Reports / September 2021

HTTPX

We now have a 1.0 pre-release for HTTPX.

The 1.0.0.beta0 release adds a huge new feature, in the form of a command-line client…

The release also includes some design changes. The most notable of these is that redirect responses are no longer automatically followed, unless specifically requested.

This design decision prioritises a more explicit approach to redirects, in order to avoid code that unintentionally issues multiple requests as a result of misconfigured URLs.

For example, previously a client configured to send requests to http://api.github.com/ would end up sending every API request twice, as each request would be redirected to https://api.github.com/.

If you do want auto-redirect behaviour, you can enable this either by configuring the client instance with Client(follow_redirects=True), or on a per-request basis, with .get(..., follow_redirects=True).

This change is a classic trade-off between convenience and precision, with no “right” answer. See discussion #1785 for more context.

The other major design change is an update to the Transport API, which is the low-level interface against which requests are sent. Previously this interface used only primitive datastructures, like so…

(status_code, headers, stream, extensions) = transport.handle_request(method, url, headers, stream, extensions)
try
    ...
finally:
    stream.close()

Now the interface is much simpler…

response = transport.handle_request(request)
try
    ...
finally:
    response.close()

Django REST framework

I’ve been making a little time for triage on REST framework. Heavy going, given the age of the project and the volume of (often outdated) issues, but making a bit of progress on getting the pull request and issue numbers down.

Finances

Catching up on monthly finances, trimming down on a couple of expenses.

A rough breakdown of how Encode’s monthly finances currently look…

Income: £5,100 (~65% Stripe subscriptions, ~30% GitHub sponsors, ~5% direct billing.)
Salary: £3,700
Expenses: £650 (Fixed desk in a co-working space, accountants, software subscriptions.)

Taxes are missing from that monthly breakdown because they’re not monthly. I’ll need to take a review at the end of the company’s financial year in order to determining if we’re currently breaking even or not. (Hint: It looks a bit tight, but probably about okay at the moment.)