Let's talk about a Small Not For Profit that has a number of web assets, but a web presence that isn't working well.

First, they have a Domain Name (pretend it's www.smallnfp.org). They have an associated organization which is hosting their web site. Let's call them the Associated …

Two recent conversations with the Non-Compromisers.

NC: "I can't use Yahoo! mail"

Me: "What?"

NC: "Yahoo! mail has a "Home" tab which isn't the inbox. It always lands there."

Me: "Yep. That's a javascript thing. The tab isn't bookmarkable."

NC: "The fact that I can't land directly on the "Inbox …

The requirements are a sequence diagram showing a complex back-and-forth with the vendor's web service. Each request and reply is detailed, but there's no overview or summary stated. It's implied, and all of the business folks can articulate it, but no one wrote any of it down.

This looks like …

REST is cool because there's less protocol there -- little more than HTTP and some kind of representation for objects (XML, JSON or whatever.) It seems to me that REST with JSON is a very lightweight approach to implementing web services. Doing this in Python further trims down the technology stack …

The problem is this: parsing HTML from a variety of sources to create pleasant, easy-to-manipulate spreadsheets. HTML can represent the same data in a variety of ways, even within a single web site. What we have are several layers of parsing; layers which must be linked with increasingly simplified intermediate …

The email from a developer starts with a complaint and moves on to a plea: "I am constantly having to look at "IF o_status = 0". Code would be a lot more compact and easy to read if exceptions were used. Request favor: Please consider blogging about using exception handling vs …

This put me over the edge. Go deh! has a deep analysis of in "Duck Typing Done Right is Wrong ". It took a minute to parse, but the article is excellent. (A less obscure title would quote the original posting properly: '"Duck Typing Done Right" is Wrong', but that's less …

NUT. No Unit Test Cases. Need I say more? If there are not unit tests, this isn't real programming.

MCF and NCF. Minimal/No Use of Collections Framework. The MCF defect occurs when someone uses only the Array or Vector classes. The NCF defect occurs when someone uses only primitive …

It's not that spreadsheets are evil incarnate, it's just that there are so many ways to abuse them. Spreadsheets put a veneer of structure over some information. Bad spreadsheet design, worse yet, puts unstructured information into a hard-to-manipulate format.

I've complained about this before. See Great Quotes about the Spreadsheet …

Some of Cringley's The Truth About IT Consultants is good stuff. His Type "A" and Type "C" are both stories of consultants who are brought in because they have specific skills. In the "A" case, it's a technical skill, and in the "C" case it's project management.

In both cases …