In fact some deep dives into individual aspects of PyPy would be *great*, even if they're more effort to write...
Greetings!
What about quick Weekly Status Updates, with a summary of svn activity and stuff?
It's not just a first for you, it's a first for me. This is the first blog I have ever subscribed to. You can attribute that to the fact that this subject is geniunly interesting.
The blog format has many benefits. For one, it amortizes the effort required to understand the project. This allows me to take my time, wiki whatever I need to, and savor the details. It takes time for me to learn the concepts but in due time, I can see myself eventually contributing to the project. The other benefit is I can see all the hot topics revolved around the various pypy projects. The whole partial evaulation, for example, was something new I learned about.
I would agree that increasing the rate of posts would be nice. While I can't say for others, in my personal experience, it seems that logged projects tend to finish faster than unlogged projects.
It's not just a first for you, it's a first for me. This is the first blog I have ever subscribed to. You can attribute that to the fact that this subject is geniunly interesting.
The blog format has many benefits. For one, it amortizes the effort required to understand the project. This allows me to take my time, wiki whatever I need to, and savor the details. It takes time for me to learn the concepts but in due time, I can see myself eventually contributing to the project. The other benefit is I can see all the hot topics revolved around the various pypy projects. The whole partial evaulation, for example, was something new I learned about.
I would agree that increasing the rate of posts would be nice. While I can't say for others, in my personal experience, it seems that logged projects tend to finish faster than unlogged projects.
> Which posts did you like in particular?
I just scanned a bunch of entries, and "List comprehension implementation details" jumped out at me as a really nice one. I like that it points out some of the deep details of python that are easy for me to not think about because I'm not implementing it.
> What sort of posts would you be interested in getting more of?
More technical details posts, I really like the one about the JIT and Prolog too.
I post your articles to reddit too, and I think "we can now run big software X" and efficency milestones are successfuly at attracting a lot of attention (if that's what you want!)
Thanks so much for doing this! It makes me very jealous over here in CPython land.
I like to hear about specific new projects and ideas you guys are working on.
For me the most interesting things were the technical details posts, like Bill Mill said. But I get excited any time there is a new blog post. :)
Being in the scientific computation area at the moment, I'm very eager to hear about progress in the JIT framework, esp. for 64 bit Linux.
Yet most other posts are also interesting.
> Which posts did you like in particular?
Anything about the JIT and its progress.
Good luck!
Hi,
I think the blog is pretty good. Weekly summaries would make it rock, though.
And I am also especially interested in hearing about progress on JIT work. And about any use of LLVM.
Best
Anders
Thanks for all the friendly comments!
So more technical posts it will be :-). Those are mostly even fun to write, it's just usually quite a bit of work. I actually have a vague plan to give a basic introduction of the ideas behind the JIT (but will still take some time, I am busy with the lecture at the moment).
About more summaries of what happens: it requires a lot of discipline (see the Python-dev summaries) and I am not sure we have that :-). It would need somebody dedicated to care for it, and that one won't be me at the moment.
Personaly, I get very anxious when you say "it will be ready when it's ready". Aaarghhh! Please, at least lie a little bit :-).
For example: "Pypy is now 1.8x slower than cpython, but after [feature here] it will be 10x faster".
Well, just kidding. Congratulations for all the great work and keep it up!
I am not especially in favour of weekly summaries, unless there is some interesting progress to report. Otherwise you end up with someone filling in progress reports because they feel obliged to, rather than to celebrate new features, and it becomes a chore.
That said, PyPy has many subprojects; maybe having a round-robin system where we get a progress report from a different project every week would be interesting.
I'm a regular Python user that wishes often for something a little faster with the same flexibility. So generally, I read this because I think you guys are on a good track for JIT optimisation and other fun things.
I guess I'm looking forward to the eventual series of posts that talks about how you can start using this on your system to replace your system Python, followed by you talking the regular Python core developers into working directly in PyPy instead. =)
For me the best parts are the tutorials and howtos relating to rpython, translating to c, etc.
I'm interested in status updates and longer descriptions on how elements of PyPy work. Sprint summaries are fine as long as they carry one of the above (they usually do, though :>)
I'm interested in anything to do with multi-thread support, GIL elimination, general status, progress and future plans.
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