Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Monarchy Is Rarely Done Well, But Often Brilliantly Executed

2023-Nov-26

There is an actual update for the web app currently being served at fredlambuth.com. A very minor one, and that brings up more questions than answers. I’ve doubled up the decorators of a few ‘views’ that I often visit by manually typing in the URL. The extra decorator is the answer I came up with for catching the times I sometimes add a trailing ‘/’ to the URL. Prior to this minor update you would get a 404 error if the last character was a ‘/’.

The idea of doubling the amount of @bp.route() decorators is the part of this solution that raises questions. Not baffling ones. Questions that are stepping stones to what I hope to be are fruitful discoveries into the lower layers underneath the abstractions afforded to me as a Python programmer. Decorators have been a concept I have been timidly flirting with for longer than I would like. I had hoped to be much more intimate with the functional programming structures of Python by now.

Once or twice I found a very good use-case for them in my data engineering day jobs. Changing a decorator to one particular URL route in my Flask app has been a somewhat thoughtless but recurring task. Despite these brushes with the convention of tacking on a function to a function, I get a little hesitant whenever I see a decorator tossed into a function in some new code, let alone an object method that is already confusing me.

Over on the up-and-coming version 3.0 of fredlambuth.com efforts on a different repo, we’ve now have an archive view of the daily charts. They’re now split up between daily ‘tracks’ and ‘artists’ rather than putting both in the same view’s context. Their HTML templating however is shared. Progress for these refactoring efforts are slow for good reasons. There is excellent streamlining of processes within each section being refactored. Only the necessary functionality is kept, and each unit of functionality is being distributed into minute components. This careful approach has made refactoring more enjoyable than the app development’s original clumsy pioneering work with Flask.

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Now that the halftime show is over, we can get on to the contender for the second round of the blog component. Today we have the audiobook Unruly by David Mitchell. I had acquired this book from the Libby app attached to my local library blind to the author’s notoriety; picking it strictly by the title’s description and elevenish hour length. The moment the author spoke I had realized the Mark Corrigan character of the British TV series ‘Peep Show’ wrote the damn book! What a super happy surprise!

I pumped up the wording and punctuation back there to display my biases. I think this guy is superbly clever, hilarious, and chock full of accurate historical jokes. I do think I came away from this book getting a keener understanding of the book’s themes about monarchy representing England, Great Britain, and/or the UK’s identity in regards to their monarchy. If you have little to know knowledge about any British monarchs, let alone any of them prior to Elizabeth the First, I would not recommend this book. Even if you were a megafan of David Mitchell’s comedy. This is a king by king series of chronological history peppered with the snark you would expect from a co-creator of Peep Show.

My quick liking of the writing for David Mitchell’s character on Peep Show stems from my shared interests in WW2 history, British history, and history in general. If those two things are up your alley, this book will tickle you wildly. If you share complaints about the idea of political authority stemming from anywhere but broad shared political consent, this book will only delight you more with its humor.