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 …

Check this out: http://www.antiifcampaign.com/.

I'm totally in favor of reducing complexity. I've seen too many places where a Strategy or some other kind of Delegation design pattern should have been used. Instead a cluster of if-statements was used. Sometimes these if-statements suffer copy-and-paste repetition because someone didn't …

Check this out: "Stupid Template Languages".

Love this:

"The biggest annoyance I have with smart template languages (Mako, Genshi, Jinja2, PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, etc) is that you have the capability to mix core business logic with your end views, hence violating the rules of Model-View-Controller architecture."

Yes, too much power …

Imagine that we've got a collection of applications used by customers to provide data, a collection of applications we use to collect data from vendors. We've got a third collection of analytical tools.

Currently, they share a common database, but the focus, use cases, and interfaces are different.

Okay so …