Chris Daviduik

I found this useful the other day and thought it worthy of “blog post” status. Hopefully someone else will find this equally useful.

If you are developing on Google App Engine then you have probably begun using their new NDB API (does anyone know what that is an acronym for?). One of the (many) cool new features includes Structure Properties. Essentially these let you group together a collection of model properties for easy reuse, such as the Address property Google uses as an example. When you fuse this together with the repeated attribute you have a practically unstoppable data storage machine. Except you just have to figure out a way to collect the data.

If you are a sensible person you are probably using Webapp2 or Django on App Engine (although I’m sure each party would debate the sensibility of the other). I’m going to assume you are using Webapp2 because otherwise what I am about to say will probably not make any sense or be at all useful. Although Webapp2 doesn’t come built with a form framework (at least that I am aware of) we have WTForms! Now, onto the interesting part…

Continuing with App Engine’s Address example lets create the associated WTForm:

class AddressForm(Form):
    type = fields.TextField()
    street = fields.TextField()
    city = fields.TextField()

Then its as easy as the following to incorporate it into your Contact form:

class ContactForm(Form):
    name = fields.TextField()
    addresses = fields.FieldList(fields.FormField(AddressForm), 'Address', min_entries=3)

Boom! Piece of cake. Then in your POST handler you can just grab the data from your AddressForm and drive it into your Contact entity:

form = ContactForm(self.request.POST)
addresses = []
for entry in form.addresses.entries:
    address = Address(type=entry.type.data, street=entry.street.data, city=entry.city.data)
    addresses.append(addresses)
contact_entity = Contact(name=form.name.data, addresses=addresses)

Woohoo! We did it! The only problem now is how do I get the data out of my entity and back into the form if I want to edit it? No problem! Problem solved:

addresses = []
for address in contact_entity.addresses:
    addresses.append({
        'type' : address.type,
        'street' : address.street,
        'city' : address.city
    })
form = ContactForm(addresses=addresses)

Mission accomplished!!! I think that should answer all your questions however if you have any left just let me know.

I had some ideas this morning, somewhere between doing my exercises and having a shower, that I think everyone can agree are brilliant.

The Problem

My recommendations are intended for agile work environments although it is possible they may be applicable to other crappier work environments. If you are not familiar with scrum/agile it essentially involves working in short sprints, perhaps a week or two long, where the planning for that week’s work is done at the beginning of the sprint and then a release at the end. Wikipedia has more information, not relevant to my discussion, that you can acquaint yourself with if you like.

In the case of a two week sprint you might spend a few hours on the first day planning the work which will be done over course of the next two weeks. During this time it is a natural occurrence to have differing viewpoints regarding how some of the work should be accomplished (or even the exact definition of the problem being solved). Typically these disagreements are solved using some boring democratic process which involves agreement by the majority of people involved (maybe around 6 or so).

The Solution

I propose a superior alternative where disagreements are solved using physically demanding one-on-one competitions. Each group of people with an opposing viewpoint can nominate someone to represent them to perform said physical task(s). These exercises could involve arm wrestling, pushups or some other quantitative activity where an obvious victor can emerge. This would help encourage people to maintain peek physical form in order to win over their competitors.

Let’s Make This Interesting

Now at this point you are probably thinking “won’t this just encourage companies to retain employees who are  physically advantageous but might not be able to perform their other required tasks satisfactorily?” That is a great question! And I’m glad you asked.

In order to avoid this obvious conundrum I have a fantastic solution. The team with the highest velocity, as judged by a third party chicken, gets the option to make a trade with one of the other teams. So if some useless team who has been doing nothing but browsing reddit all week (I do love reddit though) has an Arnold Schwarzenegger to fend off dissenters then LOOK OUT because those rockstar programmers who have been hiding in their caves all week are coming to get him!

Fantasy Work

The best part about the above solution is you could easily create a meta game around it by calculating odds that different teams will succeed and/or employees will be traded. A Fantasy Work League™ if you will. Everyone can pick their favourite employees at the beginning of a project (or fiscal quarter maybe) and see who comes out ahead at the end.

Not only will this make work more interesting, it will boost moral by creating excitement around the office. “Joe Programmer got traded? NO! He was on my all star draft!”

Summary

By implementing a program where employee’s choices are based on peek physical condition a culture promoting healthy lifestyles will obviously emerge. Rewarding teams with the greatest output will also motivate teams to work hard and prevent some bad apple from gaming the system. Finally by creating a Fantasy Work League™ incorporating this system an immediate boost of employee moral will be seen since they will be excited about the environment they are working in.

I challenge anyone to find anything that could possibly go wrong with this.

What do you turn to when you need healing?

I’ve tried meditation, but for me it’s not much different than watching soap operas in the middle of the night. Who’s to say that that isn’t the void, and that the mind can’t switch off through TV like it can through meditation?