An end to the experiments (for now)

Well, it's been 3 months, and I've gotten a decent number of things written. It took much longer than I was expecting, but I learned a lot of things, and made some good contacts. But most excitingly, I got a job! Last week I accepted a position working for Arc90, most prominently of Readability fame, but they've got plenty of other things going on.

I first heard about them when Kenneth Reitz started working there, and blogged about it. As it turns out, they were looking for someone with test automation experience just about the time I started getting serious about sending my resume around.

I'll be working with the Insight project team, building test automation and reporting tools to ensure confidence in the quality of every release. It's a very different scale from my work at RIM, and I think a very good opportunity for me to succeed or fail entirely on my own merits (I'm going to succeed, btw).

Which brings us to this blog. For the next few months, I don't expect to have much time to commit to writing here. Kenneth has certainly done an admirable job of keeping up blogging (and working on Requests!), so perhaps I will be able to as well. I've done a bit of research on some of the other topics I wanted to write about, and there's a post I think I owe someone for the help they have given me, but Arc90 is going to be my focus.

So this is an end, to this blog as it was. But one of the reasons I chose Arc90 as an employer is their support for blogging and open source work, so I do expect to be back writing before too long. Thanks to everyone who has read and commented on any of this!

Python Web Client 0.2 Release

I'm pleased to announce the 0.2 release of the Python Web Client. It now meets a bare minimum of functionality to be useful. Specifically, it provides a web UI to allow you to put together and submit HTTP requests, specifying request type, URL, parameters and headers.

You can view a demo here.

Oh, and it's hosted on Github here.

What's new in 0.2?

- Added display of response body
- Added option to select request method
- Added field to add parameters
- Added field to add headers

What does the future hold?

Well, there are a lot of potential ideas for where this could go, both in the original SoCal piggies proposal, and on the Rally site where I've been tracking this (log in with alecmunro+public@gmail.com:Experiments). However, I expect to resume my place among the employed soon, and thus far I haven't had any feedback on this. So barring extreme boredom on my part, this is probably the end of the line until someone forks it.

Python Web Client 0.1

The release
I've polished a few rough edges, and I'm now (somewhat) proud to release Python Web Client 0.1. It's still lacking in features, but it's got docs and an easy way to start it, and what's more, its pieces work on non-Windows platforms. I've also handicapped it a bit to allow me to put up a hosted version for people to try out, here.

What's next
Well, with this "release", the foundation of the project should be more or less complete (though I don't have it in continuous integration yet). That should make it pretty safe to add features. I'll see what I can put into it over the next few days and get a 0.2 release out, that will hopefully be more useful. If I people are interested, we might make it to 0.3, at which point I'll try to get it on PyPi (it would be nice to have a project up there).

Sidenote
I'm not sure there's a good solution, but I find all the context-switching that goes along with setting up a new project to be a real drain on productivity.