Picking a place to live in the East Bay
My wife and I recently bought a house in the San Francisco bay area. Having no family in the area, and no real ties to any neighborhood, it was surprisingly ...
Recent Posts
Why software engineers should maintain a blog
I have a few pieces of standard advice that I give to anyone starting out in software engineering. Join a startup, max out your 401k and start a blog. Why sh...
Creating International CSV files with Python
You might assume that reading and writing files using the CSV format, being a simple and human-readable implementation, would be relatively pain free. You wo...
Designing a Dimensional Schema for a hierarchy that can change over time
I’ve recently been reading about dimensional schemas, aka star schemas. The whole idea seems to be to optimize for fast queries that are also simple to write...
Enabling SOLR autocommit with a custom Haystack backend
By default Django Haystack makes updates to your Solr index available for searching immediately. It does this in the simplest way possible, it commits every ...
Debugging an IE7 browser crash (manual git bisect)
Every once in a while, you have to put in a heroic effort to diagnose a bug. When you finally figure it out, you want to run around the office singing “We ar...
Rich client side web apps gone too far!
I have seen some Javascript in my time…
Distributing Vagrant base boxes securely
Vagrant is typically used to provide local, uniform and repeatable development virtual machines. Repeatable is given little importance in the documentation, ...
Better debugging through healthy living
Debugging code is more of an art than a science. It’s an art form that you will have plenty of time to practice as a software engineer.
Loading classes from modules with reflection in Python (imp module)
For a dynamic language, it’s more difficult than it needs to be to import a module dynamically in Python. It’s very easy to just from foo import bar, but wha...