Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
I mentioned a couple of days ago that, as favors to friends, I am temporarily relaxing my self-imposed restriction on speaking at conferences I have to fly to. The first was EEConf 2019; the second is Bulgaria PHP.
As the opening talk of day 2, I'll be giving a brand-new presentation on "Rethinking What You Think You Know." It's nominally about the road to Action Domain Responder, but I expect to include more than just that. See you there!
"Maybe we should treat people like people:"
[I]if we are required to believe every woman who makes an accusation, then every allegation, simply by the act of making it, becomes âcredible.â This leaves little room for raising questions about honesty and due process, and plenty of space for ideological distortion.
And since ideology abhors nuance, simple narratives come to dominate the discussion when an allegation is made (in Kavanaughâs case: beer-drinking private school boy = bad; beer-drinking private school girl = good). And anything that contradicts the narrative is explained away or ignored (such as, being drunk is damning evidence if youâre the accused man, but exculpatory if youâre the woman who made the allegation).
Via https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/dont-believe-all-women-because-some-are-terrible/.
I have been lax in pointing out that I will be speaking at EEConf 2019 in October. Here's a preview of the topic, and some other background:
I have for some years now sworn off speaking at conferences that I have to fly to. I hate air travel, not only because of the experience itself but because I often get sick, and once brought illness home to my family. But in this case (and in one other to be mentioned later!) I am making an allowance as a favor for a friend.
See you at EEConf!
This is a couple of months old, but it echoes the totalitarian SJW attitudes in software as well:
Ravelry, a popular website for knitters and crocheters, took a political stand when it announced that it was banning content that supports President Trump, in what it said was a resolution against white supremacy.
âWe cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy,â the site said in a statement explaining the decision. âSupport of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.â
The policy applies to content on the site, including knitting patterns and forum posts, but not to people, according to Ravelry, which said it still welcomed Republicans and those with conservative political views. âYou can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just canât talk about it here,â the statement said, adding that âhate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.â
To the SJW, the totality of everything is political. There is no non-political space. All your hobbies and interests must be held hostage to social justice.
Wendy Lou Jones, aged around 17, passed away this morning. She was good when she was not being naughty. Clever, resilient, thiefy little dog. :-)
In an effort to extract Google's tentacles from my life, and to give them as
little feedstock as possible, I am no longer using my Gmail account as a primary
contact address. Contact me at my pmjones.io address instead. Likewise, my
paul-m-jones.com address is no longer being hosted by Google.
It was surprisingly time-consuming to find a reasonable alternative host that would support some other functionality (more on that later). After some preliminary attempts, I settled on Namecheap. Believe it or not, I am using a shared hosting plan, which supports another effort I am trying out (more on that in another post).
In a curious turn of events, Twitter has apparently suspended my account, even though I deleted it last October. How ... impotent of them.
The new immutablephp/immutable package provides truly immutable value objects and an immutable value bag, along with base Immutable and ValueObject classes for your own objects. It helps to prevent against the oversights described by my earlier article Avoiding Quasi-Immutable Objects in PHP. (Of course, it cannot prevent you from deliberately adding your own mutable behaviors, or from using reflection to mutate an object from the outside. If you do those things, you get what you deserve.)
Its base Immutable class protects against common oversights in PHP regarding immutables:
It defines final public function __set() and final public function __unset() to prevent adding and mutating undefined properties.
It defines final public function offsetSet() and final public function offsetUnset() to prevent adding and mutating values via ArrayAccess.
It prevents multiple calls to __construct() to re-initialize the object properties.
Further, the base ValueObject class with() method checks the types of all incoming values to make sure they are themselves immutable. It does so via static methods on the Type class.
The Type class recognizes scalars and nulls as immutable. All other non-object values (such are resources and arrays) are rejected as mutable.
When it comes to objects, the Type class recognizes anything descended from Immutable as immutable, as well as DateTimeImmutable. To allow Type to recognize other immutable classes, call Type::register() with a variadic list of fully-qualified class names that you want to treat as immutable.
After installing immutablephp/immutable via Composer, you can use it to create your own immutable Value Objects, or consume one of the provided Value Objects:
There is also an immutable value Bag for an arbitrary collection of immutable values; it can be useful for immutable representations of JSON data.
If you need truly immutable objects for your PHP project, give immutablephp/immutable a try!
Read the Reddit commentary on this post here.
Herberto Graça, as part of his Software Architecture Chronicles, saw fit to review the Action-Domain-Responder pattern that I have written so much about. It’s a good writeup, and you should read the whole thing, but it is off in a couple of places. I sent Herberto a followup email with some minor corrections and clarifications; I repeat it below (with light editing) for posterity.
The ADR pattern was created by Paul M. Jones
I prefer to say, not that I “created” the pattern, but that I “recognized and named” it in 2014. Slim, for example, already had single-action controllers at that time, and the various Domain Logic patterns previously existed as well. If I “created” anything, it was the idea of the Responder; that is, of treating the Response-building work as a completely separate concern. But even that is just an application of Separated Presentation.
to adjust MVC to the context of web REST APIs.
APIs were one aspect, but the origin was more in the typical HTML page-based interface. For example, the word “Action” in Action Domain Responder was inspired both by “action” methods in Controllers, and by the “action” attribute on <form> tags in HTML interfaces.
because the idea is to adapt the MVC pattern to the context of an HTTP REST API, the Action (Controller) names are mapped to the HTTP request methods so we will have Actions with names as Get, Post, Put, Delete
Well, you can do that, but it’s not strictly necessary. I think it would be more accurate to say that it’s typical for an Action to be mapped to a route, and for the routes themselves to be mapped to GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc.
As an organization pattern, all Actions on a resource should be grouped under a folder named after the resource.
That is one reasonable approach, but it’s not dictated by ADR. Alternatively, instead of grouping Actions by resource, you might organize them by Use Case, or by the intended Interactions with the underlying application.
This pattern was thought of specifically for REST APIs, so in this form it is not refined enough to be used in web applications with an HTML interface (ie. what would be the name of the action to show a form, prior to creating a resource?) … I think the pattern can easily be extended so that it is fully usable with an HTML interface: We can emulate some extra HTTP methods specifically to handle the HTML requests that a REST API does not have.
Given my notes above, I think it’s fair to say that new HTTP methods are not really needed. What is needed, as Herberto already points out, is a way to “show a form prior to creating a resource” (among other things).
Because the Actions do not necessarily map one-to-one with HTTP methods, it’s easy enough to specify that GET /{$resource}/new (or something similar) routes to an Action that gets default values for that resource from the Domain, then hands off to a Responder that builds the form HTML. You can see an example of that here:
BlogAddAction presents the form with default values
BlogCreateAction actually creates the resource, or redisplays the form on error.
You might route the first as GET /blog/new and the second as POST /blog. (That idea appears to originate from Ruby on Rails and has been imitated elsewhere.)
Aside from those notes, Herberto’s article is a fair summary and description of ADR. I’m glad he put it together.
You can read more about Action Domain Responder at http://pmjones.io/adr.
Originally published at https://24daysindecember.net/2018/12/11/open-source-and-squeegee-men/.
It is the Christmas season, and Christmas is a time for giving gifts: to family, to friends, and to colleagues. Some even give gifts to strangers they may never meet, as an expression of charity or of generosity, or in thankfulness for their own abundance.
Does the recipient of a gift owe the giver anything in return? Some might think the answer is “no” — it was a gift, after all. Others might think that the recipient now owes the giver a gift of their own, perhaps one of comparable value — but if the giver expects a gift in return, doesn’t that take away from the generous nature of the gift, making it more like a business transaction?
I would say that both responses are close to the truth. When someone receives a gift, they do well to return something to the giver … but the return is not primarily a material one. The recipient does the right thing to compensate the giver, not first with money or merchandise, but most importantly with gratitude and good will.
Granted a sense of appreciation, then, sometimes a further expression of that thankfulness is a gift in return. But note that it does not come from a sense of obligation or indebtedness “for services rendered.” We may exchange gifts, but we do not pay for having received them. To pay for something in that way is not to have received a gift; it is to have made a purchase.
I think open source software is a little like the giving and receiving of gifts.
To be clear, I don’t mean the production of open source software. The actual work of developing a program, with others, is not a series of gifts being exchanged. It is a cooperative/competitive activity with its own implicit order of criticism and acceptance.
But the open source software product itself, when presented, is a little like offering a gift to strangers. When you publish your work, you don’t know in advance who will find it useful, or even if anyone will find it useful at all. And yet, when someone does accept your offering, you get that good feeling of having been helpful.
In accepting an offer of free software, as with any gift, the recipient does best to regard the giver with gratitude and good will. That is to say, the user of open source software should have an internal feeling of appreciation for the gift they have been given.
If that appreciation is expressed in some outward and visible manner, so much the better. But that expression cannot be required by the giver of the open source gift. Really, it cannot even be an expectation on their part.
What would we think of someone who, on offering what appeared to be a gift, immediately demanded a gift (typically money) in return? And then harbored resentment and ill-will for not receiving one? I think it would be fair to call such a person disingenuous at best; a swindler or a con-man at worst. It’s like the squeegee-man scam: someone runs up to your car at a stoplight, sprays and wipes down your windshield to clean it, starts yelling at you to pay them back for having served you, and finally (if you drive away) curses at you.
A person who offers a gift, then demands a gift in return, is attempting a sort of emotional jiujitsu to turn your own good will against you. Having received a gift, you may feel the giver’s demand is somehow justified; is it not the normal expectation to exchange gifts? And yet the initial act was not that of giving a gift: it was more like priming a pump, so that you would feel guilty, and then pay in cash to soothe your own self-imposed guilt.
Of course, the proper emotional reaction to the squeegee man should be indignation, not guilt, followed by refusal to concede anything to a “gift-giver” who expects money as payment in return.
As such, if you present your open source offering as a gift, you can have no expectation of anything in return. You cannot expect that anyone will use it; that anyone else will write the documentation for it; that anyone will write up issues or pull requests; that anyone will give you money for it. You can hope for these things, but to expect them (especially money!) is to be like the squeegee scammer. You gave a gift of your own volition; you have no cause to be resentful if people don’t offer you money for it.
Then comes the question, “Don’t I deserve to get paid for my work?” Certainly you do. But you don’t “deserve” to get “paid” for your gifts. It may be true that one good turn deserves another, but if anything, it is to be in kind, not in cash. If someone opens a door for you, you don’t tip them; you open a door for them in return.
The open-source “in kind” equivalent is Github stars, fair reviews, issues and PRs, and other work — given as a gift! — on your offering. Or recognition, or being cited as an ispiration. Or it might be new software offered as a gift to new strangers, that you never know about. (That is part of what prompts my own open source work; having received these gifts, I find it fulfilling to offer gifts of my own.)
Is it appropriate to mention the kinds of gifts you might like in return? Of course! Everyone who has ever made a Christmas list knows how that works. Set up a Patreon account, point out your Amazon buy-through link, suggest a donation. But I caution against “advertising” it anywhere other than on the project page itself; going out and announcing in public that you accept gifts is a little too much like panhandling.
It’s normal to want to get paid for doing something you love doing anyway. It’s just not an appropriate expectation when you are giving strangers a gift. Now, it is true that getting money for open source software does happen from time to time, but it is unusual — more often, payment is tied to services around the software, not to the software itself. So if you prefer to get paid for your programming efforts, that’s fine: state the terms of exchange, then (and this is key) do not deliver the software unless those terms are met. Generally speaking, we call this “employment” or “sales” or “business,” not “gift-giving.”
Giving a gift in return may sometimes be good manners, but expecting a gift in return is bad manners. Likewise, it is bad manners to be a scold or a busybody, demanding that others pay money for gifts freely given. And if you feel that others are being “exploited” somehow for giving out gifts, the remedy is not to encourage them to begin demanding payment like the squeegee-man. Instead, consider suggesting that perhaps they should not be giving out gifts when they cannot afford to do so.
So don’t be the squeegee-man. If you want to get paid for your work, great! Ask for your money up front. If what you want is to give a gift, that’s great too — and if money unexpectedly flows your way, be grateful.
Postscript: these are some of the links that informed this essay.