Sometimes I think we need professional certification in this industry. I supported the ICCP for a long time.

In addition to certification, which requires ongoing educational credits to maintain, there ought to be a process for revoking one's certification, requiring them to pass their exams again.

Here's three strikes against …

Imagine that you're a beer distributor who provides "just-in-time" beer by type. You don't take orders for a specific brand, you take orders a type: stout, lager, India pale ale, etc. You resolve the bill based on what you actually delivered.

This can be kind of complex. However, there's no …

See "Commenting the Code".

This posting tickled my fancy because it addressed the central issue of "what requires comments outside Python docstrings". All functions, classes, modules and packages require docstrings. That's clear. But which lines of code require additional documentation?

We use Sphinx, so we make extensive use of docstrings …

A DBA suggested that I read up on "Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect".

Apparently the DBA had read the phrase "direct compiler support of versioning of APIs" in a review of the book and -- immediately -- become terribly confused.

I can see why a DBA would be …

Check out "End User 2.0: When Employees Have All The Answers" in InformationWeek. This is about adoption of non-approved technology. Think iPad.

This shows what innovation looks like when it happens.

1. There's no process for innovation.
2. There's no "permission to fail". Folks just fail or succeed without anyone's support …

Computerworld, July 26, 2010 cover story was "Sustaining Innovation". The magazine was chock-full of thoughts on innovation.

Much of it was good, but some of it is just appeasement to management types who are focused on cost and schedule.

"Establish processes and ownership. Organizations should have a process for taking …

My laptop chartplotter software (GPSNavX) is marvelous for visualizing a route. But, there are elements to route planning that it doesn't handle gracefully.

Specifically, it doesn't provide useful elapsed time calculation at all. While the TTG and ETA (Time to Go and Estimated Time of Arrival) for the next waypoint …

Extracting legacy data can be really, really hard. However, it's of central importance because data lives forever. Application "logic" and "business rules" come and go.

Today's case study is a dusty old Dell Inspiron Laptop running Windows 98 with Chartview software.

Problem 1. Chartview. No extract or export capability, except …

In looking at Application Lifecycle Management (see "ALM Tools"), I had found that SCons appears to be pretty popular. It's not as famous as all the make variants, or Apache Ant or Apache Maven, but it seems to have a niche in the forest of Build Automation Software.

While it …

As a hypothetical, I was asked about doing Oracle Analytic functions in Python.

[Sidebar: Politics. The question came from a DBA in a C# shop. That's why it's just hypothetical. Politically, they could never make use of this information. In C# world, Functional Programming is often scary and evil. It …