Making the rounds: Droopy: easy file receiving. Apparently, there were some widely-read blog posts about this. Google "Droopy: A Tiny Web Server That Makes Receiving Files a Snap" to see the buzz.

The point here is that 750 lines of Python code can go a long way. It's a complete …

Let's say you've found some new, good way to do business.

JSON, for example. Or Agile Methods in general. Or TDD specifically. Or use of an ORM.

You read up on it. You build a spike solution to show that it's more efficient.

We do a lot of bulk loads. A lot.

So many that we have some standard ETL-like modules for generic "Validate", "Load", "Load_Dimension", "Load_Fact" and those sorts of obvious patterns.

Mostly our business processes amount to a "dimensional conformance and fact load", followed by extracts, followed by a different "dimensional …

Here's the situation.

A vendor sent us three separate files which need to be merged. 70,000+ records each. They're CSV files, so column position doesn't much matter. The column name (in row 1) is what matters.

I looked at three solutions. Two of which are merely OK. The third …

They say "You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure". This isn't quite right, however. You can measure lots of things you can't manage. Rainfall, for example. Software development is like that. You can measure stuff that you can't actually control.

The original Deming quotes are more subtle: there are things …

The SQL database offers a domain-independent NULL value. This is a terrible thing, and should be treated with a depth of respect and fear.

Before using NULL values in a database, read things like "Null Values in Fuzzy Datasets" and "Null Values Revisited in Prospect of Data Integration".

See this …

I can't say enough good things about TDD.

But I'll try.

Due to an epic failure to read the documentation (this, specifically) I couldn't get our RESTful web services to work in Apache.

The entire application system has pretty good test coverage. I use the Python unittest to do integration …

It seems so simple: use the HTTP Digest Authorization with the Quality of Protection set to "auth".

It's an easy algorithm. A nonce that encodes a timestamp can be used to be sure no one is attempting to cache credentials. It's potentially very, very nice.

Except for one thing: Apache …

Software developers get so used to their Culture of Complexity, they hardly notice it.

See Asshole-Driven Development for more thoughts on this. The comments add lots and lots of examples of dysfunctional development. Many of these are additional examples of complexity run amok.

My personal addition is Next Year's Dollars …

I sat through a great use case analysis session recently.

"Great" because I saw lots of ways to derail a simple process. Eventually, we did identify a couple of actors and a couple of use cases. But it took hours and hours.

Bonus: this was the third go-round on these …