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 …

Consider this dialog box.

• The application was modified.
• It can't be updated.

Why not just replace it? Replacing a modified application seems to be a perfectly sensible use case.

But no, rather than doing something useful, it shows a dialog box. I guess no one thought through this use case …

My MacBook has an 80Gb drive with less than 2Gb available. A few times I've totally filled the disk and had to spend time judiciously searching and removing old files. Sigh.

I have (and use) external hard drives, but it seems to violate some kind of "laptop" principle to be …

About once a week a question shows up on Stack Overflow that involves loading a database with truly epic volumes of data. For example "billions of rows in a single table for a month".

Billions of rows per month is a minimum insert rate of 385 row per second.

Also …

Great article on "Search" from back in '08 in Forbes. "Why Google Isn't Enough", by Dan Woods. He's talking about "Enterprise Search": why in-house Google-style search is really hard and often unsatisfying.

Here's the cool quote.

enterprise search systems also index and navigate information that may reside in databases, content …

Making the rounds: Droopy: easy file receiving. Apparently, there were some widely-read blog posts about this. Google "Droopy: A Tiny Web Server That Makes Receiving Files a Snap" to see the buzz.

The point here is that 750 lines of Python code can go a long way. It's a complete …

Let's say you've found some new, good way to do business.

JSON, for example. Or Agile Methods in general. Or TDD specifically. Or use of an ORM.

You read up on it. You build a spike solution to show that it's more efficient.

We do a lot of bulk loads. A lot.

So many that we have some standard ETL-like modules for generic "Validate", "Load", "Load_Dimension", "Load_Fact" and those sorts of obvious patterns.

Mostly our business processes amount to a "dimensional conformance and fact load", followed by extracts, followed by a different "dimensional …

Here's the situation.

A vendor sent us three separate files which need to be merged. 70,000+ records each. They're CSV files, so column position doesn't much matter. The column name (in row 1) is what matters.

I looked at three solutions. Two of which are merely OK. The third …

They say "You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure". This isn't quite right, however. You can measure lots of things you can't manage. Rainfall, for example. Software development is like that. You can measure stuff that you can't actually control.

The original Deming quotes are more subtle: there are things …