Patient: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

I got an email with hundreds of words of content. This part made sense: "...doing wild card searches using Oracle's database engine and are wondering why is it so slow and how do they make it …

Looked interesting enough for someone to email it to me. Still can't figure out why they sent it. Posting this feels like advertising, so perhaps I should charge them a promotional fee.

I have slowly grown to love RESTful web services.

I was asked about a nearly empty section in the code repository labeled "Java client".

"Yes," I said, "it's a place-holder for a Java package that includes classes to wrap our RESTful web services."

"Really?" I was asked, "Why? We use …

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …

I'm looking for a unbiased Python expert to help with a book I'm working on. We need "an unbiased python expert with a keen eye for detail."

The role is technical reviewer. I've never done this before, but it appears that the tech reviewer is a paid position somewhere in …

Many folks use Python's unittest module for integration testing. It sometimes leads to whining and hand-wringing, but it is very effective. Ordinary "unit" tests use mocks and focus on a class or a module more-or-less in isolation. The purists say "complete isolation". But that's sometimes unrealistic. A class that's part …

I love hypothetical questions. Got a bunch recently. I guess it's the season for hypotheticals.

These all seem to come from the "Averted Glance" school of management. The best part about the "I don't want to know the details" management is that we need to substitute metrics for understanding. One …

In general, Software Engineering Metrics are not without value.

Expecting magic from metrics is what devalues them, reducing metrics to dumb numerosity.

Once code is in production, plenty of metrics are readily available. For example, the trouble-ticket history tells you everything you need to know about code that's in production …

I've (finally) updated the pyWeb Literate Programming Tool.

There were feature requests and bug reports. Much to do. Sadly, I'm really slow at doing it.

pyWeb Literate Programming Tool | Download pyWeb Literate Programming Tool software for free at SourceForge.net

Check out this item on eWeek: Java, C, C++: Top Programming Languages for 2011 - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com.

The presentation starts with Java, C, C++, C# -- not surprising. These are clearly the most popular programming languages. These seem to be the first choice made by many organizations.

In …