I get emails looking for help with technology choice. Essentially: "I've got this idea for game-changing software idea, what technology should I use?" These questions have disturbing expectations. There's a Gordian Knot of dependencies that's sometimes baffling.

Sometimes the questions are about choosing a "tech stack" or an "architecture". Sometimes …

The multiprocessing module includes a generic Process class, which can be used to wrap a simple function.

The function must be designed to work with Queues or Pipelines or other synchronization techniques.

There's an advantage, however, to defining a class which gracefully handles generator functions. If we have Generator-Aware multi-processing …

The advantage of multiprocessing is to have multiple processes working on a problem. If we break a big problem into small, concurrent steps, we can often get results in less elapsed time by making more effective use of the CPU. Specifically, we want to make use of non-user time where …

Years ago, when designing an interface to a vendor's web services, I did the following. This isn't a genius move, but it's worth emphasizing how important it is. And what's most important isn't technical.

1. I built a simple spike solution to access their service.
2. I morphed this into a "sanity …

Some folks love the twin ideas that (1) "someone" might break the API rules and (2) they must write lots of bonus code to "prevent" problems.

Sigh.

There are three distinct things here.

• API definition - something we do all the time.
• "Defensive Programming" - something that may or may not actually …

"Threads don't promote concurrent I/O."

Kernel threads may. Most of us write user threads. Here's a great summary under Thread (Computer Science).

However, the use of blocking system calls in user threads (as opposed to kernel threads) or fibers can be problematic. If a user thread or a fiber …

A joyous milestone today. Removed much of our pre-Piston RESTful web services code.

We started with the Django-REST Interface. While nice, it imposed a number of restrictions that were onerous. In particular, we have a lot of non-model responses. They're model-like data that we serialize to be compatible with …

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

I got an email with hundreds of words of content. This part made sense: "...doing wild card searches using Oracle's database engine and are wondering why is it so slow and how do they make it …

I have slowly grown to love RESTful web services.

I was asked about a nearly empty section in the code repository labeled "Java client".

"Yes," I said, "it's a place-holder for a Java package that includes classes to wrap our RESTful web services."

"Really?" I was asked, "Why? We use …

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 …