Indonesian recipes

In late February and early March I attended the GNOME Recipes hackfest in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It was my second time visiting Indonesia, and food was a bit of a theme. The hackfest was about GNOME Recipes, so food, but also I love Indonesian food and I was eager to taste some more so I can improve how I cook it at home.

I haven’t contributed to GNOME Recipes. (Shamefully, not even a recipe yet!) So why was I going to a GNOME Recipes hackfest? It’s because on Endless OS we have a Cooking app, which in many ways is not as good as GNOME Recipes. It’s certainly less lovingly curated, and less community-oriented, than GNOME Recipes, and it allows recipe submissions by users while the Endless app is read-only.

However, there are a few things Endless’s Cooking app does better than GNOME Recipes: it is visually more appealing, it’s available in several languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and also a Spanish version customized for Guatemala), and it uses a better database backend (which also makes it fully offline.) It does these things using Endless’s “modular framework,” which if you want to know more about, I gave a talk two years ago at GUADEC. This modular framework is the product that I primarily work on at Endless, so a few of my team joined in the GNOME Recipes hackfest to see whether the two apps could share some technology.

It turns out that Matthias was eager to have somebody come along and make a database backend for GNOME Recipes, so the answer was yes, we could very well share some technology.

As an experiment, we made a recipes “lookalike” app using the modular framework technologies of which you can see some nice screenshots in Martin’s blog post.

We worked out some goals that we wanted to achieve by GUADEC in order to present our work, which you can see in the hackfest notes.

Outreach

There were also some goings on besides the hackfest. On the day before the hackfest started we did an outreach event for the students of AMIKOM University Yogyakarta, where the hackfest was held. We gave some talks on our work, and GNOME contributor and Endless Ambassador Siska closed the morning out with a very successful talk on how to get involved in GNOME.

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After that I gave a live demo of how to make a GNOME app, the result of which you can find on GitHub here!

This is me doing the live-coding demo of a GNOME app. Some of the students said I looked like Tony Stark.

 

Translation

One of the most interesting discussions we had was about how to internationalize GNOME Recipes. In different countries people cook very differently, so translating a recipe from one language into another is not enough. You also have to adapt the recipe to the ingredients that you can get in the country, and sometimes it’s not possible to get the same taste. For example, if I wanted to adapt my beloved pesto recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook, to Indonesia, first of all I’d probably have to substitute Thai basil which would change the taste entirely. Or to adapt Indonesian recipes to Canada, you have to go to some lengths to find ingredients like terasi (shrimp paste) and kemiri (candlenuts), and we just can’t get some of the same vegetables.

It can also be that when one language is used in two countries, the same recipe still won’t work for both. For example, in the UK, baking measurements are given by weight, and in Canada and the US they are given by volume. The metric system (ºC, kg, ml) is used in the UK and the imperial system (ºF, pounds, quarts, ounces, bushels, specks, caltrops, and jeroboams) in the US. To make matters worse, Canada uses the metric system for weight and volume measurements (kg, ml) but oven temperatures are given in Fahrenheit as in the US. All three countries cook with teaspoons and tablespoons, but teaspoons and tablespoons are metric in Canada and the UK (5 ml and 15 ml) but imperial in the US (4.93 ml and 14.79 ml).

We also discussed that many translation tools assume that the source language is always English since that’s the lingua franca of programmers, but it’s definitely not the lingua franca of cooking!

I would go so far as to say that all the existing translation infrastructure that we have for internationalizing GNOME is not going to be good enough to translate the recipes in GNOME Recipes.

Progress since then

In the time since the hackfest, I was able to make a little bit of progress on our goals. I worked on splitting out the code that handles data modelling into DModel, a separate library, so that GNOME Recipes could use it.

Food

I did get a chance to learn the flavors of Indonesian food more. When I lived in the Netherlands I already became familiar with some Indonesian food, but the Indonesian food in Indonesia is really much more delicious. In Vancouver we have only one Indonesian restaurant, which is kind of far away. And I found only one Indonesian store where I can buy ingredients like shrimp paste and candlenuts, which is even farther away.

Siska brought in packets of rendang spice paste for everyone to take home, for which I was especially grateful. Here’s a picture of my rendang that I made when I got back to Vancouver:

Rendang and rice

I also tried to make the spice paste myself (because soon I will be out of the spice paste packets) but I haven’t got it figured out yet.

Some of the other dishes that I’ve made at home:

Gulai curry (substituting kale for the cassava greens)
(The recipe is from Daily Cooking Quest which is a cooking blog from an Indonesian blogger who emigrated to the United States, and I’ve had good luck with those recipes because she uses ingredients that are possible for me to get in Vancouver, and she also gives the Indonesian names of the ingredients)

Mi goreng

I am going to try making gudeg this week, which is a jackfruit curry, a specialty of Yogyakarta.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank AMIKOM University Yogyakarta for hosting the hackfest and giving us the opportunity to get some students interested in open source development, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodations during the hackfest. Thanks also to Cosimo, Ekta, Elvin, Emmanuele, Haris, Jonathan, Kukuh, Martin, Matthias, Rama, Siska, and Umang, and also Kiki from Mozilla who joined on the last day, and Angky from Endless who helped arrange the hosting and logistics, for making the event a success!

Announcing Flapjack

Here’s a post about a tool that I’ve developed at work. You might find it useful if you contribute to any desktop platform libraries that are packaged as a Flatpak runtime, such as GNOME or KDE.

Flatpak is a system for delivering desktop applications that was pioneered by the GNOME community. At Endless, we have jumped aboard the Flatpak train. Our product Endless OS is a Linux distribution, but not a traditional one in the sense of being a collection of packages that you install with a package manager; it’s an immutable OS image, with atomic updates delivered through OSTree. Applications are sandboxed-only and Flatpak-only.

Flatpak makes the lives of application developers much easier, who want to get their applications to users without having to care which Linux distribution those users use. It means that as an application developer, I don’t have to fire up three different virtual machines and email five packaging contributors whenever I make a release of my application. (Or, in theory it would work that way if I would stop using deprecated libraries in my application!)

This is what flapjacks are in the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man, and Newfoundland. Known as “granola bars” or “oat bars” elsewhere. By Alistair Young, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5331306

On my work computer I took the leap and now develop everything on an immutable OSTree system just like it would be running in production. I now develop everything inside a Flatpak sandbox. However, while Flatpak works great when packaging some code that already exists, it is a bit lacking in the developer experience.

For app developers, Carlos Soriano has written a tool called flatpak-dev-cli based on a workflow designed by Thibault Saunier of the Pitivi development team. This has proven very useful for developing Flatpak apps.

But a lot of the work I do is not on apps, but on the library stack that is used by apps on Endless OS. In fact, my team’s main product is a Flatpak runtime. I wanted an analogue of flatpak-dev-cli for developing the libraries that live inside a Flatpak runtime.

Flapjack

…while this is what flapjacks are everywhere else in Canada, and in the US. Also known as “pancakes.” By Belathee Photography, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15167594

Flapjack is that tool. It’s a wrapper around Flatpak-builder that is intended to replace JHBuild in the library developer’s toolbox.

For several months I’ve been using it in my day-to-day work, on a system running Endless OS (which has hardly any developer tools installed by default.) It only requires Flatpak-builder, Git, and Python.

In Flapjack’s README I included a walkthrough for reproducing Tristan’s trick from his BuildStream talk at GUADEC 2017 where he built an environment with a modified copy of GTK that showed all the UI labels upside-down.

That walkthrough is pretty much what my day-to-day development workflow looks like now. As an example, a recent bug required me to patch eos-knowledge-lib and xapian-glib at the same time, which are both components of Endless’s Modular Framework runtime. I did approximately this:

flapjack open xapian-glib
flapjack open eos-knowledge-lib
cd checkout/xapian-glib
# ... make changes to code ...
flapjack test xapian-glib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
cd ../eos-knowledge-lib
# ... make more changes to code ...
flapjack test eos-knowledge-lib
# ... keep changing and repeating until the tests pass!
flapjack build
# ... keep changing and repeating until the whole runtime builds!
flapjack run com.endlessm.encyclopedia.en
# run Encyclopedia, which is an app that uses this runtime, to check
# that my fix worked
git checkout -b etc. etc.
# create branches for my work and push them

I also use Flapjack’s “devtools manifest” to conveniently provide developer tools that aren’t present in Endless OS’s base OSTree layer. In Flapjack’s readme I gave an example of adding the jq tool to the devtools manifest, but I also have cppcheck, RR, and a bunch of Python modules that I added with flatpak-pip-generator. Whenever I need to use any of these tools, I just open flapjack shell and they’re available!

Questions you might ask

Why is it called Flapjack?

The working title was jokingly chosen to mess up your muscle memory if you were used to typing flatpak, but it stuck and became the real name. If it does annoy you, you can alias it to fj or something.

Flatpak-builder is old news, why does Flapjack not use BuildStream?

I would like it if that were the case! I suspect that BuildStream would solve my main problem with Flapjack, which is that it is slow. In fact I started out writing Flapjack as a wrapper around BuildStream, instead of Flatpak-builder. But at the time BuildStream just didn’t have enough documentation for me to get my head around it quickly enough. I hear that this is changing and I would welcome a port to BuildStream!

As well, it was not possible to allow --socket=x11 during a build like you can with Flatpak-builder, so I couldn’t get it to run unit tests for modules that depended on GTK.

Why are builds with Flapjack so slow?

The slowest parts are caching each build step (I suspect here is where using BuildStream would help a lot) and exporting the runtime’s debug extension to the local Flatpak repository. For the latter, this used to be even slower, before my colleague Emmanuele Bassi suggested to use a “bare-user” repository. I’m still looking for a way to speed this up. I suspect it should be possible, since for Flapjack builds we would probably never care about the Flatpak repository history.

Can I use Flapjack to develop system components like GNOME Shell?

No. There still isn’t a good developer story for working on system components on an immutable OS! At Endless, the people who work on those components will generally replace their OSTree file system with a mutable one. This isn’t a very good strategy because it means you’re developing on a system that is different from what users are running in production, but I haven’t found any better way so far.

Epilogue

Thanks to my employer Endless for allowing me to reserve some time to write this tool in a way that it would be useful for the wider Flatpak community, rather than just internally.

That’s about it! I hope Flapjack is useful for you. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.

Where to find it

Flapjack’s page on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flapjack
The code on GitHub: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack
Report bugs and request features: https://github.com/endlessm/flapjack/issues

Endless is Here

For the past 2.5 years I’ve been working at Endless Mobile on something that was mostly secret. You probably caught me being vague about “computers for developing countries.” Well, secret no longer. I am excited, proud, and honestly a bit relieved to be able to say that I can finally tell you what it’s all about.

“Tell you” is a bit of an exaggeration, I’ll let the videomaking skills of my coworker Taylor Morgan show you instead. The video is at the top of our Kickstarter campaign.

We’re launching our first product, via Kickstarter. It’s a computer that’s affordable for people in developing countries, and it looks like this:

Alien Egg

I’ve been working on writing applications for this computer, and also contributing to some parts of the operating system. Some parts of this are open source, and you can view them on GitHub.

Also, I have colleagues who are really fun to work with. If you happen to like fun and are looking for a job, there are some positions open… (It’s at the bottom of that page.)

Update: Within only four days, the Kickstarter campaign hit the original goal of US$100 000. It’s incredible. My favorite part is that almost $30 000 of that money was donated by people paying to give a computer, rather than buy one for themselves. Enough people asked for the option to donate a computer directly, so it was added. Also you can now get the whole package for yourself: computer plus swag, because enough people asked for that too.