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 ...
Recent Posts
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...
Optimizing Flask client tests
When writing Python integration tests, it’s useful to put slow code such as database access in a setUpClass method, so that they are only executed once for...
Per-OS virtual environments in Python
A common setup for web development is to have a virtual machine on your Mac running all your code. Typically this involves a shared folder containing the cod...
Getting Started with Sphinx docs
Everyone knows that you should write documentation for your code. Writing documentation actually is not that hard. Like any type of writing, the hardest part...
Customizing Celery with Task Arguments
Celery is an awesome distributed asynchronous task system for Python. It’s great out of the box, but a couple of times I have needed to customize it. Specifi...