Recently I received some feedback that my writing and documentation needs improvement. For this, I have decided to try to work on a minor programming project. I will try to do the documentation in this blog. The rest of this blog will be a general design doc.

 

Lisp Blog Storage Application

Jonathan Godbout

May 4, 2018

Background:

Currently, I use the WordPress website to both house and display my blog articles. This gives me a reliance on a programming stack, and a third party website that I know absolutely nothing about. It gives quick what you see is what you give access to creating, updating, and releasing articles. I have used it for a few years to decent affect, but I believe its now time to write my own.

Goals:

My goal is two fold:

• First, is to create a back end system to house my blogs.
• It will allow me to write weekly update about my progress.

Overview:

The majority of the work will be a CRUD based API to access blogs. This will include serving and saving the state of the blog documents themselves as well as securing the server so users blogs can’t be accessed by anyone but the users themselves. We place as a addendum that this will only be for personal use.

We expect each user to have there own blogs, so there will be no effort to allow for dual authors. This is expected to be run on a resource limited dedicated hardware, say a raspberry pi, so we will expected a very limited number of users and not be overly concerned with user on-boarding.

Technology:

The CRUD based API will be made with SBCL. We will use the Hunchentoot web server as our HTTP server and expect all CRUD calls to be made over it. We will use json for communication.

Our back-end database will be PostgresSQL (most likely version 9.6). This is a heavier piece of software then is needed, but the programmer writing this wants to use it.

The Lisp to SQL interface has yet to be chosen.

The BUILD system will use Bazel (using Bazelisp).

We will use GIT as a code repository and version control system.

System Design:

API:

We will have to API endpoints. For user security, we will have an account endpoint that will handle accounts. We will also have a blog endpoint for access to blogs. Here’s our current design:

Account:

• POST account/add-user/  :{user_name: ???, password:???, token:} Returns: 200 success or error
• POST account/get_token/  :{user_name: ???, password:???}: Returns: auth token or error
• POST account/get_token/  :{user_name: ???, password:???}: Returns: auth token or error
• GET users/  : Returns a list of users

Blog:

• POST blog/add_blog/ :{user_name: ???, auth_token: ???, title: ???, body: ???} returns 200 or fail
• POST blog/update_blog/: {user_name: ???, auth_token: ???, title: ???, body: ???} returns 200 or fail
• GET blog/ Returns latest blog {title: ???, body: ???}
• GET blog/user/{user_name} Returns latest blog by user {title: ???, body: ???}
• POST blog/ Returns latest blog {number: ???} Returns latest n blogs
• POST blog/user/user_name} Returns latest blog {number: ???} Returns latest n blogs by user

Database:

We will have two tables, one table for the users, and one for the blogs.

Users:

• First_Name: varchar
• Last_Name: varchar
• Username: varchar {primary key}

Blogs:

• Body varchar
• Last_Modified date
• Created date
• Created_By varchar
• Title varchar

Limitations:

This is currently a bare-bones list of what is needed for a blogging platform. We don’t have a front-end created, and there no pictures. Nowhere in this document have we mentioned a front-end. This is of course but the first stage in the creation of such a platform.

Testing:

We will write regression tests in Lisp as well as the code.

—————————————————END OF DESIGN DOC

So, that’s the first draft of a design doc. It’s the majority of what many programmers do. It lays out the framework for what I wish to build, and gives you a good platform to step off of. We even have the database schema. Yes, currently its minimal, but all things in time. I hope you learned something, or at least entertained. I leave you with a picture of my wife and I at a coffee shop.

 

In undergrad, and grad school, I was a mathematics student, though half of my courses where comp sci. Really, the only reason I didn’t dual major is the long list of general classes (non comp sci) that I would have to take. When I got more first programming job, and now into my second one, I feel there are several things I wish I would have learned. That being said, they’re often skipped over.

1. Actually using a text editor, well. Not your silly text editors (I’m looking at you nano) but the more advanced text editors: Emacs and Vim. Your nice large GUI based editors (Visual Studios, Intellij,…) have many bells-and-whistles. They have integration with version control system’s like GIT and SVN, all using a some nice GUI, but harness you in to there workflows. On emacs, I can make functions that do whatever I want, I can grep with the smallest number of keystrokes, I can do all I wan’t with my fingers on the keyboard.

But Visual Studios has an integrated debugger, and code analyzer, and all of this fancy stuff (often at the low price of 10k dollars). Emacs has all of this, if you can find the package 🙂

2. Actually using a (modern) version control system. In undergrad I never really used a version control system. We sent code to the professor by zipping (taring) the directory. Then I got to my first job and used TFS, easy to use with a GUI, but as I have stated before, I believe in the Emacs. Now that I’m at Google and do everything in the console I’ve learned to use Piper, but it really doesn’t meet my needs. More advanced version control systems take some time to get use to.

3. BASH and ZSH (or Powershell): If you write code you should have a good knowledge of command line tools, and command line languages. You should be able to quickly script things away. This is something you’ll learn you need to learn.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China, and my wife has just received her green card. This is all exciting news, but it has lead me to try to better understand immigration and my thoughts on nationality. Before we delve deeper, lets discuss my personal view on my nationality.

I, as well as my family for several generations back are American, born and raised in New England. I believe I’m American, and I don’t prescribe to Americans ancestrally from Europe are immigrants claim, if your family has been here for this long, your a native (though this is a rant for another time maybe). I find slight interest in my French ancestry, as well as a love of the way french people speak, I don’t think I’m french in any real way.

My wife is Chinese, her parents, grandparents, and probably all ancestors going back for over a thousand years are Chinese. This is part of who she is, in a way that me being french, or even American for that matter, will ever be. It is an identity that I think many  Americans will never have.

Now that we have the personal out of the way, lets discuss the national. The U.S. for the past 200 years has been a melting pot. Sure, at times we have had our nationalist fervor, but by and large we are a nation of many ethnicities and cultures, all blending together. From Europe to Africa to Asia, every country, religion, and ideology can be found. In contrast in China it is (mainly) only Chinese, and by government regulation this is generally how it will stay.

We can now juxtapose this with the nationalist bent going on over the world. America, Germany, Britain (and on) are all becoming more insular. They are getting tired of immigration and migration, and like America in the 1840’s more anti-immigrant.

I write this as a try to understand, in this global world, what does it mean to really be American, or Chinese? What does nationality mean? Will our children be American or Chinese (really both)?

Or maybe, I just need some more coffee this morning.

 

I don’t have much to say, I’m playing a sad Game of Logs:

I can show you the logs
Shining shimmering data
Tell me admin, now when did
You last let your analytics fly?

I can open your mind,
Take you report by report,
Over, sideways, and under,
On a logical flume ride

A whole new release
A new fantastic point of view
Information to tell us how,
and where to go
or say we’re only dreaming

It’s time, it’s time for another blog post. Usually this means turning on my desktop, because its annoying to write such a thing with my Chromebooks keyboard, it’s okay, just not as nice. This time, I’m using a Benson Approved USB C dongle to connect me keyboard to my Chromebook, what an odd feeling this is! But the clickiness is happy.

So, what to talk about today. Something many of you know, and most of you probably don’t, is last week was a national holiday in China, The Mid-Autumn Festival. Many people in China, though far less the for Spring Festival, will travel home and celebrate. This is actually a full week off in China, so many more will go on vacation. Much mooncake is had by all.

As this is a national holiday, and my wife is in China, she went to her hometown. She stayed with her father and helped her sister-in-law take care of her  brothers children. These are some of the cutest and smartest children you will ever meet.

Now, I’m having trouble putting what I want to say onto paper. I hope it makes somes sense.

I’ve spent time with these kids, I’m there uncle, I’ve spun them around, made silly faces at them, and they’ve made silly faces right back. I was playing with a stuffed toy Husky, shaking it’s paw, and the oldest one grabs my wife’s hand it shakes her hand right back. These are amazing kids.

Here’s the problem, although the education system in China (whether you approve or disapprove of it) has done fairly well for the kids in Beijing and Shanghai, tests wise they outperform children in the U.S. Another day we can have a spirited debate on the actually usefulness in these tests in determining a kids understanding of a subject, the politics of these tests, and the U.S. education system, this is not that day.

The education system, and the infrastructure for learning, is just not built up in these small villages. First is the lack of schools and proper education. Again, I understand that we have disparities in schools in the U.S., in many cases equally as bad as in China, but I’m not talking about that at the moment. My wife got to be a doctoral student at the University of New Hampshire. She did this by extremely hard work, and extremely lucky circumstances.

Her elementary school teachers weren’t college educated, but she worked hard, learned well and scored well on a test. This got her into the best school in her city. After hard work, she scored well on another test and got into a good college. Her PhD advisor visited that school, and she asked to study with him, and she was really smart so he said yes. She was very hard working, very lucky, and her parents knew the value of her getting an education. They paid for her tuition (no, public school wasn’t free), her mother was illiterate, but she knew that through education she could improve her life.

She was lucky, and she was smart. These days many teachers in her village still lack a college education. They aren’t trained to teach like in the west. They do the best they can, and are incredibly nice, they believe in education, but there are few pathways, and fewer people who wish to return home after earning a college degree.

Next libraries, something we in the U.S. take for granted and deem to shut down. Libraries are many things to many people, a place to use and learn about computers, gain new skills, read stories, and places where the community meets. Anybody, no matter your income, can come in and read a book (or if they choose a blog). When I was young I would get interested in different subject, one time greek fables, so my mom went to the library and borrowed books on greek mythology.

In my wifes village, and many other villages, these don’t exist. My wifes sister has a hard time finding books to give read to her kids.

So here are my thoughts:

1. Education has to be expanded into these villages, much like in the U.S. education has to be expanded into our dusty small towns.
2. Google Chromebooks have become a staple for education in the United States and many other western cultures. We should find a way to bridge the gap, and create a chrome-library. Unfortunately Googles library was all but shut down, but people like Michael Karpeles (https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles) are leading the way at the Open Library.
3. We must find a way to spread our focus to the world. How do we improve education in Ferrisburg Vt USA, and ZHOU WANG ZHUANG CUN China.

I don’t have any of the answers right now. My wife and I will have kids in the US, who will grow up with all of the advantages that having a Doctor of Math mother and a Google Programmer father gives someone. I wish to give my nieces and nephews the same possibilities.