Got an email looking for help in attempting break through the RDBMS Hegemony. It's a little confusing, but this is the important part of how management says "no".

"Their response was nice but can you flush [sic] it out more"

[First: the word is "flesh": "flesh it out." Repeat after …

The HamCalc program binhop is one of those little nuggets of beauty that might be helpful or might be useless. Or. Perhaps there's some useful stuff commingled with quirky stuff.

For folks in agriculture or manufacturing, I'm hoping that the calculation could be helpful. Although it's also likely that folks …

A recent question

"what we might expect, in terms of 1) Time to completion, 2) Cost to implement according to the mockup, 3) Monthly server/maintenance costs and 4) approximate team size required"

This question was followed by this acknowledgement:

"it is hard to make the above estimations, given the …

See The Question of Risk.

Also, see Lean Projects -- Not Deficient Projects.

And Keeping the Customer Satisfied.

These are notes for a long, detailed rant on the value of Agile methods.

One specious argument against an Agile approach is the "risk management" question. In this case, however, it becomes a …

A library had unit tests that ran for almost 600 seconds. Two small changes dropped the run time to 26 seconds.

I was amazed.

Step 1. I turned on the cProfile. I added two methods to the slowest unit test module.

def profile():
    import cProfile
    cProfile.run( 'main()', 'the_slow_module.prof' …

I get emails looking for help with technology choice. Essentially: "I've got this idea for game-changing software idea, what technology should I use?" These questions have disturbing expectations. There's a Gordian Knot of dependencies that's sometimes baffling.

Sometimes the questions are about choosing a "tech stack" or an "architecture". Sometimes …

Tweet:

People criticize for making tons of small classes instead of fewer larger classes.How is well-organized code more difficult to understand?

—jim christopher (@beefarino) May 31, 2013

This isn't really a question. Writing a few "large" omnibus classes is simply bad design.

There are several variations on the theme …

Careful study of the HamCalc shows a number of quirks. Some are funny, some are just examples of the need for unit test frameworks. The Wikispaces for the modernization project is here: http://hamcalc.wikispaces.com/home

For example, the following line of code, in GW-Basic, will (usually) set Y …

Some additional points on using Python 2.7 in a way that bridges the gap to Python 3.2. The steps are small and simple. You can start taking them now.

Recently I suggested that one should always include from __future__ import division, print_function on every module. Always. Every Module …

Once in a great while, you see someone engaging in Obstinate Idiocy.

Here's my recent example.

They're solving some kind of differential equation. Not sure why.

Symptom 1 of Obstinate Idiocy is No Rational Justification. The explanation is often "that's not relevant, what's relevant is this other thing I want …