I was looking at the Digg source code the other day and, I’ve gotta say, mega-props to the developer of their javascript. The traditional rule in web development has become, “Put your Javascript at the end of your page.”  That way, all of the DOM objects you might refer to are guaranteed to be [...]

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Following up on the The Onion’s announcement that they’re using Django comes this priceless discussion of the technical challenges of doing so with several members of The Onion’s technical team. They were using Drupal before.
Among the things I discovered:

Grappelli, a customizable theme for the Django admin
uWSGI, a high-performance WSGI container separated from Apache,
HaProxy, a [...]

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Giggle has become my new best friend.  Giggle is a graphical front-end for Git: you start it in a Git repository and it keeps excellent track of all of your branches, their history, mergings, and so on.  Since one of my big initiatives in my current position has been refactoring an inappropriately large model class [...]

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Apress’ Pro Git is a better book than O’Reilly’s Version Control with Git.  The O’Reilly book tries hard to educate you about the repository, but goes off into the weeds with details about history and branch management that overwhelm a user who “just wants to use the damn thing.”  The Apress book has a section [...]

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Gwaredd Mountain writes:
Microsoft has published empirical data that shows that the process overhead for TDD increases the development effort by 15% – 35%. Despite the many positive benefits from TDD, we cannot possible consider anything that adds an extra 35% effort to produce artefacts the customer will never see as lean. Amazingly, people still try [...]

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I have a contract that I’m working on that requires I work with rails.  That, in itself, isn’t so bad.  But I think what bothers me most about rails can be summed up in one word: partials. For example, let’s say I have the following:
render :partial => ‘employee’, :collection => @employees
What this means is [...]

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I had a job interview today, and one of the “challenges” with which I was presented was this: “We own several sites. We would like our user to be able to log into the central site as a subscriber, and then all the other sites will know what permissions that user has.”
The sites are [...]

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Java is Pass-By-Value, Dammit!
Quite possibly the most important article I’ve ever read, because it finally, finally explains to me what Java’s object-passing model is really all about. I’ve never understood it, and now I do: it’s exactly backwards from pass-by-reference, so it’s exactly backwards from the languages with which I grew up. The [...]

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I’ve always been a little leery of studies that show that somehow, a bigger monitor equals more productivity.  Well, count me as no longer leery.  I’ve been hacking on a 24″ monitor I bought at a Christmas sale yesterday, and already I’m going along significantly faster than I was before.  For one thing, I can [...]

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Yes, that’s a signal boost.
I’ve only played with Node.js for about 24 hours now, and I’m already deeply impressed with it. Node.js is something of a holy grail: an implementation of server-side (and desktop) Javascript with a modern engine (Google’s V8), in which all I/O is event-handled. You no longer care about multiplexing, [...]

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