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meredydd

3,161 karma · joined April 15, 2008

Cofounder of Anvil, a platform for building full stack web apps with nothing but Python: https://anvil.works/

Email: meredydd@anvil.works

Based in Cambridge (UK).

submissionscomments
meredydd··on The last Soviet citizen: The cosmonaut who was left behind in space
If you like this, you should definitely read "Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough. It's an amazing portrait of the disintegrating immediately-ex-Soviet space program, and the disintegrating space station they were trying to keep flying.

This article mentions other countries buying seats on Mir. The book explains how this was a deliberate international effort to keep the Russian space program alive with infusions of hard cash. This was to avoid huge numbers of scientists with, effectively, high-level missile experience dispersing across the world in desperate need of money (rockets==missiles; that was the point of the whole original space race).

It's an eye-opening look at an astonishing time, and it culminates in heart-stopping descriptions of the various in-flight accidents, including the mid-space collision with a supply craft that knocked a hole in the station and nearly killed everyone aboard.

If you prefer video, the author gave an extended interview about it when it was released: https://www.c-span.org/video/?115419-1/dragonfly-nasa-crisis...

meredydd··on Angular v8.0
> I really want to go back to late-90s desktop UI development sometimes…

While it's not a JS framework, can I interest you in an explicitly VB/Delphi-inspired app development tool for the web?

It's got drag'n'drop design, you code entirely in Python (including the front end - it transpiles to JS), and it even has a built-in database: https://anvil.works/

meredydd··on Leaked Microsoft Email Chain Reportedly Describes Hellish Workplace for Women
This Gizmodo post consists entirely of quotes and paraphrases from the original article (which they do at least link to):

https://qz.com/1587477/microsoft-investigating-sexual-harass...

meredydd··on Gimli – A Visual Studio Code extension for front-end developers
Browser-based Visual Basic, you say? We built one! https://anvil.works/

(Mind you, our visual layout tools aren't this powerful at the HTML/CSS level. We have a fairly simple drag'n'drop system, and if you want to get lower-level than that, then you'll be editing HTML and CSS as text. Gimli looks awesome.)

meredydd··on Show HN: An Easy Programming Language – Built with WebAssembly
Agreed - the browser leaves much to be desired as an accessible dev platform, and the web as a whole is even worse! (Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, Python, SQL and React/Redux/Bootstrap/Flash/SQLAlchemy just to get started?! And that's not mentioning Webpack, AWS, shell scripting...).

We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like programming environment for the web - it's got one language (Python), drag'n'drop design, built in database, actual working autocompletion - the works: https://anvil.works.

Would love to hear what you think!

meredydd··on Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib (2012)
I put together an "XKCD" theme for Anvil that works quite nicely:

https://anvil.works/blog/xkcd-style-apps

meredydd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2019)
Anvil | Developer Evangelist | Cambridge, UK | On-site | Full-time or Part-time | https://anvil.works/jobs

Help us fix web development at Anvil (https://anvil.works)!

Anvil is a platform for building full-stack web apps with nothing but Python. It's faster and easier than traditional web tools, but it's got all the power of an industrial-strength language, ecosystem and tooling.

We're looking for someone with great communication skills, to show the world how to build awesome things. You'll be building apps, writing blog posts, and speaking.

It's rewarding work -- developers love being introduced to Anvil (our stand is always crowded[1] at conferences!). Plus, there are all the advantages of an early-stage startup: lots of autonomy, and huge impact.

[1] https://anvil.works/blog/img/how-many-t-shirts/crowd.jpg

We're bootstrapped and profitable, with customers ranging from tiny to enormous. Find out more: https://anvil.works/jobs

meredydd··on Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE
The thing is, making Anvil open source now would virtually guarantee that outcome.

The market has spent the last few years demonstrating that the sustainable number of large companies whose main product is open source is...One. (Red Hat, if you were wondering.) Even trying to become that kind of company requires a highly speculative VC-fuelled trajectory, which is famous for turning sustainable 100m-scale companies into 1% unicorns and 99% rubble.

Even Docker, which utterly transformed its target market, is barely making any revenue ($25m/year on a $1.3bn valuation). All its value is busily being subsumed into Kubernetes, itself a loss-leader from a company (Google) that makes all its money from something else.

Anvil-the-company is sustainable, profitable, and growing, and Anvil-the-product is getting better all the time, because we charge for what we produce. We would love to be able to give it away and keep doing that - but basically, we can't.

meredydd··on Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE
Can I interest you in a very Delphi-like IDE for building web apps with nothing but Python?

https://anvil.works has a WYSIWYG visual designer, with Python for in-browser code as well as server-side. (We compile it to JS.) It's even got a built-in DB if you want it (Postgres-backed). Everything in one language, full front-to-back autocompletion...all the things we missed about Delphi!

meredydd··on Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
May I interest you in something explicitly in that genre?

https://anvil.works is VB6, but for the Web, and in Python. No JS frameworks required! We've had data scientists with no Web experience produce MVPs with it in a couple of weeks.

meredydd··on Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it
We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like development environment for the web, which I think fits your bill: https://anvil.works.

It's got a drag'n'drop UI creator, you use Python to build the front-end and the back-end (with proper autocomplete, VB-style), and it even has a built-in database if you need one.

meredydd··on Python and Qt: 3,000 hours of developer insight
Honestly, if you're looking for a local (Windows) executable, those old 90s tools (VB, Delphi, Xojo [aka RealBasic], even C#) are still great! They're just as good as they were in the 90s; it's just that demand has moved to the web (or mobile).

If what you want is a 90s-shaped experience (installable desktop app), then the best of 90s-era dev tools still kick ass. (It's sad that open source stuff hasn't caught up, but that's mostly because everyone's been focused on...the web.)

meredydd··on Python and Qt: 3,000 hours of developer insight
The short answer is, "the Web happened". The Web platform is a stack of approximately five[1] different programming languages (SQL/Python/Javascript/HTML/CSS). Each layer generates source code for an adjacent one, creating a level of cascading complexity which makes it impossible to create a workable a WYSIWYG GUI editor like (eg) Delphi's.

We cut the Gordian knot in Anvil (https://anvil.works) by replacing pretty much everything in that stack with one language (Python). You need to get rid of that complexity if you want to get anywhere close something like Delphi.

Anvil got pretty well reviewed on HN a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15584124

--

[1] - You can quibble about the exact number of languages, but they all have syntax and they all have source code you need to edit and run to see a result. And a successful injection into any of them is usually game over.

meredydd··on Urban Area Cost-Of-Living as Big Tech Moats and Employee Golden Handcuffs
This narrative resonates personally with me. We bootstrapped Anvil in Cambridge (UK), and one of the most common reactions to a demo is "wow, this is actually a real platform, deep enough to have answers to my follow-on questions". (Which is...kinda important for a programming tool.) Ironically, this response often comes from Bay Area-based startups with incredibly limited time/resources to produce a prototype, despite objectively huge amounts of "seed" or "pre-seed" funding - because prevailing salaries and cost of living make staying alive long enough to build it, let alone recruiting another engineer, a real stretch.

No way would we have been able to build anything nearly so complete if we'd had an SFBA cost-of-living clock ticking behind us.

meredydd··on Is front-end development having an identity crisis?
> I've seen no evidence to support the suggestion that building CRUD apps for the web takes 5x as long as with something like PowerBuilder, Delphi, VB etc

Well, I have!

We actually did the test, with Anvil (https://anvil.works), which is explicitly a VB/Delphi-like platform for the web.

We took a straightforward CRUD-y consulting project as a spec, and built it with traditional tools and with Anvil. We did our best to keep it fair: We raced an expert against an expert, and we kept the web tech simple: simple templating, minimal JS, etc. And it was still about 7 times faster with the Delphi-like tool.

(It was actually 10x faster if you just count dev time, but we counted overhead meetings too - again, in an effort to be fair. It was still "one week" vs "one afternoon".)

meredydd··on Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate
"Every single sentence has a button for taking it out of context" is the best single-sentence summary of Twitter I have yet seen. Thank-you.
meredydd··on Building apps on top of Google Sheets
Thanks for mentioning us! Yes, this is the sort of thing our customers use Anvil for all the time (including several schools). (And since you ask, our pricing is per developer.)

My email is in my profile, or you can just check out the demo/tutorial videos at https://anvil.works/learn

meredydd··on PyQt5 Tutorial: Create a Python GUI in 2018
What was the last version of TCL you used? These days they have an extremely cunning system involving multiple representations: Being TCL, every value is of course canonically a string, but if you do (eg) integer operations the result will be stored only as an integer until its needed as anything else. And the body of a 'proc' will be compiled to bytecode on first use, so subsequent calls will go much faster. One could even add a specialising JIT to this if you wanted to.
meredydd··on PyQt5 Tutorial: Create a Python GUI in 2018
If you want VB/Delphi-style app builder for Python, can I interest you in Anvil (https://anvil.works)? It targets the web, but you write all the code (even client-side) in Python. We've had multiple customers describe it as a worthy heir to Delphi :)
meredydd··on What Could You Build with $10k?
As several people here have observed, "we built this for $10,000" actually means "We did something for which the main input was time and effort, and incurred $10k of incidental costs". The physical-goods stories are cute, but any software company is clearly in this category.

I therefore think it's more interesting to break it down by how you get that time. I see a few categories:

1. Have rich parents. Yes, yes, this is true of some people (but probably fewer than you think), and isn't very interesting except for starting political arguments.

2. Have a supportive partner on whose earnings you can live. This is much more achievable for many people, and under-emphasised (it's common for, eg, postgraduate education!)

3. Have an existing consulting work that gives you steady work 1-2 days per week. People say "startups die by consulting", and they're right, but what kills you is finding new work (it becomes the "top idea in your brain", which is lethal). If you have an established client who's happy to spend a year paying for 1-2 days a week, you're perfectly positioned. (This is how we started https://anvil.works, and I can't speak highly enough of it)

4. "Productised consulting" - consult full time until you come up with a product that all your clients will buy immediately, then switch to selling that product. This sounds great in theory, but I've seen a few people try and fail to make that leap (possibly because it's really hard to stop "find new consulting work" from being top idea on your mind, especially if you have employees/partners to feed).

5. Have a business with good cash-flow characteristics that can be launched fast enough to become self-sustaining within its first month. This is what this article seems to focus on, but apart from "productised consulting" (where you start out selling something that's not your product), I'm very skeptical that it really works for product businesses. If you try this, I'd recommend having a fallback to one of options 1-4!

meredydd··on Salmon, a Python Mail Server
If you're looking for something like this, but without setting up postfix/sendmail yourself, Anvil has a pretty straightforward API (and it's already hosted on a domain):

https://anvil.works/blog/email-driven-apps

(There's a video example at that link, where I build and deploy a Mailinator-like service from scratch in a couple of minutes.)

meredydd··on Show HN: Windows 95 in an Electron App
Yep :) When you load the uplink library, it makes an HTTPS connection to Anvil from your code, so it can be anywhere as long as it can make outbound requests.
meredydd··on Show HN: Windows 95 in an Electron App
> give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference [...] that clearly just wasn't built for this

Can I interest you in a VB6-y design/code/deploy tool with no CSS or JS? It's all in Python, even in-browser: https://anvil.works

meredydd··on Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
Transmitting radio waves with a spread-spectrum CPU clock, you say?

Here's a project to turn the Raspberry Pi into an FM radio transmitter using this exact trick:

http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspb...

meredydd··on Web Assembly and Go: A look to the future
Obligatory plug: we've built one!

https://anvil.works - it's explicitly modeled on VB6/Delphi. All Python (front and back end, with a simple RPC interface from client to server), and learnable in a lot less than 6 weeks. Check it out!

meredydd··on Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
> People think writing DTOs is challenging

I don't think this is true. Writing these objects isn't difficult, it's tedious and repetitive. That's why people keep trying to automate it!

The problem is that you can't quite automate it smoothly, because SQL doesn't work like objects. You avoid this interface issue by taking the hit for the tedious-and-repetitive stuff directly (and I agree that's often the right choice) - but that doesn't dissolve the problem.

meredydd··on Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
Thanks! And funny you should mention that. We're challenging every layer of that heirarchy simultaneously, by building a development environment for the web and making it as integrated as Delphi or VB were on the desktop:

https://anvil.works

meredydd··on Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself.

Think of a typical web app. Your data exists:

1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL

2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes

3. As JSON, accessed via many HTTP endpoints with a limited set of verbs (GET/PUT/POST/DELETE)

4. As Javascript objects, accessed via (a different set of) method calls and attributes

5. As HTML tags, accessed via the DOM API

6. As pixels, styled by CSS.

--

Each time you translate from one layer to the next, there's a nasty impedance mismatch. This, in turn, attracts "magic": ORMs (DB<->Object); Angular Resources (REST<->JS Object); templating engines (JS Object<->DOM); etc. Each of these translation layers shares two characteristics:

(A) It is "magic": It abuses the semantics of one layer (eg DB model objects) in an attempt to interface with another (eg SQL).

(B) It's a terribly leaky abstraction.

This means that (a) every translation layer is prone to unintuitive failures, and (b) every advanced user of it needs to know enough to build one themselves. So when the impedance mismatch bites you on the ass, some fraction of users are going to flip the table, swear they could do better, and write their own. Which, of course, can't solve the underlying mismatch, and therefore won't be satisfactory...and so the cycle continues.

Of these nasty transitions, 4/5 are associated with the front end, so the front end gets the rap.

(I gave a lightning talk at PyCon two weeks ago, about exactly this - stacking this up against the "Zen of Python" and talking about some of the ways we avoid this in Anvil: https://anvil.works/blog/pycon18-making-the-web-more-pythoni...)

meredydd··on Boeing's folding wingtips get the FAA green light
Granted that current Soyuz is the most reliable human-carrying spacecraft today (not that there's much competition). And granted that the Shuttle was deeply weird and a bad idea.

But Wikipedia tells me that the next Soyuz to go up will be #142, counting from Gagarin. In the hypothetical world where (say) the Mir crisis had been fatal, Soyuz would have a lifetime success rate almost exactly the same as the Shuttle's.

Even if the new ones are much better, we don't have the statistical power to say. Gimme the kitbuilt Piper any day.

meredydd··on Boeing's folding wingtips get the FAA green light
The Space Shuttle suffered 2 total losses in 135 missions. Apollo had 1 total loss from a dozen or so flights (plus several heart-stopping near misses). If privately flown Cessna 172s had that kind of fatality rate, I (and many other posters on this board) would long since be a smoking hole in the ground.

Space flight is spectacularly dangerous, and US launch vehicles have a particularly gnarly safety record. Some paranoia is probably warranted.

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