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Books: Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices For Django 1.6
I just finished reading the book Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices For Django 1.6. I had already reviewed the previous edition, so I was anxious to see what had changed. In short, I loved it!It's...
View ArticleDagger: A Dependency Injection Framework for Android and Java
Dagger is a new dependency injection framework for Android and Java. I went to a meetup yesterday to learn more about it. These are my notes:The talk was by Jake Wharton who works at Square.Every...
View ArticlePyCon Notes: PostgreSQL Proficiency for Python People
In summary, this tutorial was fantastic! I learned more in three hours than I would have learned if I had read a whole book!Here's the video. Here are the slides. Here are my notes:Christoph Pettus was...
View ArticlePyCon Notes: Introduction to SQLAlchemy
At PyCon, Mike Bayer, the author of SQLAlchemy, gave a three hour tutorial on it. Here's the video. What follows are my notes.He used something called sliderepl. sliderepl is a nice ASCII tool that's a...
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Best Practices for Software Engineers
I'm going to be giving my talk "Best Practices for Software Engineers" at two different user groups in May:East Bay Ruby MeetupBayPIGgiesHere's the abstract:Being a software engineer requires a lot...
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Best Practices for Software Engineers
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I'm going to be giving my "Best Practices for Software Engineers" talk at both the East Bay Ruby Meetup and at BayPIGgies (the Bay Area Python Interest Group)....
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Raspberry Pi: Building an LED Digital Clock
As I mentioned in a previous post, I really enjoyed reading Programming Raspberry Pi: Getting Started with Python. One of the chapters in the book teaches you how to build an LED digital clock. It took...
View ArticleBeing Turing Complete Ain't All That and a Bag of Chips
I was talking to someone the other day. He said that given two Turing Complete programming languages, A and B, if you can write a program in A, you can write a similar program in B. Is that true? I...
View ArticleSecurity: Scam Involving the "assoc" Command on Windows
My dad sent me the following:Today I received a call from a Mark Atkison. He claims to be with Windows Technical Services, located in (or on) Brainbridge Island, Washington. Phone number...
View ArticleA Blog Post on Excel, 4x4s, Moonshots, and General Purpose Software
Using Excel is like driving a 4x4. Writing custom software is like building an interstate freeway.With a modest amount of training, you can do amazing things with a 4x4. You can go to places where...
View ArticlePython: Custom App Labels in Django
Django has had a long-standing missing feature that made it impossible to give your apps friendly names. See #3591 and #14251. Thankfully, this will be fixed in Django 1.7, but switching to the latest...
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Play Framework Essentials, Learning Scala, and Functional Programming...
I've been really busy over the last six months or so:First, I was a technical editor for Play Framework Essentials. It's a fun book because every example is first shown in Scala and then in Java, which...
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Books: Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life
I finally finished Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World. It was one of the most influential books I've ever read. It has impacted every area of my life!
View ArticleGo: A Surprising Edge Case Concerning append and Slice Aliasing
In Go, the append function reallocates the underlying array if there's no more room. Hence, if you have two slices that point to the same array, after you append to one of the slices, the other slice...
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Tetris Written in Go
I implemented a console-based version of Tetris in Go.In general, it was a pleasant experience. I made use of the termbox-go library for console graphics, and it was enjoyable as well.I've been reading...
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Go
I finished reading "A Tour of Go", "Effective Go", and the entire language specification.They were very well-written. My brain hurts ;)
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Tetris Over SSH
I wanted to try out Google Compute Engine, but I wanted to build something other than a simple web app. Hence, I setup a virtual server that runs tetris when you log into it, and I gave everyone the...
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The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the very beginning
Over the years, I've read a lot of books on software engineering. Agile books in particular like to refute the "Waterfall Model". Every time I read about the Waterfall Model, I think to myself: I'm...
View ArticleDistributed Systems: Another Great Jeff Dean Quote
During the first year of a typical Google datacenter, there will be five rack-wide outages, three router failures large enough to require diverting processing away from connected machines, and eight...
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