See http://www.meetup.com/stackoverflow/Hampton-VA/ for information on next week's Stack Exchange meetup.

For other events near you, see the Meetup page.

I'll be wearing my "official" Stack Overflow shirt. I'll try to grab a seat by the door, also, to be easy to find.

#SOMeetup

A joyous milestone today. Removed much of our pre-Piston RESTful web services code.

We started with the Django-REST Interface. While nice, it imposed a number of restrictions that were onerous. In particular, we have a lot of non-model responses. They're model-like data that we serialize to be compatible with …

This is a fair-to-partly silly question that shows up on places like StackOverflow once in a while.

Python is used widely and pretty heavily.

It's a built-in feature to many operating systems in common use. The exception, of course, is Windows.

I just found out -- the hard way -- that Python …

Check this out: "IT Is Too Darn Slow".

This article is packed with helpful advice on how to improve "velocity" and the pace of innovation.

Good quotes: "Once IT decides to focus on speed, two obstacles get in the way: security and governance." This is important. Manage security without it …

Here's a lack of a use case for you.

Someone -- fraudulently -- used my email address to subscribe to XBox live. I cannot remedy this. Apparently, neither can Microsoft.

I get spam from XBox. I change my passwords all over the place.

I go to the XBox live web site to …

A quote

"What sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense."

—Napoleon Bonaparte

There's no authoritative source for this quote. Since Fulton was commissioned to …

Check out this little item in eWeek. "Transforming DIY Projects from the Painful to the Productive".

As an outside consultant in a large number of organizations, I've seen a lot of DIY projects—what we used to call "end user computing". Indeed, I've even been hired by the user organizations …

In "Unit Test Case, Subject Matter Experts and Requirements" I suggested that it's often pretty easy to get a spreadsheet of full-worked out examples from subject-matter experts. Indeed, if your following TDD, that spreadsheet of examples is solid gold.

Let's consider something relatively simple. Let's say we're working on some …

Here's a typical "I don't like TDD" question: the topic is "Does TDD really work for complex projects?"

Part of the question focused on the difficulty of preparing test cases that cover the requirements. In particular, there was some hand-wringing over conflicting and contradictory requirements.

Here's what's worked for me …

We're struggling with our Relational Schema. We're not alone, of course, everyone struggles with the relational model. The technology imposes difficult limitations and we work around them.

There's kind of a 4-step process through which the relational schema erodes into irrelevance. The concept of a schema is not irrelevant. It's …