We test software. We test people.
My lawyer, all my various doctors, even the coffee bar on main street is subject to testing. The coffee shop proudly posts their score from health inspections. Want to know about food safety? Ask them.
My professionals all have walls full of diplomas and …
more ...Starting back in 2011 I was working on a way to manage a variety of spreadsheets in a variety of layouts with a common schema. Over the last 13 years, I've been updating and maintaining this little project. It's not widely used, but it interests me.
Fundamentally, the use of …
more ...This was a surprising thing (for me) to see. Surprising because -- after writing a book about functional programming, I'd forgotten that some of the ideas are actually really new to people.
(I've omitted the source of the quote because I want to reuse this without worrying about link rot. Some …
more ...Central to OO design is "encapsulation." It's so central it is part of several separate principles.
In the S. O. L. I. D. design principles it's the Interface Segregation Principle. And a significant part of the Single Responsibility Principle.
In some cases, Python n00bz -- folks who already know some OO …
more ...Let's reach way, way back. 1989 - 1990. This will let me talk about OO programming and Python Type Hints. (really) And doing OO design for things that are as pervasive (and transparent) as air. Things that need to be part of a design, but don't appear in any documentation.
In …
more ...The question was "Favorite Design Patterns."
This is tricky because -- well -- so many patterns appear and re-appear in software. Picking a few from the vast world of patterns is fraught with difficulties.
Here are some thoughts:
Few things are as distracting as those god-awful side quests.
In this case, I had to search out all of the examples in my new book drafts.
Once upon a time, it was a manual check of code in the book to be sure it made sense.
Ugh. Not …
Reaching back to 2008. Yes. Decade(s) ago. Python 2.5.
I was reminded of this when a former colleague pinged me about this: https://github.com/slott56/TigerShark.
Yes, it's an X12/EDI message parsing library from -- well -- decades ago.
Short answer: Parsing X12 …
See Programming Languages I've Learned (more-or-less in order) [Update].
This came up on Twitter and Fosstodon.
See https://fosstodon.org/@vpavlyshyn/109908255464181943 and https://fosstodon.org/@slott56/109908527412493172.
I omitted a few things from the list because -- well -- there are a LOT of languages.
For example, in the 90's I …
more ...The (almost) 10-year old 27" Thunderbolt display finally died.
Well, it didn't really die.
The Thunderbolt connector had gotten impossibly flaky. If I looked at it wrong, the monitor glitched or disonnected.
It was dead enough that I wasn't going to deal with it.
It involved this morass of adapters …
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