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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So, I got tired of the way Django-SocialAuth was borked and not working for me, so I forked the project and have put up my own copy at GitHub.
There are three things I noticed about the project right away: First, it forces you to use a broken templating scheme. I haven’t fixed that, but [...]

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This is part 4 of a series.
So far, we’ve written a basic Django application, written some tests for it, checked everything into a central repository, and then integrated those tests with the Hudson continual integration server.
But Django’s tests run in a kind of pseudo-server mode, with both the tests and the application running inside the [...]

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For the past few days, this has been bugging the Hell out of me and I finally decided today to knuckle down and figure out how the hell Python decorators-with-arguments work.
Basic Decoration
The basics: A python function takes arguments, performs a task, and returns a value. A decorator takes as its argument a function, [...]

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