I've been refurbishing an older project -- written in 2008. Probably with Django 1.0.1. Certainly with Python 2.5.

The Django 1.3 release has been around since March. The change underscored the importance of technology refresh.

The best part was to delete code. There were two significant reasons …

I worked with this a few years ago to tweak up some web pages. http://colorschemedesigner.com/ I just rediscovered it. It's a cool toy. You get some colors that all "go" together. If you're careful with your .CSS definitions, you give people this page and let them fuss around …

This isn't the OWASP Top 10 list, but it's still very handy. Top 10 Dumb Computer Security Notions. I'm particularly fond of the "security can't be perfect; since it can't be perfect, why bother?" approach. One other notion that amuses me is the silliness of changing a password every 90 …

Years ago, when designing an interface to a vendor's web services, I did the following. This isn't a genius move, but it's worth emphasizing how important it is. And what's most important isn't technical.

1. I built a simple spike solution to access their service.
2. I morphed this into a "sanity …

Some folks love the twin ideas that (1) "someone" might break the API rules and (2) they must write lots of bonus code to "prevent" problems.

Sigh.

There are three distinct things here.

• API definition - something we do all the time.
• "Defensive Programming" - something that may or may not actually …

Read this: "Here Comes Functional Programming" by Larry O'Brien in SD Times.

people who should know better continue to assert that statically typed languages are "safer, because the compiler can catch errors that otherwise wouldn't show up until runtime." While it's true a statically typed language can detect that you've …

Got this a few weeks back.

My job is to persuade bloggers to link to our site.

I really love my job! We have a friendly team and good management, but unfortunately I have no idea how to convince a blogger to link to us, I'm afraid I might lose …

See this Limitations of Agile Software Development and this The Agile "Religion" -- What?.

What's important is that the limitations of Agile are not limitations. They're (mostly) intentional roadblocks to Agile.

Looking for "limitations" in the Agile approach misses the point of Agile in several important ways.

The most important problem …

See Andrew Binstock's "Windows 8: Microsoft's Development Re-Do".

The costs of these migrations has been enormous and continues to accumulate...

I can only rub my hands with glee and engage in shameless "I Told You So" self-congratulations.

Only you can prevent being held hostage by Microsoft.

More than once, I've …

I really dislike being asked to plan a project. It's hard to predict the future accurately.

In spite of the future being -- well -- the future, and utterly unknowable, we still have to have the following kinds of discussions.

Me: "It's probably going to take a team of six."

Customer: "We …