Today I've stumbled upon two pieces of software that I've been hoping to see for some time.

repoze.component

Sort of like zope.component, but simplified to the bare minimum. No formal interfaces (strings are good enough), no global component registry, and no magic in sight. You still need to wrap your head around the whole idea of component lookup – some real-world examples would help – but that's inherent in the problem.

repoze.configuration

Eerily similar to a wishful-thinking mockup that I made two weeks ago, asking a question on the WSGI mailing list. At a basic level, it's a glorified declarative-syntax function-calling mechanism that configures the application environment. Which is great, because you can follow the logic of how each piece of the application is assembled.

Most importantly, repoze.component and repoze.configuration are simple (unlike Zope), so they would be a great fit for Django, Pylons and other Python infrastructure to adopt as a lingua franca configuration system. But perhaps that really is wishful thinking.

So there's this guy, Marco Arment, who created instapaper.com. Simple concept: bookmark pages that look interesting, read them later or download to Kindle/iPhone/iPad, all for free. Or buy the "pro" version of the iPhone application if you want to support the site, and get a few bonus features in the app. He's not out to make money; just scratched an itch, but let anyone use the new service, wrapped in a nice user interface.

I'm guessing that by far the biggest cost was the time he invested into this project. There must be some hosting bills, but I'd be surprised if they are significant. In return, he built himself a great reading tool, and earned the gratitude of countless other people.

I'd love to make something like that sometime.

So I haven't blogged anything in four months. How does one pick up the narrative after such a long time?

I should pobably first explain the silence. I started blogging to shout to the world, "hey, look at me, I can program, and say smart things!". In a way it worked, I'm pretty sure the blog helped me in a couple of job interviews that got me to interesting places. But in another way it didn't work: I hoped the blog would be popular, and when that failed to happen, I slowly gave up. Eventually I told myself that there's no point in writing if nobody is listening.

In the mean time I've been working at Eau de Web, having a great time, learning that there's always more to learn, and becoming highly opinionated on software in general and Python and the Web in particular. I'm still reading a lot about technology, and I'm still itching to write myself, so maybe it's time to drag grep.ro out of its sleep, dust off the old publishing scripts, and do some writing.

So, hello again Internets, the truth is I never left you :)