Moments of recognition

What does a wave on the street have to do with Python?

Nothing.

They’re unrelated.

A wave on the street

It only lasted a few seconds.

I glanced to my right, saw a familiar face in a diner, waved as they waved back, and then kept on my way.

No words exchanged, and I don’t even remember their name.

Yet I still found myself on cloud 9 for the next 9 blocks.

I have something to ask them about next time I see them ("how was that BLT?") and one previously unremarkable building now has a slightly richer pin on my mental map.

Life has a little more texture.

I moved to NYC nearly a decade ago expecting a Jane Jacobs urbanist paradise. Of course I’d leave my keys with the butcher. Do you even live in a city if you don’t? When I remembered that my friends and I knew our butcher in the suburbs from our weekly work lunch trips, I quickly dismissed it as a quirk.

After a couple of years in the city, I only knew faces from in and around work. I felt vaguely connected at professional events and knew nothing else. I hadn’t taken the time, and frankly didn’t know how, to meet people in my neighborhood. I spoke to zero butchers.

Compare that to last week, where I waved through a diner window, ran into a friend and his wife sitting next to the river, and saw two other connections in two different parks. A friend boarded the bus I was already riding.

These small moments are accumulating.

Python

On something completely different, I found myself with a fair bit of duplicated JS wrapper code this week. Three Memphis-powered UI tools all imported the same WebAssembly build and exposed a public interface.

Given the whole project is about creating clean layers, this felt like a good candidate for another clean layer.

That’s how my Python interpreter in Rust came to have a JavaScript library: memphis-js. Language soup.

It’s on version 0.1.0 which means you should trust it with basically nothing and the interface is guaranteed to change tomorrow. Yay open source.

To take us home, I’m going to attempt to write in sales voice for one paragraph.

This groundbreaking JavaScript package, backed by the full faith and credit of GitHub Actions, represents a leap forward in running Python code in the browser. With platform-agnostic, multi-stage lexing, parsing, and evaluation, memphis-js is the right tool for the right job. It outperforms whatever else you were considering on all benchmarks that exist and some that don’t. Given its beta status, issues are 100% user error.

How did I do?

Talk to you next week.