Code LV

I'm not old (yet) and I've been using django for well over 5 years now and I must say it's a fantastic platform.  However I haven't seen much change since I started using it. This might be a good thing, since django doesn't need much to changed, however, maybe it's just me but django is starting to feel "dated".  Templates, in my opinion, are the "old" way of doing things vs web components. Current method The whole web development experience in python seems dated. Twisted, torando, django, flask, bottle, you name it... they all use the same general way for building pages using some formatting type template engine. A request comes it, it's dispatched to some handler. The handler generates a "context" or set of variables to pass to a template engine, the template engine renders it and the handler writes it back to the client. It's a boatload of code (for django at least) and really difficult to follow and modify.

I just updated the iOS code and demo app to work with the latest version (2.14.0) of enaml-native and decided to make a video to share the status of using enaml-native for iOS. Still a lot of work ahead...  My goal at some time down the road would be to write a "unified"  build system for both Android and iOS that merges python-for-android and python-for-ios (kivy-ios) as they have a lot of code that does the same thing. Anyways, happy new year!  

I finally got around to pushing my thermostat app to the app store and putting the code on github. I must admit the whole project is overkill, I could have done it in a few hours with react-native (or just bought a thermostat like everyone else) but instead I created an entire framework to write it in python. You can find everything here https://github.com/frmdstryr/thermostat .   I did a video earlier showing my Kivy version controlling the fireplace. This app is now written in enaml-native and starts up about 50% faster (but still pretty slow).  I want to add a few more features and do a mircopython port of the arduino code but will have to do that some other time.  If requested, I'll do a more detailed post on how to set it all up, but the code is out in the wild now so have fun! Stay warm!

A bunch of more expensive home routers have these huge antennas on them. Ever wonder what's inside? Not much!  They're pretty much all for show (and could be a lot smaller). The best way I've found to decide which to buy is by using actual good review sites that do "real" testing like https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ . Smallnetbuilder gives actual test data and detailed breakdowns of the build of a router, not the crap you get from many other big websites, or useless reviews from amazon.  Being a former test engineer, nothing speaks more about a product than cold hard data, so hats off to smallnetbuilder for providing truly useful reviews. Cheers!