Here's a pretty simple set of use cases for a code-kata database application.

This is largely transactional, not analytical.

It's a simple inventory of ingredients, recipes and locations.

Tonight (May 25th). Red Dog. Colley Ave. Ghent. I'll be wearing my Stack Overflow shirt. I'll be there about 7. I know that at least one other person won't be there until 8.

The Meetup link.

I like this meetup idea a lot. Probably because the WFH life-style is a …

I've seen some discussion on Stack Overflow that is best characterized by the question: "What is Strictly Agile?", or "What's the Official Agile Approach?".

Someone shared this with me recently: "Process kills developer passion".

I have also heard some great complaints about organizations that claim "Agile" and actually do nothing …

I'm a big fan of plain-text tools. Source Code. ReStructuredText. LaTeX.

I'm not a big fan of proprietary file formats and document formats that are difficult or impossible to decode. JSON and XML rock. .XLS files are painful and difficult to work with.

UML Diagrams are a particularly odious problem …

http://www.meetup.com/757-Python-Users-Group/

I'm looking forward to meeting other Python developers in Hampton Roads.

Tonight. 7:00 PM. See you there.

A single poorly-made decision can have profound ripple-effects. Once your stuck with it, you make accommodations, hacks and work-arounds. Eventually, things work, but the result is less than ideal.

Changing tack requires sometimes pervasive rework to the application. How can we reduce the risks and improve the value created?

First, the definition. A use case describes an actor's interaction with a system to create business value. There are three parts: Actor, Interaction and Business Value.

1. Not Interactive.

1.1. The use case is just features and technical attributes with no actor interaction expressed.

1.2. The use case is …

Objects are everywhere.

Weirdly, some people can't see them. I guess they live in a rarified, HP Lovecraftian world of pure action inhabited by amorphous things that can't be properly called "beings" but rather "doings" because they're pure activity with no existence.

Read "Hypnos". "They were sensations, yet within them …

After reverse engineering procedural code in C, VB or even Python, I'm finding that procedural programming inevitably leads to bad, bad code-rot.

Consider some of the common design patterns.

Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either

• If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
• Block comments …

Too much of programming is intimately tied up with the tools to support the development of the software.

Example 1. I was told -- with absolute and fierce conviction -- that VB may suck as a language, but Visual Studio more than makes up for the obvious problems. For some people, Tools …