Using a copy of or a partial copy of a deployed database (e.g. production or staging, one that is somehow exposed to other people) is a…
I’ve made up the titles. While these are books I would find interesting, it’s more the case that I’ve found this to be an excellent exercise…
In the last edition I alluded to my deep love for that otherwise banal kitchen appliance, the dishwasher. So in the next issue we’re going…
Today we’re going to walk through a fairly typical web application deployment (obviously using Django as our example) and how to automate it…
Last week I shared some suggestions for reducing the bus factor or at least the risks posed by losing team members and their institutional…
The bus factor on a project is the number of people who would, if hit by a hypothetical bus, result in project catastrophe (e.g. stopped…
We’ve been looking at why people erroneously think they’ve reached the limits of their software stack: Both generally and with regard to…
The Medium post, regardless of its content, is defined by several visual characteristics: Large, pretty stock images that add little to no…
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. - old time-y adage There’s a lot of wisdom in that cliché. Intervening in a working system when no urgent…
We’ve been looking at why people erroneously think they’ve reached the limits of their software stack: Both generally and with regard to…
Let’s try something more exciting, like Comic Sans. And make it “pop”. There’s a trope among freelancers that when something goes wrong with…
It’s a problem I’ve dealt with practically, but not one to which I’ve previously given any thought in a structured way. After all, I’ve been…
This is part four in a project to review/respond to one book per week (er, couple months). By and large it will only include books I am…
A few years back I had an idea. I’d write a series of blog posts specific to things I’d learned - often the hard way - about to create and…
This is part four in a project to review/respond to one book per week (er, couple months). By and large it will only include books I am…
This is part three in a project to review/respond to one book per week. By and large it will only include books I am reading or have read…
This is part two in a project to review/respond to one book per week. By and large it will only include books I am reading or have read…
This is the first part in a project to review/respond to one book per week. By and large it will only include books I am reading or have…
How should you store the value of 5%? Or $10 in expenses? These seemingly trivial little questions can cause development pain and allow…
NOTE: Very much in progress but published by request as its still moderately useful. I’ve organized this primarily by media type, but it…
This is a compendium of my answers to common questions about setting up a business as an independent consultant or freelancer. Many of these…
Just a short description of a non-surprising but non-obvious feature of tuple unpacking in Python (2.7, not even the cool new unpacking in…
Quick links: I ❤️ PEP8 shirts are super rad and you can have one too!. Discount codes for t-shirts and stickers good for this week are…
envdir runs another program with environment modified according to files in a specified directory. envdir is a component of daemontools…
When digging into a codebase to either for the expressed purpose of cleaning it up or starting to work on features or bug fixes, one of the…
While most of my work with my clients is related to building or fixing software, I often find myself helping them solve other related…
The prolific Gabriel Gonzalez wrote a post last week about basic Haskell examples. Regarding the state of example Haskell code, often using…
This post is a note to self and an explanation for present and future team members and collaborators. YMMV. The goal is twofold: to ensure a…
When you want to add image support to your Django app, like allowing content editors to upload images, how do you do that? Probably by using…
With probably every web site and application, we have situations where we have lists of items, like articles or messages. These items have…
Enjoying some cookies with my wife and a colleague of hers a few weeks back, I was presented with a puzzle that he had taught in a class on…
It starts innocently enough: a few mockups, some user flows, a form that everyone loves, an application born of high quality design - a…
Clean code does not make code good, but it certainly makes writing good code a lot easier. And it’s far easier to read clean code, easier to…
I came, I saw, I spoke. A quick hit of the talk highlights. Building Better API Clients My own talk was on the topic of designing and…
The specifics here are illustrated using a Jekyll site, but it should be trivial to substitute your static site generator of choice. A…
I mostly work from a home office. Also co-working spaces. And coffee shops, friends’ homes, occasionally hotels, airport terminals…
Django’s proxy models are one of those features that I remember reading about and thinking, “oh, cool… I guess” and then moving along. From…
Django Addendum is a little library I wrote a couple years back to solve a recurring problem: making copy snippets on a web page editable…
PyPI never goes down, right? Well, even if it doesn’t, running a fresh build on a Python library - in say, multiple test environments - or…
In a standard single application Heroku deployment, the app name is usually implicit if your working directory is a Heroku app with your…
This is what I saw today when I opened up our QuickBooks online dashboard: QuickBooks visual abortion It’s supposed to be a quick snapshot…
is a memcached client for Python. It’s a requirement for adding caching with memcached to a Python application, like a Django project…
When you start looking at tutorials and guides for a configuration management tool like Ansible, most of them show how to get started or…
Trying to check changes on multiple browsers and multiple devices is hard. In the old days shops kept old computers lying around to test…
Django templates, which share some common syntax with Jinja2 templates and Liquid templates use curly brace delimiters to designate template…
In January 2014 a new bulk geocoding service landed with the public announcement of Geocod.io. I took a look at the service offering and…
The City of Richmond makes a lot of its data publicly accessible, I’m told, in an effort to encourge “civic hacking”. I’m not yet sure where…
Wellfire was at DjangoCon 2013 in Chicago this year and it’s high time we reflected a bit about the conference and our experience there…
So I gave a talk at DjangoCon US today, “Finding the Needle”, all about search and Django, including Haystack and ElasticSearch. Here are…
On the new Django Discussions forum someone raised a question about time tracking which led to a discussion about invoicing. I thought I’d…
Not every search feature requires a third-party search system, like Haystack coupled with ElasticSearch. In fact a great many are served…
You could provide several answers related to a reliance on individual automobiles (inefficient road use, urban sprawl), but I’d like to…
Make your goal each time simply to start your routine. It’s easy to think about everything you have planned out, and then to think about how…
Two primary reasons: the complexity of enterprise requirements and a sales-driven requirement to try to satisfy as many customers as…
Taleo is enterprise software. With any enterprise software momentum is usually a good starting answer. Replacing not just the software but…
I don't miss any of this stuff I sold an old scientific calculator the other day for $30. A few months before I sold an old desk for $5. I…
In practice SharePoint tends to encourage information “stovepiping” and the accumulation of information in non-permeable form (i.e. big dumb…
Last Tuesday’s Django District meetup was a series of lightning talks focused on testing in Django. I presented on getting started with in…
Shortly after I started my first job, and started getting paychecks and managing actual expenses, I created my first personal finance…
Bottom line up front: Show the benefits and make it easy. External incentives might work to get traction (e.g. some award or ‘badge’) but…
The reasons are momentum, government policy, and land availability. American society is invested in the infrastructure of suburbia. Putting…
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