Extracting legacy data can be really, really hard. However, it's of central importance because data lives forever. Application "logic" and "business rules" come and go.

Today's case study is a dusty old Dell Inspiron Laptop running Windows 98 with Chartview software.

Problem 1. Chartview. No extract or export capability, except …

In looking at Application Lifecycle Management (see "ALM Tools"), I had found that SCons appears to be pretty popular. It's not as famous as all the make variants, or Apache Ant or Apache Maven, but it seems to have a niche in the forest of Build Automation Software.

While it …

As a hypothetical, I was asked about doing Oracle Analytic functions in Python.

[Sidebar: Politics. The question came from a DBA in a C# shop. That's why it's just hypothetical. Politically, they could never make use of this information. In C# world, Functional Programming is often scary and evil. It …

I'm rewriting Building Skills in Python. 2.7 is out. As more libraries make the move, 3.1 is getting more and more viable.

I'm looking closely at the Decorators chapter (Part 3, Chapter 6).

And I'm struggling with classmethod. It's a first-class part of Python. And I'm sure there …

The question of "customization" and "extension" is a common one. For example, "non-technical users to be able to extend with simple scripts".

Read this question on Stack Overflow: "Programming / scripting language aimed at non-technical people".

This is -- at best -- little more than an attractive nuisance. At worst, of course, it …

Here's a great post called "Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells". This lists some "Management Smells": specifically doing clumsy, ineffective things and calling it "Scrum".

I found this in StackOverflow question, titled "Any stories where trying to apply Scrum went wrong?"

Another great answer was a link to "Scrummerfall: World's …

Here's an interesting -- and common -- question.

"... any tools that I could use to create a web scraper that I could use to interact with a .aspx website?

I want to build a tool that will read an input file (e.g. an excel spreadsheet) containing a list of property parcel …

In Creating Complexity Where None Existed, I noted that it's possible to create complexity out of thin air.

Indeed, by wallowing in the supposed drama, one can turn the differences between sales and service delivery into a hopelessly complex situation. A focus on a manufactured "conflict" leads to the following …

I read a 482-word treatise that amounted to these four words "sales and delivery disagree".

A more useful summary is "Sales and Delivery have different views of the order".

It started out calling the standard sales-delivery differences a "Conflict" requiring "Resolution". The description was so hopelessly enmeshed in the conflict …

First, let me say that TDD rocks.

Few things are as much fun as (1) writing a test script for a feature, and then (2) debugging the feature incrementally until it passes the test. It's fun because a great deal of hand-wringing and over-thinking is taken off the table.

To …