Planets, Clouds, Python

Half a year ago, I wrote some thoughts about writing a cloud-native feed aggregator. I actually started drawing some ideas of how I would design this myself since, and I even went through the (limited) trouble of having it approved for release. But I have not actually released any code, or to be honest, I have not written any code either. The repository has been sitting idle.

Now, with the Python 2 demise coming soon, and me not interested in keeping around a server nearly only to run Planet Multimedia, I started looking into this again. The first thing that I realized is that I both want to reuse as much code exist out there as I can, and I want to integrate with “modern” professional technologies such as OpenTelemetry, which I appreciate from work, even if it sounds like overkill.

But that’s where things get complicated: while going full “left-pad” of having a module for literally everything is not something you’ll find me happy about, a quick look at feedparser, probably the most common module to read feeds in Python, shows just how much code is spent trying to cover for old Python versions (before 2.7, even), or to implement minimal-viable-interfaces to avoid mandatory dependencies at all.

Thankfully, as Samuel from NewsBlur pointed out, it’s relatively trivial to just fetch the feed with requests, and then pass it down to feedparser. And since there are integration points for OpenTelemetry and requests, having an instrumented feed fetcher shouldn’t be too hard. That’s going to probably be my first focus when writing Tanuga, next weekend.

Speaking of NewsBlur, the chat with Samuel also made me realize how much of it is still tied to Python 2. Since I’ve gathered quite a bit of experience in porting to Python 3 at work, I’m trying to find some personal time to contribute smaller fixes to run this in Python 3. The biggest hurdle I’m having right now is to set it up on a VM so that I can start it up in Python 2 to begin with.

Why am I back looking at this pseudo-actively? Well, the main reason is that rawdog is still using Python 2, and that is going to be a major pain with security next year. But it’s also the last non-static website that I run on my own infrastructure, and I really would love to get rid of entirely. Once I do that, I can at least stop running my own (dedicated or virtual) servers. And that’s going to save me time (and money, but time is the most important one here too.)

My hope is that once I find a good solution to migrate Planet Multimedia to a Cloud solution, I can move the remaining static websites to other solutions, likely Netlify like I did for my photography page. And after that, I can stop the last remaining server, and be done with sysadmin work outside of my flat. Because honestly, it’s not worth my time to run all of these.

I can already hear a few folks complaining with the usual remarks of “it’s someone else’s computer!” — but the answer is that yes, it’s someone else’s computer, but a computer of someone who’s paid to do a good job with it. This is possibly the only way for me to manage to cut away some time to work on more Open Source software.