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People talk about CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment).

They also need to talk about CM (Continuous Migration).

"Wait, what?" you ask.

When we roll out a new version of the software (CD) there are three common situations.

1. The new software uses the …

I was told a horror story about a bad database schema migration. Let's call the author of the horror story HPL.

HPL related a tale of woeful conversion problems from a mismanaged schema migration.

While I could feel HPL's pain, the reasons given for their pain were wrong. They didn't …

First. The question is moot. It's a programming language. It's good for programming. When I push back, folks try to produce languages which exist only in certain pigeon holes. "You know. PHP is for web and JavaScript runs in the browser. What's Python for?" The PHP and JavaScript examples aren't …

Here's the actual quote:

Why would you need to rewrite a working script in python ? Was there any business direction towards this ?

This was an unexpected response. And unwelcome. I guess I called their baby ugly.

The short answer is that the shell script language is perhaps one of the …

One word: "wow" More words: "Helping shy people get up and do what needs to be done." Yes, that's Garrison Keillor's tag line for one of the "sponsors" of "A Prairie Home Companion": the Powdermilk Biscuits company. (Heavens. they're tasty and expeditious.) The folks at Lynda are truly great at …

This cropped up recently. It's part of a "replace Mongo with Relational DB" conversation.

I'm going to elide the conversation down to five key points. The three post-hoc nonsensical ideas, and the two real points.

What's (to me) very telling is that someone else published the five reasons in this …

I write Microservices. And not-so-micro Services. API's.

I got this email recently.

"Goal: get you to consider adding Gooey to your Python tool set" "Gooey What it's for: Turn a console-based Python program into one that sports a platform-native GUI. Why it's great: Presenting people, especially rank-and-file users, with a …

Here's a snippet of an email

In big data / data science, the curse of dimensionality keeps showing up over and over. A good place to start is the wiki article “curse of dimensionality.” The issue seems to be that a lot of these big data / data science people have not …

I'm calling this the Composite Builder pattern. This may have other names, but I haven't seen them. It could simply be lack of research into prior art. I suspect this isn't very new. But I thought it was cool way to do some declarative Python programming.

Here's the concept.

class …

Do you have a good project? Do you want to write? The acquisition folks at Packt are looking for this: "... demonstrate 4-5 projects over the course of the chapters in order to demonstrate how to build scalable Python projects from scratch. These projects cover some of the most important concepts …