The ORM layer is magic, right?

The ORM layer "hides" the database, right?

We never have to think about persistence, right? It just magically "happens."

Wrong.

Here's some quotes from a recent email:

"Somehow people are surprised that we would have performance issues. Somehow people are surprised that now that …

Browsers are required to skip over bad HTML and render something.

Consequently, many web sites have significant HTML errors that don't show up until you try to scrape their content.

Beautiful Soup has a handy hook for doing markup massage prior to parsing. This is a way of fixing site-specific …

After installing Python 2.6 in Mac OS X, I had problems with BBEdit not finding the right version of Python. It kept running an old 2.5 version.

I finally tracked down the BBEdit documentation, http://pine.barebones.com/manual/BBEdit_9_User_Manual.pdf.

Found this: "BBEdit expects to find Python …

Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

The question of "Stored Procedures and Triggers" comes up fairly frequently.

Over the years (since the 90's, when stored procedures were introduced to Oracle) I've learned precisely how awful a mistake this technology is.

I've seen numerous problems that have stored procedures as their root cause. I'll identify just a …

Whitehouse.gov is publicly using open source tools.

See Boing Boing blog entry. Plus Huffington Post blog entry.

Most importantly, read this from O'Reilly.

Many places are using open source in stealth mode. Some even deny it. Ask your CIO what the policy on open source is, then check to …

Python's packages and modules are -- generally -- quite elegant.

They're relatively easy to manage. The __init__.py file (to make a module into a package) is very elegant. And stuff can be put into the __init__.py file to create a kind of top-level or header module in a larger package …

After all, programmers are all lazy and stupid.

Got his complaint recently.

"Developers on a fairly routine basis check in code into the wrong branch."

Followed by a common form of the lazy and stupid complaint. "Someone should think about which branch is used for what and when." Clearly "someone …

I had a recent conversation with some folks who were desperate to "processize" everything. They were asking about Scrum Master certification and what standards organizations define the "official" Scrum method.

Interestingly, I also saw a cool column in Better Software magazine, called "Scrumdamentalism" on the same basic question.

In my …

I find that some people spend way too much time doing "meta" programming. I prefer to use someone's framework rather than (a) write my own or (b) extend theirs. I prefer to learn their features (and quirks).

Having disclaimed an interest in meta programming, I do have to participate in …