Things have not been going smoothly on The Grand Locus recently. The blog was my first serious Python project, and as a beginner I made several mistakes. In particular, I did not realize that I had a huge technical debt. In 2012, I forked a Python 2 project for Google App Engine. Twelve years later, Google removed support for Python 2 and one good morning the blog went down.

I apologize to the readers who may have found the blog in a sorry state recently. It is a bit of a struggle to rewrite the code for Python 3, but I am getting there. Actually, if you are reading this, then I already managed to fix the back end so that I can publish new posts! With a bit of luck, I will soon be able to share my thoughts on more interesting topics.

In the meantime, here are some things I learned while fixing my blog. They are not particularly insightful, but it is just another way to ease my frustration.

1. The future does not always happen

Fifteen...

Today I opened a Disqus forum on the blog. You can find the discussion threads at the end of every post. I also have added the forum to the previous posts, so that you can retroactively express your opinion.

It's about 6 months that I started writing, and I could have done this earlier (The Grand Locus is a fork of Nick Johnson's Bloggart, which includes support for Disqus), but I must confess that my tolerance for trolls is very low (there, that's one on the left). I hate having to search information in the middle of personal insults on the forums.

But then I started to be active on Cross Validated which is Stack Overflow's statistics spin-off. And it was a double surprise. I realized that Internet communities are not intrinsically dysfunctional, and I also realized that people of an extreme competence, who deserve academic respect, are part of these communities. And the awesome news is that some of them read this blog!

Anyway, the forum is now open and here are a couple of...