Episode: 1876
Title: HPR1876: MicrobeLog, or: On Shaving Yaks and Doing Things
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1876/hpr1876.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:41:16

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This is HBR Episode 1876 entitled MicroBlog or Unshaving Axe and Doing Things.
It is hosted my first time post-clacket and in about 9 minutes long, the summary is why
I'm making an HBR Episode and why I'm making a vaporware social network engine.
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Timezone appropriate greetings, everyone.
I'm Klake and I'm here to talk about
my little project MicroBlog.
But first, I'm not a very long-time listener but I've been following HBR for a while and
I'm a first time caller so I thought first I'd go into a little bit why am I now recording
an episode of HPR.
I love free culture.
I love that there's stuff out there that you can listen to wherever you like, you can
watch it wherever you like.
If you want to, you can remix it and you can put out your own version and if we want
a world like that, we have to create that culture ourselves.
So I was listening to this great HPR episode about half a year ago in March, 1726 by
nightwise, his 15 excuses not to record a show for HPR and I thought that was really inspiring
and I was thinking, I'm going to do it, I'm going to go right ahead and just record
something, whatever.
I was thinking, maybe I'll do it when I'm running to the bus, but that didn't happen.
But now hey, a couple of months later, it's in the middle of the night, I should be sleeping
but I can spare an hour to do this, so now I'm doing it.
I'm not doing it for you, I'm doing it for me, I want to do things, I mean, I do things,
I go to work and I feel pretty useful there and when I come home, we have a great time
together, the whole family, but I wanted to create something.
I want to contribute back to the people who have created so many things for me.
The whole community that has been creating all these software that I'm using every day
and the stuff that I listen to, I think the secret to getting things done is to do things
and doing things is difficult, the best way of getting into doing things is to start
doing things.
So now I'm doing it, it's a muscle that needs to be trained and I'm starting to exercise
that muscle, so I'm starting with HPR.
So what is this micro blog thing?
Well, I just wanted to start some project, you know, again, contribute back to free software
and the whole culture that I've been enjoying all these many years and that was one thing
and also I just want to practice what Larry Wall called whip up the chewed and I wanted
to do it in Python.
I've been working in Ruby, I know Ruby really well, but I really like Python, but I haven't
been doing enough stuff in it.
So the best way to learn is to do it and then I figured, okay, I'll just start some project
and I'll do it in Python because I want to learn Python.
So what is micro blog at this point?
It's nothing.
It's just vaporware.
I put up a repository with the manifests, which is a list of things about what I would
like the project to be when it's called, unquote, finished.
And I did start something, there's some stubs there for a potential bus API, I started
looking at one bus protocol, which is WAMP, builds on web sockets and I've been looking
around that and I didn't get very far yet.
And that's sort of the whole character of this project because this is not really a project
with an end goal, this is an excuse to shave the axe.
I want to learn about Python, okay, so I'll write a project in Python.
I want to learn about async IO, okay, so I'll use the async IO part of Python.
I want to do stuff with the semantic web because I think that's really interesting and I've
been studying it for a long time, but I didn't do anything practical with it.
And the first time I saw pump IO, I figured, hey, this is a pretty obvious thing to map
onto a triple store backend and nobody seems to have been doing that.
So I'm going to do a project that does that and then I heard about microservices and
I thought, well, this sounds like an interesting concept, I'll throw that into the mix as well.
And also I've been following, that's almost like the original, original reason for starting
a project is that I really liked the work that Richard Fontana has been doing on copy
left next and I figured, hey, I'm going to use that in my next project.
What project?
I haven't done anything public, okay, well, I'll have to start a project then so I can use
this thing.
So those are the reasons for why a project and why all the technical details about the
implementation.
But why microbe log, why this software that works in this particular space?
So I haven't told you yet what it is, but it's a social network engine like GNU social
or pump IO and I wanted to do this particular, solve this particular problem because there
are things I care about.
I care about the federation of social networks.
I care about free software in particular, copy left and I care about clean, neat code
that is readable, describes it in its intention and is architected the right way.
And I figured there is a space to be filled here and that is bridging the federation because
the great sadness of the federation is the split that happened when pump IO was introduced
and identical switched over to pump IO and there was never a proper bridge between pump
IO and Ostatus.
So I figured, okay, I'll fill that space and I don't just want to do a bridge, I want
to do a real client that can act in both networks or real server that can act in both networks.
Well, they appear to appear so it's the same thing really.
So micro blog exists for the purpose of connecting the pump network and the Ostatus network.
Yes, there is software that does research already, there's Frendika and also from Mike
is Red Matrix which is now called Habzilla, but they're PHP and I'm going to out my prejudice
right now and I'm going to say I don't believe you can write readable and beautiful code
in PHP.
And also Frendika and Habzilla are not copy left, I want to contribute something to the
copy left sphere.
So that's the reason why I'm doing micro blog, I'm doing it in my spare time, I don't
have any spare time.
So the last time I touched the code was, oh, maybe it was back in March just after I heard
that episode, I'm not sure, I would have to check, but I haven't done anything for several
months, but now I've done this podcast episode and practicing that doing things muscle.
So who knows, maybe next weekend, maybe the weekend after that, I will do a small commit
fixing, spelling error in the code that still doesn't do anything.
We'll see.
I'm Klake and you can find me on Pompeo at microcast, microco with the C dot st slash C L A C
K E or you can find me on GNU social on quitter.se slash C L A C K E and you can find the
beginnings of micro blog on gitlab.com slash micro blog one word.
See you next time I get something done.
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