Designing for the Mental Model
Software is typically more complicated under the hood than it looks on the surface. A good product presents a simple and consistent user interface. Ideally, ...
Recent Posts
Abstracting away session handling in Flask/SQLAlchemy
Having used the Django ORM for years, I appreciate the power of the SQLAlchemy ORM. Many complicated SQL queries that are not possible to express in a single...
QA 101 - How to Write a Bug Report
The purpose of a bug report is to enable an engineer to fix the bug. In companies with no dedicated testing/QA resources, bug reports get generated by many d...
Interoperable AES256 encryption between CryptoJS, PyCrypto and CryptoSwift
Even though AES256 is a standard, there are enough choices left to implementing libraries to make cross platform encrypting and decrypting tricky. In particu...
Comparison of Chat Message Platforms
If you’re writing a chat app, the first big question to consider is whether you are going to write the actual chat backend. Why would you want to? You would ...
Case Study in Documentation Usability - Django vs. Flask/SQLAlchemy
When I’m evaluating new open source projects, there are a few things I look for. I look for how many stars they have on GitHub. I look at their issues in Git...
The Role of Specifications in Agile
It’s commonly said that everyone does Agile differently. In my experience, it’s also common to do basically whatever you want and call it Agile. It can be u...
Death to Meetings (and other alternatives)
What percentage of your time at work do spend in meetings? If you’re a middle manager, it’s likely about 35% of your time, and if you’re in upper manageme...
Getting Engineering Involved Early in a Project
Agile requirements are ideally visual and should be barely sufficient, i.e. the absolute minimum required to enable development and testing to proceed wit...
Flask-Admin Edit One To Many Fields from the List View
I got to play with Flask-Admin for the first time this week. Compared with Django admin, it’s very extensible, though the default UI is pretty ugly. In any c...