Happiness Through Ignorance

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Happiness Through Ignorance a presentation by Armin Ronacher for PyCon Japan 2012 @mitsuhiko http://lucumr.pocoo.org/

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About the Name mitsuhiko: name is from the Detective Conan Manga I don't actually speak Japanese :-(

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Foreword Take everything with a grain of salt … and that includes this talk

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Why Happiness Matters and why I talk about happiness

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Happiness There is no value in doing something you don't like. It might work for a while, but you will get grumpy

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Happy People are Productive People If you like your work you are willing to work overtime Without happiness there would be no Open Source

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We Love Python Many of us are using Python because it makes us happy (or at least happier than the alternatives)

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Why Ignorance Matters and why being ignorant can be important

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Ignorance We start out ignorant

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Education When we're learning we become less ignorant …

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Education … start learning more and more …

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Education … explore less …

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Education … worry more.

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Ignorance is Bliss Ignorance & dedication gets you far

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Wolfire Indie Game Developer (known for running the humble indie bundles)

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Lugaru Wolﬁre's ﬁrst successful indie game eventually open sourced under the GPL license

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Lugaru Screenshot from Lugaru

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Overgrowth Screenshot from Overgrowth (their current game)

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void Screenshot(void) // Make an FSSpec static char buf[256]; if(numscreenshots==0){ buf[0]=26; buf[1]=':'; buf[2]='S'; buf[3]='c'; buf[4]='r'; buf[5]='e'; buf[6]='e'; buf[7]='n'; /* ... */ buf[26]='0'; }

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void Game::Tick() { declare 40 variables; handle network messages; handle keyboard input; handle main menu code; handle all menu pages; handle game saving; handle game loading; handle game sounds; handle player movements; handle collisions; handle attacks; handle screenshots; }

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Game Ticks Executed every frame one function with 10000 lines of C++ code up to 12 levels of indentation

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Dedication Instead of not doing it They did it They made a successful game

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Too Much Information humanity knows so much

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I want to make a website HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Templates, Flask, Django, CodeIgnitor, XML, Ruby on Rails, node.js, OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, bcrypt, SSH, SHA1, FTP, HTTP, SPDY, Puppet, Chef, Salt, Backbone JS, MD5, Flash, jQuery, Dojo, DOM, XPath, XInclude, XSLT, Jinja, Genshi, i18n, l10n, unicode, utf-8, MIME, email, websockets, server side events, pubsub, pubsubhubbub, Atom, RSS, …

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Where do you even start? It's increasingly diﬃcult to learn things people tell you to learn Technology X when you're done, X gets replaced with Y

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Step by Step You start somewhere and go small steps from there

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Quick Iteration every small step is a achievement

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Learn to love and hate instead of taking hackernews' word that PHP sucks you can learn it ﬁrst hand

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A Healthy Balance Ignorance requires a healthy balance start ignorant — don't end there

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Cargo Cult Programming “why didn't you?“

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“Why didn't you use X?” Chances are that if you present something you did someone will ask why you didn't do it with technology X instead of Y

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But it's O(n)! There is theory and there is practice Something that's slow in theory could still be a valid solution in practice

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Infinite is a lie n often really is a constant think about it

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Scripting languages are slow Can't program computer games in it Unreal Engine 3 has considerable amount written in Unreal script

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Complexity kills Happiness Examples from the real world

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SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol

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SAML 2.0 Security Assertion Markup Language

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SAML 2.0 … is an XML-based open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, that is, between an identity provider and a service provider.

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Specification Breakdown SAML 2.0, XML, XPath, XPath Filter 2.0, XPointer, XLST, HTTP, XMLENC, X509, XMLDSIG, Canonical XML

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This is no Sign-in protocol … it's a way to make money of SAML because barely anyone has the resources to implement it securely

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SSO 101 Shared Secret + HMAC + encapsulated payload

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SSO 101 import hashlib, hmac, json class BadSignature(Exception): pass def get_signature(payload): m = hmac.new(SHARED_SECRET, digestmod=hashlib.sha1) m.update(payload) return m.hexdigest() def sign(payload): payload = json.dumps(payload) return get_signature(payload) + '.' + payload def get_payload(data): if '.' not in data: raise BadSignature() signature, payload = data.split('.', 1) verify_sig = get_signature(payload) if verify_sig != signature: raise BadSignature() return json.loads(payload)

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Is it secure? For as long as you have a long secret key which you don't lose. Takes 10 minutes to implement and is easy to understand. Would you know if SAML is secure?

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Pluggable Applications All the over-engineering in the WSGI community in the end just gave us systems that look like J2EE. Meanwhile Django has a global settings module and is popular

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PHP Barely a programming language, but hugely successful. No consistent language design but fast iteration speeds.

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C No namespaces, no OOP, not functional, no type safety, bad standard library, worst string type, theoretically hard to optimize, no form of GC — the pillar of modern software development

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Personal Guidelines things I follow because I think they make sense

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Disclaimer Personal experience I have not nearly done enough to tell others what to do

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Learn Asking Questions And then ask the right ones I notice many times (on myself and others) that we ask the wrong questions

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Avoid Global State Just avoid it. It's easy to do. If you think the API suﬀers consider thread/context locals. But really. Avoid global state.

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Refactor often At the end of an iteration/milestone go over the code and try to see if implementation can be simpliﬁed

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Examples First I always write APIs and I start with the examples. Often shows when something does not make sense.

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Q&A http://ﬁreteam.net/ — Armin Ronacher — @mitsuhiko