What I knew was this: I had a program, and I was supposed to make it work. I went to a meeting, the responsibility was duly handed off to me. "Alex has it mostly done, you just need to pitch in and help finish this by Friday."

Okay.

I listened …

Recently , I found out that my HTML parser was only a mere shadow Beautiful Soup . I invented what is -- essentially -- a similar core structure. I didn't carry it to the same level of completion. From what little research I've done, my invention predates Beautiful Soup.

It's one of those "collective …

TC writes:

I’m sitting in the corner, considering SOA from various perspectives:

• What sized company?
• When you sell/license the tech, what are you actually trying to sell? The initial implementation, individual services, ???
• Chicken vs. egg – implement first or align the culture first?

What is our company's approach?

Has …

The question seemed simple, which testing framework is the simplest? The situation is complex. There's a web application, there are developers and there are testers. The developers develop, and the testers test. So far, not so complex.

Here's the complexity. The testers are pretty focused on manual point-and-click testing. They …

Centuries ago -- it seems -- Jim Coplien facilitated a session for us at ChiliPLoP . Eventually, I figured out that patterns are a solution to a problem in a context which resolves various alternative forces, and has some understood consequences. Context - Problem - Forces - Solution - Consequences.

In this month's CACM, the article on …

See So What Are Requirements? in Dr. Dobb's.

I've seen requirements done badly. I've seen some notable failures of the use case technique: almost entirely because people refuse to actually apply the technique; they refuse to write use cases from the actor's point of view. I've whined about this before …

The Alex Handy story Study Predicts Upswing in Dynamic Language Use is old news, but when it's in a print publication like SD Times, then it starts to gain some traction. And it's one of those journalistic things: you can't repeat the obvious without some kind of "angle". And the …

The problem with Python is the vastness of the Open Source community. You may think you have something cool for HTML parsing , but then someone tells you about Beautiful Soup which already does it.

In my defense, I actually did a version of this HTML parsing back in '02. Indeed …

The mixed content model, defined succinctly in the XML standards, is pleasant enough for human communication, but leaves a lot to be desired. For example, mapping a mixed content model to a relational database is a hard problem.

The problem is made worse when the document is HTML. HTML doesn't …

We wind up in this situation from time to time.

Customer:

[X] is broken, what will it cost to fix it?

Us:

Depends, but put $$$ in your budget.

Customer:

I can't afford $$$, I can barely afford to Keep The Lights On™!

At this point, the conversation is usually over. There …