Mocking is essential to unit testing.

However.

It's also annoyingly difficult to get right.

If we aren't 100% perfectly clear on what we're mocking, we will merely canonize any dumb assumptions into mock objects that don't really work. They work in the sense that they don't crash, but they don't …

Step 1. Go to amazon.com and look for one (or more) of my Python books.

Step 2. Have you read it?

• Yes: Thanks! Consider posting a review.
• No: Hmmm.

That's all. Consider doing this for other authors, also.

Social media is its own weird economy. The currency seems to …

Folks who don't use Python regularly -- the folks in TechOps, for example -- are acutely aware that the Python 3 language is "different," and the upgrade should be done carefully. They've done their homework, but, they're not experts in everything.

They feel the need to introduce Python 3 slowly and cautiously …

Get Packt's Python Essentials. I think it covers a large number of important topics. Central to this is Python 3.4. The book covers Python 3 with few -- if any -- backward glances. If it makes any mention of Python 2, the reference is strictly derogatory. There isn't even a mention …

I remain captivated by the ideals of Literate Programming. My fork of PyLit (https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3) coupled with Sphinx seems to handle LP programming in a very elegant way.

It works like this.

1. Write RST files describing the problem and the solution. This includes the actual implementation code …

Let me gripe about this for a moment.

sys.exit()

The use case for this function is limited. Very, very limited.

Every place that this appears (except for one) is going to lead to reusability issues.

Consider some obscure little function, deep within the app.

def deep_within_the_app(x, y, zed …

Read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html.

I was originally focused on "beauty". Clearly, good design is beautiful. Isn't that obvious? Why so many words to explain the obvious?

The post seemed useless. Why write it in the first place? Why share it? Why share it now, 12 years …

Someone told me they weren't yet ready to write "serious code." They needed to spend more time doing something that's not coding.

I'm unclear on what they were doing. It appears they have some barriers that I can't see.

They had sample data. They had a problem statement. They had …

Or. Why I Hate Windows. For Mac OS X, you download XCode (for free) and you can build anything. For Linux, you use some kind of yum or rpm installer for the developer tools, and you can build anything. For Windows... Pre-built binaries. 😂 And a hope that the version numbers …