Creating a Budget and Sticking to It
The hardest part of doing anything is starting. If you’re someone who has delayed getting serious about retirement savings, or budgeting in general, I would ...
Posts by Tag
401k
Saving for Retirement as a Software Engineer
Take 100 young Americans starting out at age 25. By age 65, one will be rich and four will be financially independent. The remaining 95 will reach the tra...
MySQL
MySQL drop column if exists
Idempotence describes the property of operations in mathematics and computer science that means that multiple applications of the operation do not change th...
agile
How to run a Retrospective
Retrospectives are a good catch-all for team health, bonding, and continuous improvement
Trust Eats Process for Lunch
A set of individuals can become a self-actualized team that can deliver working software despite uncertainty, not when they have perfect documentation or pro...
💯 The Agile Scorecard – 12 Questions
Lots of people claim to do Agile. Most believe it. Many are not doing the basics right.
Scrum in a Nutshell
Scrum is a fundamentally adaptable process. One of the core pieces is the retrospective, where the team can collaboratively change the process itself. Team m...
Agile Motivations and Objections
Often when I first start talking to someone new about Agile and/or Scrum, they have questions and occasionally objections. More often they just don’t underst...
ajax
Quick and dirty Ajax on any FORM
I have been trying to write as much unobtrusive javascript as possibly lately. Mainly this means getting everything working without any javascript in the pi...
analytics
Pulling Google Analytics data into Django
Website analytics tools are expected to do a lot. They need to allow you generate reports on metrics like sessions, pages/time per session, bounce rates, re...
ant
Ant java.library.path
Maybe this will save someone an hour... to set java.library.path from inside an ANT Java task, you need to set the parameter fork="true".
apache
Splunk/Rsyslog/Apache/Ubuntu Quickstart
I've been using Splunk for several years. It's a great tool for log file visualization and analytics. One thing I use it for is to generate a graph of avera...
per subdomain robots.txt in Apache
When I develop a website, I tend to go subdomain crazy. If the site is crazy.net, I probably configure www.crazy.net, admin.crazy.net, static.crazy.net, you...
api
REST API Design
REST APIs operate over HTTP, use standard verbs like GET and POST, expose a common-sense URL structure and return resources in a well-defined format, typical...
app
Deploying React Native apps with Buddy Build
Buddy Build is a great tool for getting your app out to physical devices, whether that is during development, or in production. Their tool is fairly agnostic...
awk
First AWK script
I have been aware of AWK as a "general purpose programming language that is designed for processing text-based data" since college. But until today I never s...
backup
Backing up gmail to Dropbox using getmail on Linux
What if gmail went away tomorrow, or at least deleted all your mail? It may not be as far fetched as you think. It's always prudent to have a backup.
bash
Save a screenshot to Dropbox with a keyboard shortcut
It's not uncommon for me to call my product manager over to my desk half a dozen times on a given day to look at what I'm working on. To speed things up, I ...
beautifulsoup
Sanitize HTML with Beautiful Soup
If you have a website that displays user-generated HTML (emails, rich text entry, etc), you likely want to scrub that HTML before you display it. At the ver...
Backup your Amazon order history with Python
Ever wanted to download your Amazon order history? Maybe you want to get it into a spreadsheet, or just keep it around in case Amazon decides to delete this...
Parsing invalid xml with Beautiful Soup
Sometimes, bad xml happens to good people. In my case, I was getting a text stream back from a web-service call that proported to be xml, but was actually n...
blog
Introducing Advocoders
Update: this app was decommissioned in 2022
book-review
Book Review - Leadership and Self Deception
This is a review of Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute.
bootstrap
Fixing styling incompatibility with Google Charts and Twitter Bootstrap
Ran into a vexing issue this week when we upgraded to using Twitter Bootstrap. Some of our analytics graphs using Google Charts were suddenly broken in IE 7/...
cache
Per-request Query Caching in Django
The Django ORM is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to access the database, that sometimes you forget that it’s even happening. That is, until you open ...
career
Writing Your Self Review
The best feedback is tied to one or more specific examples, and also highlights the impact of what happened on the team or company.
What I Learned at My Last Job
On the surface, what you learn at a particular job takes the form of bullet points on your resume. But there are also deeper, more private lessons.
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...
What to spend your last two weeks at a job doing
So, you’ve given your notice at your job. Now what? First off, stop coding. That’s right. Finish whatever small task you’re currently working on, but for the...
How to prepare for a software engineer interview
Interviews for software engineering positions are equal measures normal job interview and extemporaneous logic bomb de-arming with an audience. Most develope...
celery
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...
Celery fail silently context manager
Celery ships with an configuration option called CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER which causes all tasks to be executed immediately instead of being asynchronously execut...
Celery: blacklists and custom formatting for exception emails
Celery 2.3 has a few high level knobs to turn with regards to exception emails. You can whitelist exceptions by type. You can change the recipients, email s...
django-celery: blacklist errors by class
Celery has a built-in mechanism for sending untrapped errors to admins via email. This is great for trouble-shooting. Sending the emails directly to develop...
django-celery with postgres: “connection already closed” errors
I ran into a mysterious, transient exception this week using django-celery.
Django/Celery Quickstart (or, how I learned to stop using cron and love celery)
Websites often need tasks that run periodically, behind the scenes. Examples include sending email reminders, aggregating denormalized data and permanently ...
checklist
Dependency Management Playbook
How to manage risk for your project dependencies, i.e. when you need another team to put something on their roadmap.
How to Run a Zoom All Hands
If you’re working in corporate America, you’ve probably been to a lot of All Hands presentations.
chrome
Blank Canvas brings @require support to Chrome
Quick shout-out to the Blank Canvas Script Handler, a relatively unknown Google Chrome extension that brings @require support to userscripts in Chrome.
coldfusion
CFHTMLHEAD and CFCONTENT reset
I ran into some trouble this week attaching my JSON Exception Handling to a new ColdFusion feature. Specifically, there was content from that page that surv...
ColdFusion JSON Exception Handling
When calling a ColdFusion end-point from an Ajax call, the caller is expecting a certain format. In my projects, that's usually JSON. Regardless, it would be...
computer-science
Thoughts on Object Oriented Class Design
The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you...
cron
How to use a cron job to open a web page in a browser
At work, I have a set of long-term goals I'm supposed to be making progress on over the year. As a way to remind myself about them, I have a cron job setup ...
csrf
Varnish caching for unauthenticated Django views
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a cl...
Django CSRF verification failed in IE IFRAME
I ran into an interesting issue with the Django's CSRF (cross site request forgery) protection this week. Some users were reporting seeing the dreaded "CSRF...
csv
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...
database
Why Database Integrity Matters
Given the rise in popularity of NoSQL solutions, typically set apart by their explicit forfeiture of traditional RDBMS features, you might think that age old...
datawarehouse
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...
debugging
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.
director
Organizational Design
You don’t have to choose just one organizational strategy for your entire company. A mature product org may be organized by goal, while a new product org has...
django
Faster Django/sqlite runserver with /dev/shm
When you’re writing software, the feedback loop is king. Whether you’re implementing new functionality, changing server configuration or writing unit tests, ...
Hacking Django runserver to run multiple Django instances
Recently at work we’ve been on a “servicifying” kick, meaning we’re slowly converting our monolithic Django app into separate services. To start, this just m...
Subclassing Django’s runserver causes command to be run twice
This week I was creating my own version of the Django management command runserver. Like the built-in, I wanted to run a lightweight development only web ser...
Introducing Django Migratron
Django Migratron is a schema migration tool for Django. Why write another schema migration tool? Here is how we stack up against other tools.
Read only Django shell
Say you have a bunch of developers that occasionally need Django shell access to production, but you want this to be an exceptional event. Here is a drop-in ...
Django Nose Lint Quickstart - Enforce fast unit tests
In the battle for blazing fast unit tests, you need all the tools you can get at your disposal. Enter django-nose-lint, a new Nose plugin that lets you enfor...
Introducing Django Pyfixtures
Django fixtures were initially touted as a great way to pre-populate your database, mainly for testing. Over time, various community leaders have suggested t...
Keep Track of Vim Tabs Per Git Branch
Mylyn is a “task lifecycle management framework” plugin for Eclipse. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but I know I really liked one particular feature. On ...
The Post/Redirect/Get (PRG) Pattern
Anyone who has used a web browser has probably encountered the dreaded “form resubmission” dialog. This happens when the user tries to refresh or use the bac...
Faster Django view unit tests with mocks
Unit tests need to be fast. Really fast. Some have suggested that speed is the defining characteristic of a unit test. But writing fast unit tests for Djang...
Django: persist some session state across login/logout boundaries
By definition session state is tied to the session. When you log out, you obviously don't want the server remembering who you are. Likewise, session state i...
Django: ditch objects.using() in favor of a per-view decorator to switch databases
Django has a "multiple databases" feature that lets you read/write data from more than just the default database. I'm going to show you how to switch databa...
Django Nose/sqlite3 “too many SQL variables” error
Trying to get started with Django nose today on an existing project, I kept getting the following error trying to run my empty test suite:
Django/Postgres: Optimize COUNT(*) by replacing with an estimate
Every week I take a look at a report generated by the excellent pgFouine tool for our production Postgres database. This week, there was a surprising query ...
Django/NewRelic Quickstart (gunicorn.d + Django 1.3 hack)
New Relic is an excellent web application performance reporting tool. After a great experience using it on Heroku, I went to enable it for an existing self-...
Deploying Django staticfiles to Heroku via Hudson/Jenkins
Starting in Django 1.3, you can use the built-in staticfiles feature to bundle up css, javascript, images and other static resources for deployment to a CDN...
Django management command to list, filter and exclude models from a fixture
Dumping Django data to a fixture and loading it back up again are accomplished with the built-in management commands dumpdata and loaddata. However, loading...
Django/Heroku quickstart for existing applications
Getting a brand new Django application running on Heroku is fairly simple. There is a great tutorial for it on devcenter.heroku.com. I would recommend going...
Adding a .first() method to Django’s QuerySet
In my last Django project, we had a set of helper functions that we used a lot. The most used was helpers.first, which takes a query set and returns the fir...
Django aggregation, group by day
This week we had a hackathon to develop a better internal dashboard page that shows things like records added to the system over time. Not having generated ...
Using Access-Control-Allow-Origin to make cross domain POST requests from javsacript
Making ajax calls from javascript, even without a framework like jQuery, is pretty trivial. However, once you try to make the same request cross-domain, it ...
Python class attributes are evaluated on declaration
In Python, class attributes are evaluated and put into memory when the class is defined (or imported). For example, if you run the following code in an inte...
Django reset database connection
Django handles database connections transparently in almost all cases. It will start a new connection when your request starts up, and commit it at the end ...
Python/Django: disk based caching decorator
One of the great things about Django's caching framework is that you can cache complex objects. Say you have a list of dictionaries representing favorite mo...
Reduce javascript UI code with Django forms
Typically, I try to implement a dynamic UI feature without javascript on the first pass. Then, I layer in a little javascript goodness to make it more respo...
Profile and reduce memory use in Django with .iterator()
For the most part, objects allocated by Django are short-lived, and are eligible for garbage collection when the request ends. In our case, we also have som...
Django Performance: Latency Kills
Do you know how many database queries your Django pages are making? If you're like me, you probably don't know exactly. That's the beauty of the ORM; it abs...
Varnish caching for unauthenticated Django views
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a cl...
Django/Haystack: latitude/longitude radius search w/ SOLR
Haystack is a great indexed search framework for Django. Getting started is easy, and it includes many data types and facets out of the box. However, one da...
Celery: blacklists and custom formatting for exception emails
Celery 2.3 has a few high level knobs to turn with regards to exception emails. You can whitelist exceptions by type. You can change the recipients, email s...
Django: sticky URL query parameters per view
On pages that contain filter controls, such as search results pages, it's common for the filter selections to be put into the URL using query parameters. Th...
Django: exclude some views from middleware
In my Django applications, I tend to use custom middleware extensively for common tasks. I have middleware that logs page runtime, middleware that sets cont...
django-celery: blacklist errors by class
Celery has a built-in mechanism for sending untrapped errors to admins via email. This is great for trouble-shooting. Sending the emails directly to develop...
Django: white-label styling with URL prefixes
Many websites have branding or "white label" functionality where the site can have custom styles per customer. A common use case with commercial products is...
Python: calculate lighter/darker RGB colors
Many times color palettes have lighter and darker variations of the same color. This may be used to convey relative importance, or for something as simple a...
Django CSRF verification failed in IE IFRAME
I ran into an interesting issue with the Django's CSRF (cross site request forgery) protection this week. Some users were reporting seeing the dreaded "CSRF...
django-celery with postgres: “connection already closed” errors
I ran into a mysterious, transient exception this week using django-celery.
Django: show me the sql!
This week, I noticed that there was a select query in our production system without a where clause, and it was running a lot. Tracking it down, I found the ...
Python: Convert a Word/PDF document to html
My current Django project deals with resume files in Word/PDF format. In order to show a web preview of the file, it's necessary to translate these files to...
Per user timezones in Django
A common requirement for sites that deal with dates (most of them), is to display date and time values in the individual user's timezones. Luckily, there ar...
Django: uniform image resizing
Sometimes, you want all the thumbnails you're creating to be the same dimensions. For example, your layout may require a certain width so that all the items...
Pulling Google Analytics data into Django
Website analytics tools are expected to do a lot. They need to allow you generate reports on metrics like sessions, pages/time per session, bounce rates, re...
Check if a block is defined in Django
Very often when styling a webpage, you want to put content in a box. For example, say you have a standard box for contextual help content.
Show username in Django 500 error emails
By default, Django will send an email to the site admins when a 500 error occurs. These emails contain all kinds of great information such as stacktrace, HT...
Django log form ValidationErrors
Forms are the primary way your users communicate with your website. Hopefully, the users are always entering data in the correct format, and the form always...
Django HTML5 input placeholders
HTML5 has a bunch of nifty progressive enhancements to forms, one of which is placeholder text. Here is an example, along with the required code.
Redirect console output to a Django HttpResponse
Say you have some Python code that prints to the console, and you want to re-use that code in a Django view, but output the print statements as HTML in the ...
Django/Celery Quickstart (or, how I learned to stop using cron and love celery)
Websites often need tasks that run periodically, behind the scenes. Examples include sending email reminders, aggregating denormalized data and permanently ...
Django: ManyToManyField on ModelForm as checkbox widget
By default, Django will use a mutli-select widget for rendering a ManyToManyField on a ModelForm. Switching it out for checkboxes is simple.
Django ManyToMany error: “Cannot resolve keyword XXX into a field”
This week I was doing some refactoring, and started getting the following exception in Django's admin site. This was under Django 1.1.1, and Python 2.6.4.
Django forms date field format
Django defaults dates in forms to the format "2010-01-15". But changing the default format is fairly straight-forward, though there appears to be some confu...
Allowing periods (and other characters) in Django’s user model
By default, Django's authentication middleware only allows user names with 30 characters or fewer, containing only letters, digits and underscores. What if ...
Unit testing Django with doctest
There are two main ways to write tests in Django; doctests and unit tests. Units tests will be familiar to you if you're coming from Java. You basically wri...
Django - Externalize settings.py
In Django, settings.py is where you store configuration such as database connection strings, directory paths for static and media resources, as well as cach...
Python/Django: First Impressions
I've started a brand-new codebase at work. With new code comes the possibility of a new language/platorm. What we really needed was speed; we don't know exa...
docker
Docker/OSX Quickstart (not grokking docker yet? start here)
Docker has only been around since 2013, but it seems like it’s all over my Twitter feed and RSS reader. I’ve gone trough the “Hello world” example in the pas...
documentation
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...
dotfiles
Sync dotfiles with GitHub
What are dotfiles?
dropbox
Backing up gmail to Dropbox using getmail on Linux
What if gmail went away tomorrow, or at least deleted all your mail? It may not be as far fetched as you think. It's always prudent to have a backup.
easymock
EasyMock java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.easymock.internal.RecordState.(Lorg/easymock/internal/IMocksBehavior;)
Mysterious Error #5578:
Render styled HTML emails consistently with Litmus
Getting your HTML email to look the same on all mail clients is hard. Most clients only support a small subset of HTML. Outlook 2010 actually uses Word to d...
How to not get caught in spam filters
Reliably sending email without getting caught in spam filters is a full-time job, for someone. Surely not for an end-user, but for every end-user email, the...
Python smtplib long header folding using tabs instead of spaces
Unless you have done a lot of work with generating and parsing emails, you are probably not intimately familiar with the details of the MIME format. Here is...
Facebook Page Post Insights Empty Results
Spent a couple of hours tearing my hair out over the Facebook insights API this week. Say you have a Facebook page with an ID of 173304932707127, and a post ...
Migrate your Python app to Facebook OAuth 2.0
Facebook recently started enforcing OAuth 2.0 on app developers. Supposedly this was slated for Oct 1, 2011, but in practice it seems to have not started un...
Python: Convert your FBML Facebook app to IFRAME
Recently, users started reporting that our Facebook app was returning a blank screen. Tracking it down, it turned out that it was specifically when the user...
Facebook: Authenticate w/o the JavaScript SDK (Python)
If you're using the Facebook JavaScript SDK to implement Facebook connect, your site may be more fragile than you think. Last weekend, I ran into an issue w...
finance
Creating a Budget and Sticking to It
The hardest part of doing anything is starting. If you’re someone who has delayed getting serious about retirement savings, or budgeting in general, I would ...
firefox
Ubuntu Firefox/Chrome handle svn protocol
If you're using using a web-based bug tracking system (in my case, JIRA), or getting Subversion check-in emails in a web-based client, you may have seen URI...
fixtures
Introducing Django Pyfixtures
Django fixtures were initially touted as a great way to pre-populate your database, mainly for testing. Over time, various community leaders have suggested t...
flask
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...
Flask absolute import bug in debug mode
Ran into a vexing issue this week. I was getting errors trying to use absolute imports in a new flask app:
forms
In-context FORM help using jQuery
The Apple store checkout form redesign introduced me to the concept of in-context error messages.
Django log form ValidationErrors
Forms are the primary way your users communicate with your website. Hopefully, the users are always entering data in the correct format, and the form always...
Django HTML5 input placeholders
HTML5 has a bunch of nifty progressive enhancements to forms, one of which is placeholder text. Here is an example, along with the required code.
framebreaking
Youtube: Detecting X-Frame-Options/framebreaking in Python
My current project involves URL shortening. Like many URL shorteners, we wanted to get into frame bars. These are alternately called banners, share bars and...
gcharts
Fixing styling incompatibility with Google Charts and Twitter Bootstrap
Ran into a vexing issue this week when we upgraded to using Twitter Bootstrap. Some of our analytics graphs using Google Charts were suddenly broken in IE 7/...
gdata
Pulling Google Analytics data into Django
Website analytics tools are expected to do a lot. They need to allow you generate reports on metrics like sessions, pages/time per session, bounce rates, re...
git
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...
Python script to delete merged git branches
One of the great things about git is how fast it is. You can create a new branch, or switch to another branch, almost as fast as you can type the command. Th...
Using $EDITOR and a less paging from Python command line apps
Python’s built-in raw_input() function is a quick and dirty way to get text input from the user in your Python command line application. But it’s really only...
Easier source control merges by trimming trailing whitespace
If you do frequent branch merges in any source control system, you have likely encountered merge conflicts. When two branches have legitimate differences, m...
gmail
Backing up gmail to Dropbox using getmail on Linux
What if gmail went away tomorrow, or at least deleted all your mail? It may not be as far fetched as you think. It's always prudent to have a backup.
greasemonkey
Blank Canvas brings @require support to Chrome
Quick shout-out to the Blank Canvas Script Handler, a relatively unknown Google Chrome extension that brings @require support to userscripts in Chrome.
gtd
How I use OmniFocus Get Things Done
This is my personal system for staying on top of everything.
gunicorn
Django/NewRelic Quickstart (gunicorn.d + Django 1.3 hack)
New Relic is an excellent web application performance reporting tool. After a great experience using it on Heroku, I went to enable it for an existing self-...
hadoop
Hadoop from a Python Perspective
I’m just coming off a project where we decided to use Hadoop for the first time. We’re a Python shop developing an analytics feature. We have about 150m reco...
Sqoop/HBase Quickstart on Linux
Sqoop is a tool for bulk copying data between a relational database like MySQL and HDFS or another Hadoop based data store like Hive or HBase. It can either ...
HBase/Pig/Python Quickstart on OSX
Having spent a good chunk of the last two weeks getting a prototype analytics system running, I thought I would write up my findings. I was pleased to find t...
haystack
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 ...
Django/Haystack: latitude/longitude radius search w/ SOLR
Haystack is a great indexed search framework for Django. Getting started is easy, and it includes many data types and facets out of the box. However, one da...
hbase
Hadoop from a Python Perspective
I’m just coming off a project where we decided to use Hadoop for the first time. We’re a Python shop developing an analytics feature. We have about 150m reco...
Sqoop/HBase Quickstart on Linux
Sqoop is a tool for bulk copying data between a relational database like MySQL and HDFS or another Hadoop based data store like Hive or HBase. It can either ...
Hive with HBase Quickstart
Though there is some decent documentation, I found that setting up Hive with a HBase back-end to be somewhat fiddly. Hopefully this guide will help you get s...
Happybase Connection Pooling
Wrote a simple connection pool for Happybase using socketpool.
HBase Schema Introduction for Programmers
Schema design in NoSQL is very different from schema design in a RDBMS. Once you get something like HBase up and running, you may find yourself staring blank...
Using HBase/Thrift through the Rackspace Load Balancer
Using the binary Thrift protocol through a load balancer can be a little tricky. While it works out of the box in HAProxy, you may run into some slight troub...
Mocking HappyBase for unit testing HBase code
HappyBase is a friendly interface to interact with HBase from Python. It lets you perform basic HBase operations like get, put and scan. But say you have a b...
Flatten entire HBase column families with Pig and Python UDFs
Most Pig tutorials you will find assume that you are working with data where you know all the column names ahead of time, and that the column names themselve...
HBase/Pig/Python Quickstart on OSX
Having spent a good chunk of the last two weeks getting a prototype analytics system running, I thought I would write up my findings. I was pleased to find t...
heroku
Deploying Django staticfiles to Heroku via Hudson/Jenkins
Starting in Django 1.3, you can use the built-in staticfiles feature to bundle up css, javascript, images and other static resources for deployment to a CDN...
Django/Heroku quickstart for existing applications
Getting a brand new Django application running on Heroku is fairly simple. There is a great tutorial for it on devcenter.heroku.com. I would recommend going...
hibernate
Hibernate Search - Shard Query Optimization
Hibernate Search shards allow you to break down your index data into separate Lucene directories. Typically, indexes would be broken down either into N equa...
Hibernate Search - Query API helper
If you are programmatically generating a query string and then parsing it with the query parser then you should seriously consider building your queries dire...
hibernate-search
Hibernate Search - Shard Query Optimization
Hibernate Search shards allow you to break down your index data into separate Lucene directories. Typically, indexes would be broken down either into N equa...
Hibernate Search - Query API helper
If you are programmatically generating a query string and then parsing it with the query parser then you should seriously consider building your queries dire...
hive
Write CSV data into Hive and Python
Apache Hive is a high level SQL-like interface to Hadoop. It lets you execute mostly unadulterated SQL, like this:
Hive with HBase Quickstart
Though there is some decent documentation, I found that setting up Hive with a HBase back-end to be somewhat fiddly. Hopefully this guide will help you get s...
housing
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 ...
html5
Django HTML5 input placeholders
HTML5 has a bunch of nifty progressive enhancements to forms, one of which is placeholder text. Here is an example, along with the required code.
hudson
Deploying Django staticfiles to Heroku via Hudson/Jenkins
Starting in Django 1.3, you can use the built-in staticfiles feature to bundle up css, javascript, images and other static resources for deployment to a CDN...
ie7
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...
iframe
Youtube: Detecting X-Frame-Options/framebreaking in Python
My current project involves URL shortening. Like many URL shorteners, we wanted to get into frame bars. These are alternately called banners, share bars and...
interview
Interviewing as a Manager
Interviewing as an engineering manager is quite different from interviewing as an individual contributor.
My favorite coding interview question
Every software engineering interview I have ever participated in has involved a coding exercise. For one position, I would expect three two five separate cod...
How to prepare for a software engineer interview
Interviews for software engineering positions are equal measures normal job interview and extemporaneous logic bomb de-arming with an audience. Most develope...
java
Running a JAR as a service (Linux/upstart)
Running a java JAR as a daemon in Linux is fairly easy, but it took me some digging to figure out how. This is using the new upstart init script functionali...
Java hack to deal with Windows file paths in Linux
Say you have a large legacy ColdFusion app on top of Java that runs on Windows. File access is done both via java.io.File and by CFFILE (which in turn also ...
The case of the OOM Killer
An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was sav...
Java replaceAll() File.separator
When dealing with file paths, it's not uncommon to construct a path where the file separators are missing or duplicated. Ie, instead of c:\temp\test.txt, yo...
Ant java.library.path
Maybe this will save someone an hour... to set java.library.path from inside an ANT Java task, you need to set the parameter fork="true".
Deploying Jersey to JBOSS
I spent the afternoon playing around with Jersey in JBOSS. Jersey is a Java API for publishing REST web-services, and JBOSS is the application server we use...
Java phone number format API
So, you have a database with millions of phone numbers with free-for-all formatting. Ie, the UI does not enforce any constraints and the users are typing in...
RPC/Encoded web services on Java 1.6
Usually, when I want to call a remote web-service in Java, I would generate stub proxy classes at the command line with:
EasyMock java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.easymock.internal.RecordState.(Lorg/easymock/internal/IMocksBehavior;)
Mysterious Error #5578:
javascript
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...
waiting while a jQuery UI animation is running
A common pattern for less than instantaneous ajax calls is to show the user a "loading" animation while the ajax response is pending. If your animation is a...
jQuery: remove (script) tags from a string of html
I'm in the middle of writing a bookmarklet to screen scrape web pages. My back-end piece is having trouble parsing pages with lots of script tags. Since I d...
Using Access-Control-Allow-Origin to make cross domain POST requests from javsacript
Making ajax calls from javascript, even without a framework like jQuery, is pretty trivial. However, once you try to make the same request cross-domain, it ...
Reduce javascript UI code with Django forms
Typically, I try to implement a dynamic UI feature without javascript on the first pass. Then, I layer in a little javascript goodness to make it more respo...
Measure navigation timing with javascript
Historically, site administrators would measure their site performance by timing individual page renders. If your site is serving pages in less than 500ms, ...
Facebook: Authenticate w/o the JavaScript SDK (Python)
If you're using the Facebook JavaScript SDK to implement Facebook connect, your site may be more fragile than you think. Last weekend, I ran into an issue w...
Pulling Google Analytics data into Django
Website analytics tools are expected to do a lot. They need to allow you generate reports on metrics like sessions, pages/time per session, bounce rates, re...
Chained Select Progressive Enhancement
Perhaps you have encountered a chained select control in your travels. The canonical example would be on Monster or CareerBuilder, picking your area of expe...
click on a link (follow) via jQuery/JavaScript
You might reasonably assume that it would be possible to fire a click event on an "A" element (link) via JavaScript, at which point the browser would fire a...
Easier Development with Unobtrusive JavaScript, Part III
Part I defined what I mean by Unobtrusive JavaScript. Part II showed some specific examples. Now I want to talk a little more about why you might want to do...
Quick and dirty Ajax on any FORM
I have been trying to write as much unobtrusive javascript as possibly lately. Mainly this means getting everything working without any javascript in the pi...
ColdFusion JSON Exception Handling
When calling a ColdFusion end-point from an Ajax call, the caller is expecting a certain format. In my projects, that's usually JSON. Regardless, it would be...
Ajax grid performance in IE
Generating a grid (table) view from the results of an Ajax call is a common Web 2.0 use case. But performance can be an issue, especially on IE7.
Copying a link to the clipboard in IE/Javascript
Problem: You want to copy a link into the clipboard from a web-app such that when you paste, you get the link URL AND the link text.
jax-ws
Using a local copy of a WSDL with JAX-WS
By default when JAX-WS auto-generates a proxy stub via wsimport, it will reference the live web version of the WSDL in the stub definition. This means that w...
jaxb
Using JAXB without a schema
A Yahoo HotJobs API project has been my first exposure to REST APIs. Usually, I'm working with SOAP web-services. Bullhorn is actually thinking about trying ...
jquery
waiting while a jQuery UI animation is running
A common pattern for less than instantaneous ajax calls is to show the user a "loading" animation while the ajax response is pending. If your animation is a...
jQuery: remove (script) tags from a string of html
I'm in the middle of writing a bookmarklet to screen scrape web pages. My back-end piece is having trouble parsing pages with lots of script tags. Since I d...
jQuery hashtag input control
This jQuery snippet will turn an INPUT element into a hashtag input control. For example, if the user type "jobs business networking", it will translate it ...
Selenium: Execute arbitrary javascript (even jQuery)
We're very happy with our new-ish Selenium + Saucelabs setup for web site automation testing. But as easy as Selenium makes it to compose tests, you will in...
Preventing duplicate form submissions with jQuery
A common problem for a new site to have is for their users to occasionally submit the same form two or more times. For example, maybe they were adding a new...
In-context FORM help using jQuery
The Apple store checkout form redesign introduced me to the concept of in-context error messages.
click on a link (follow) via jQuery/JavaScript
You might reasonably assume that it would be possible to fire a click event on an "A" element (link) via JavaScript, at which point the browser would fire a...
Quick and dirty Ajax on any FORM
I have been trying to write as much unobtrusive javascript as possibly lately. Mainly this means getting everything working without any javascript in the pi...
keepassx
Ubuntu Unity: I want my KeePassX panel back!
Big props to Ubuntu for taking a risk and trying to innovate in the desktop experience arena. Unity is pretty cool, but pretty raw, too. For example, some a...
ktlo
Killing Features and Complexity to Reduce “KTLO”
Deleting code is the highest return on investment activity for a software engineer
latency
Django Performance: Latency Kills
Do you know how many database queries your Django pages are making? If you're like me, you probably don't know exactly. That's the beauty of the ORM; it abs...
linux
Development on a Mac versus Linux
I love the Mac computing experience. Their laptop hardware, like their phones, feel solid and elegant. OSX usability is excellent, though it is myopically ge...
Faster Django/sqlite runserver with /dev/shm
When you’re writing software, the feedback loop is king. Whether you’re implementing new functionality, changing server configuration or writing unit tests, ...
Switching from Ubuntu Unity to LXDE
Canonical was founded with the goal of bringing polish, consistency and usability to the Linux desktop. Derided unfairly by some as not contributing much tec...
Python: Convert a Word/PDF document to html
My current Django project deals with resume files in Word/PDF format. In order to show a web preview of the file, it's necessary to translate these files to...
litmus
Render styled HTML emails consistently with Litmus
Getting your HTML email to look the same on all mail clients is hard. Most clients only support a small subset of HTML. Outlook 2010 actually uses Word to d...
lucene
Django/Haystack: latitude/longitude radius search w/ SOLR
Haystack is a great indexed search framework for Django. Getting started is easy, and it includes many data types and facets out of the box. However, one da...
Numeric Range Searches in Lucene
One of the reasons Lucene is awesomely fast is that it treats all data as strings. This is a perfect optimisation for most searching tasks. However, it does...
Hibernate Search - Shard Query Optimization
Hibernate Search shards allow you to break down your index data into separate Lucene directories. Typically, indexes would be broken down either into N equa...
Hibernate Search - Query API helper
If you are programmatically generating a query string and then parsing it with the query parser then you should seriously consider building your queries dire...
lxde
Switching from Ubuntu Unity to LXDE
Canonical was founded with the goal of bringing polish, consistency and usability to the Linux desktop. Derided unfairly by some as not contributing much tec...
management
Burnout Playbook
Leaders need to be actively managing their own mental well-being at work
manager
Dependency Management Playbook
How to manage risk for your project dependencies, i.e. when you need another team to put something on their roadmap.
Organizational Design
You don’t have to choose just one organizational strategy for your entire company. A mature product org may be organized by goal, while a new product org has...
My Expectations for Managers
These are my basic expectations for managers that report to me
What are Healthy Relationships?
Strong relationships built in the small moments will be what you lean on to get through tough times
80 Percent is Done
80% of impact for anything comes from the first 20% of the work
Setting Direction: Create a Strategy
Good Strategy Bad Strategy using Apple circa 1997 as an example
How to Run a Zoom All Hands
If you’re working in corporate America, you’ve probably been to a lot of All Hands presentations.
How I use OmniFocus Get Things Done
This is my personal system for staying on top of everything.
How to run a Retrospective
Retrospectives are a good catch-all for team health, bonding, and continuous improvement
Setting Direction: Define a Vision
This post is a collaboration with Jason Ramirez, Frances Klein, and Maria Handberg
Google Sheets for Managers
Spreadsheets could replace 80% of software
How to Escalate
The magic of clean escalations is that 50% of the time, you come up with a compromise before you actually escalate. That’s just good collaboration.
Killing Features and Complexity to Reduce “KTLO”
Deleting code is the highest return on investment activity for a software engineer
Going Fully Remote as an Engineering Manager
Starting on the remote work journey
Growing an Engineering Manager
So, you want to be a manager?
Trust Eats Process for Lunch
A set of individuals can become a self-actualized team that can deliver working software despite uncertainty, not when they have perfect documentation or pro...
Transitioning Teams as a Manager
When a team gets a new manager, it can be a time of great uncertainty.
How to Choose a Team Size
Teams operate best at certain sizes. Try sub-teams of 3-4 engineers, and interleaving active projects more often at the sprint boundaries.
Getting Started Estimating with Story Points
How do you bootstrap a team to use story points?
Writing Your Self Review
The best feedback is tied to one or more specific examples, and also highlights the impact of what happened on the team or company.
Interviewing as a Manager
Interviewing as an engineering manager is quite different from interviewing as an individual contributor.
How to Handle Layoffs as a Manager
All companies go through layoffs. As a manager, you can count on participating in one, someday.
How to Give 360 Peer Feedback
Managers have a lot of practice giving people feedback. Most other engineers are only asked to give formal peer feedback once or twice a year. These are know...
Teams Working at a Sustainable Pace
How do you make sure that your team is not signing up for too much?
Don’t Split the Team Until You Have To
If you have a team that is unable to work effectively, there could be any number of causes. If you’re thinking about splitting the team into two or more team...
Saying the Same Thing Multiple Times
To communicate something to an organization of people, you need to repeat yourself. The more people involved, the more you will need to repeat yourself if yo...
Estimating Epic Stories in Three Steps
In Agile, an Epic story is a potentially large placeholder story in the backlog. Typically they will be broken down into manageable stories during grooming b...
Trading off Value, Quality and Time
The traditional Iron Triangle tries to explain in graphical form how software projects need to make hard tradeoffs between scope, schedule and resources.
Minimizing Impact of Interruptions on Engineers
Any software engineer knows the feeling of being “in the flow”, or “in the zone”. It’s when you get a large block of uninterrupted time to just code. These p...
Best Practices for Meetings
Every team meeting needs a primary owner. If you are the owner of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to make sure that this is a great use of team time.
Long Term Software Estimates
False scheduling to match a patron’s desired date is more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering because it is VERY DIFFICULT to make a vi...
Tiger Team Survival Guide
A tiger team is a diversified group of experts brought together for a single project, need, or event. They are usually assigned to investigate, solve, bui...
Management 101
Coming off some annual management training, I realize that I need to write some of these learnings down, in order to actually internalize them. This is mostl...
Using Points vs Hours for Estimates
One of the key innovations of Agile is that estimates should NOT be in hours, but in points. But it doesn’t just intuitively make sense. As a result, many te...
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...
Topics for One on Ones
I like to ask other managers what kind of questions they ask during their one on ones. Everyone has their own style, so I often get some interesting response...
managers
Headcount Tracking for a Medium Sized Org using a Spreadsheet
Don’t do what I did, and spend 10 years headcount tracking in text documents
mechanize
Backup your Amazon order history with Python
Ever wanted to download your Amazon order history? Maybe you want to get it into a spreadsheet, or just keep it around in case Amazon decides to delete this...
meetings
Minimizing Impact of Interruptions on Engineers
Any software engineer knows the feeling of being “in the flow”, or “in the zone”. It’s when you get a large block of uninterrupted time to just code. These p...
Best Practices for Meetings
Every team meeting needs a primary owner. If you are the owner of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to make sure that this is a great use of team time.
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...
mock
Faster Django view unit tests with mocks
Unit tests need to be fast. Really fast. Some have suggested that speed is the defining characteristic of a unit test. But writing fast unit tests for Djang...
nagios
Nagios check for Varnish Backends
We recently starting using Varnish to cache un-authenticated requests to our web farm. It even has this great feature called grace mode, where it will keep ...
Checking RabbitMQ queue size/age with Nagios
For months we were using RabbitMQ (with celery) with no real insight into what was going on inside the queue. Recently, we deployed the mangement plug-in, w...
netbios
Name resolution failure caching in SMB
If you have a production file server failing, you have serious problems. Client requests are failing. But they may not be failing quickly. If your product i...
newboss
My Expectations for Managers
These are my basic expectations for managers that report to me
Let’s Work Together
The first step is getting to know each other
Transitioning Teams as a Manager
When a team gets a new manager, it can be a time of great uncertainty.
What I Learned at My Last Job
On the surface, what you learn at a particular job takes the form of bullet points on your resume. But there are also deeper, more private lessons.
Trading off Value, Quality and Time
The traditional Iron Triangle tries to explain in graphical form how software projects need to make hard tradeoffs between scope, schedule and resources.
Best Practices for Meetings
Every team meeting needs a primary owner. If you are the owner of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to make sure that this is a great use of team time.
Long Term Software Estimates
False scheduling to match a patron’s desired date is more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering because it is VERY DIFFICULT to make a vi...
Cross Functional Scrum Teams
Teams are also cross-functional; Team members must have all of the skills necessary to create an increment of work. - Scrum Guide
Management 101
Coming off some annual management training, I realize that I need to write some of these learnings down, in order to actually internalize them. This is mostl...
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...
Book Review - Leadership and Self Deception
This is a review of Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute.
Lessons Learned at My Most Recent Job
Today is my first day of “unemployment” in the last 12 years. I’m switching jobs, soon to start at NerdWallet. This time, I decided to take a couple of weeks...
Topics for One on Ones
I like to ask other managers what kind of questions they ask during their one on ones. Everyone has their own style, so I often get some interesting response...
Rich client side web apps gone too far!
I have seen some Javascript in my time…
newrelic
Django/NewRelic Quickstart (gunicorn.d + Django 1.3 hack)
New Relic is an excellent web application performance reporting tool. After a great experience using it on Heroku, I went to enable it for an existing self-...
nginx
nginx + SSL reverse proxy tutorial
If you have an existing HTTP application that you want to enable SSL for, nginx provides a convenient reverse proxy mode. In this mode, nginx is just respon...
nose
Django Nose/sqlite3 “too many SQL variables” error
Trying to get started with Django nose today on an existing project, I kept getting the following error trying to run my empty test suite:
oauth
Migrate your Python app to Facebook OAuth 2.0
Facebook recently started enforcing OAuth 2.0 on app developers. Supposedly this was slated for Oct 1, 2011, but in practice it seems to have not started un...
object-oriented
Thoughts on Object Oriented Class Design
The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you...
opensource
Introducing Advocoders
Update: this app was decommissioned in 2022
Democratic Product Management
In 2007, Dell launched their IdeaStorm site. It was the first example I had seen of a website where users can go to vote on features. From their FAQ:
osx
Development on a Mac versus Linux
I love the Mac computing experience. Their laptop hardware, like their phones, feel solid and elegant. OSX usability is excellent, though it is myopically ge...
p3p
Django CSRF verification failed in IE IFRAME
I ran into an interesting issue with the Django's CSRF (cross site request forgery) protection this week. Some users were reporting seeing the dreaded "CSRF...
performance
How to Run Calibrations
Calibrations are a group-based process for an organization to increase the equity of individual performance reviews across a large set of teams
Django Performance: Latency Kills
Do you know how many database queries your Django pages are making? If you're like me, you probably don't know exactly. That's the beauty of the ORM; it abs...
Measure navigation timing with javascript
Historically, site administrators would measure their site performance by timing individual page renders. If your site is serving pages in less than 500ms, ...
Ajax grid performance in IE
Generating a grid (table) view from the results of an Ajax call is a common Web 2.0 use case. But performance can be an issue, especially on IE7.
personal-finance
What are the less obvious downsides of a Health Savings Plan?
As someone with a young family and who is generally on track for retirement savings, I switched to an HSA and HDHP for two years, but then switched back
The Software Engineer’s Easy Mode Guide to US Tax Withholdings
Set withholdings to zero, and pay up to an extra 15% of your bonus and RSU vest in the form of quarterly estimated taxes
pickle
Python pickle AttributeError ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘foobar’
Ran into an interesting edge case with pickle this week. I had a producer task that was querying objects from a database, and pickling them plus a reference ...
pig
Flatten entire HBase column families with Pig and Python UDFs
Most Pig tutorials you will find assume that you are working with data where you know all the column names ahead of time, and that the column names themselve...
HBase/Pig/Python Quickstart on OSX
Having spent a good chunk of the last two weeks getting a prototype analytics system running, I thought I would write up my findings. I was pleased to find t...
plaintext
Sanitize HTML with Beautiful Soup
If you have a website that displays user-generated HTML (emails, rich text entry, etc), you likely want to scrub that HTML before you display it. At the ver...
playbook
Dependency Management Playbook
How to manage risk for your project dependencies, i.e. when you need another team to put something on their roadmap.
Organizational Design
You don’t have to choose just one organizational strategy for your entire company. A mature product org may be organized by goal, while a new product org has...
Setting Direction: Create a Strategy
Good Strategy Bad Strategy using Apple circa 1997 as an example
Setting Direction: Define a Vision
This post is a collaboration with Jason Ramirez, Frances Klein, and Maria Handberg
How to Escalate
The magic of clean escalations is that 50% of the time, you come up with a compromise before you actually escalate. That’s just good collaboration.
Growing an Engineering Manager
So, you want to be a manager?
podcast
Introducing the Software Engineering Fireside Chat Podcast
I’m pleased to announce the first episodes of the Software Engineering Fireside Chat podcast are available for download. Along with my colleagues Scott Lobde...
postfix
postfix: only enable sasl for some relays
Some mail hosts, like SendGrid, require you to use SASL authentication to relay mail through their systems. Many of those same hosts only want you to send m...
How to not get caught in spam filters
Reliably sending email without getting caught in spam filters is a full-time job, for someone. Surely not for an end-user, but for every end-user email, the...
Postifx Header Based Routing
I run a custom web-based email site. Some users requested the ability to smarthost any outbound mail from their accounts through an arbitrary server. In the...
postgres
Django/Postgres: Optimize COUNT(*) by replacing with an estimate
Every week I take a look at a report generated by the excellent pgFouine tool for our production Postgres database. This week, there was a surprising query ...
Django aggregation, group by day
This week we had a hackathon to develop a better internal dashboard page that shows things like records added to the system over time. Not having generated ...
Django reset database connection
Django handles database connections transparently in almost all cases. It will start a new connection when your request starts up, and commit it at the end ...
Quickstart: Log shipping with Postgres 8.4
The official Postgres documentation covers log shipping (aka WAL Archiving, aka warm standby) in some depth. But it's still quite a lot to absorb. The basic...
prg
Keep Track of Vim Tabs Per Git Branch
Mylyn is a “task lifecycle management framework” plugin for Eclipse. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but I know I really liked one particular feature. On ...
The Post/Redirect/Get (PRG) Pattern
Anyone who has used a web browser has probably encountered the dreaded “form resubmission” dialog. This happens when the user tries to refresh or use the bac...
process
How to Run Calibrations
Calibrations are a group-based process for an organization to increase the equity of individual performance reviews across a large set of teams
Thanksgiving Epic Estimation Workshop
Epic estimation is as much about best-effort definition of scope and milestones as a cross-functional team, as it is about putting estimate values on roadmap...
How to run a Retrospective
Retrospectives are a good catch-all for team health, bonding, and continuous improvement
Headcount Tracking for a Medium Sized Org using a Spreadsheet
Don’t do what I did, and spend 10 years headcount tracking in text documents
How to Escalate
The magic of clean escalations is that 50% of the time, you come up with a compromise before you actually escalate. That’s just good collaboration.
Trust Eats Process for Lunch
A set of individuals can become a self-actualized team that can deliver working software despite uncertainty, not when they have perfect documentation or pro...
💯 The Agile Scorecard – 12 Questions
Lots of people claim to do Agile. Most believe it. Many are not doing the basics right.
How to Choose a Team Size
Teams operate best at certain sizes. Try sub-teams of 3-4 engineers, and interleaving active projects more often at the sprint boundaries.
The Programmer Mindset - Main Debug Loop
Validating ONLY with tests is basically flying the plane on instrumentation, versus being able to look out the windshield. Flying visually and by muscle-memo...
Getting Started Estimating with Story Points
How do you bootstrap a team to use story points?
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...
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.
Limiting Project Scope and Optimizing for Shipability
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actu...
Democratic Product Management
In 2007, Dell launched their IdeaStorm site. It was the first example I had seen of a website where users can go to vote on features. From their FAQ:
product-management
Trust Eats Process for Lunch
A set of individuals can become a self-actualized team that can deliver working software despite uncertainty, not when they have perfect documentation or pro...
Product Management 101
This is intended as a guide for new front-line product managers on my team. It could also double as an introduction for people brand new to the discipline. M...
Teams Working at a Sustainable Pace
How do you make sure that your team is not signing up for too much?
Saying the Same Thing Multiple Times
To communicate something to an organization of people, you need to repeat yourself. The more people involved, the more you will need to repeat yourself if yo...
Estimating Epic Stories in Three Steps
In Agile, an Epic story is a potentially large placeholder story in the backlog. Typically they will be broken down into manageable stories during grooming b...
Trading off Value, Quality and Time
The traditional Iron Triangle tries to explain in graphical form how software projects need to make hard tradeoffs between scope, schedule and resources.
What makes a compelling product?
Words matter. When we use the term “product”, what do we mean? Are we talking about the same thing? In the context of tech startups, we often mean product wi...
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, ...
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...
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...
productivity
80 Percent is Done
80% of impact for anything comes from the first 20% of the work
profile
Profile and reduce memory use in Django with .iterator()
For the most part, objects allocated by Django are short-lived, and are eligible for garbage collection when the request ends. In our case, we also have som...
pyflakes
Ignore pyflakes warnings with bypass_pyflakes
Pyflakes is a popular linter for python, even if it isn’t being maintained anymore. One long standing request is to allow ignoring of specific warnings with ...
python
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...
Python Mock Cookbook
The python mock library is one of the awesome things about working in Python. No matter what code you’re unit testing, it’s possible to mock out various piec...
Flask absolute import bug in debug mode
Ran into a vexing issue this week. I was getting errors trying to use absolute imports in a new flask app:
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 ...
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...
Reload Python inside uWSGI as fast as humanely possible
The Django development web server you get when you execute ./manage.py runserver optimizes for one thing; fast hot reloading when you change your Python code...
Multi-level argparse in Python (parsing commands like git)
It’s a common pattern for command line tools to have multiple subcommands that run off of a single executable. For example, git fetch origin and git commit -...
Celery fail silently context manager
Celery ships with an configuration option called CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER which causes all tasks to be executed immediately instead of being asynchronously execut...
Python script to delete merged git branches
One of the great things about git is how fast it is. You can create a new branch, or switch to another branch, almost as fast as you can type the command. Th...
Print to the console in Python without UnicodeEncodeErrors
I can’t believe I just found out about this! If you use Python with unicode data, such as Django database records, you may have seen cases where you print a ...
Writing a Python decorator that can be called as a function or a callable
A Python decorator wraps a function with another function. Classing examples are a @cache decorator or a @log decorator, which call the wrapped function and ...
Diagnosing Memory “Leaks” in Python
The Problem
Hadoop from a Python Perspective
I’m just coming off a project where we decided to use Hadoop for the first time. We’re a Python shop developing an analytics feature. We have about 150m reco...
Write CSV data into Hive and Python
Apache Hive is a high level SQL-like interface to Hadoop. It lets you execute mostly unadulterated SQL, like this:
Happybase Connection Pooling
Wrote a simple connection pool for Happybase using socketpool.
Python pickle AttributeError ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘foobar’
Ran into an interesting edge case with pickle this week. I had a producer task that was querying objects from a database, and pickling them plus a reference ...
Dynamic Attributes in Python
One of the strengths of a dynamic language is that it allows you to more easily work introspection and light weight meta-programming into your every day code...
Mocking HappyBase for unit testing HBase code
HappyBase is a friendly interface to interact with HBase from Python. It lets you perform basic HBase operations like get, put and scan. But say you have a b...
Introducing Django Migratron
Django Migratron is a schema migration tool for Django. Why write another schema migration tool? Here is how we stack up against other tools.
HBase/Pig/Python Quickstart on OSX
Having spent a good chunk of the last two weeks getting a prototype analytics system running, I thought I would write up my findings. I was pleased to find t...
Mocking HTTP calls in Python tests
There are at least a few decent libraries out there for mocking out HTTP calls in Python unit tests. The best solution looks like HTTPretty. One feature that...
Per-request Query Caching in Django
The Django ORM is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to access the database, that sometimes you forget that it’s even happening. That is, until you open ...
Ignore pyflakes warnings with bypass_pyflakes
Pyflakes is a popular linter for python, even if it isn’t being maintained anymore. One long standing request is to allow ignoring of specific warnings with ...
New Year Python Meme 2012
View all #2012pythonmeme posts by the community.
Python Subprocess Asynchronous Read Stdout
Python has a great standard library when it comes to invoking external processes. But one weakness it does have is that it’s not easy to communicate with a s...
Using $EDITOR and a less paging from Python command line apps
Python’s built-in raw_input() function is a quick and dirty way to get text input from the user in your Python command line application. But it’s really only...
postfix: only enable sasl for some relays
Some mail hosts, like SendGrid, require you to use SASL authentication to relay mail through their systems. Many of those same hosts only want you to send m...
Python class attributes are evaluated on declaration
In Python, class attributes are evaluated and put into memory when the class is defined (or imported). For example, if you run the following code in an inte...
Migrate your Python app to Facebook OAuth 2.0
Facebook recently started enforcing OAuth 2.0 on app developers. Supposedly this was slated for Oct 1, 2011, but in practice it seems to have not started un...
Python/Django: disk based caching decorator
One of the great things about Django's caching framework is that you can cache complex objects. Say you have a list of dictionaries representing favorite mo...
Nagios check for Varnish Backends
We recently starting using Varnish to cache un-authenticated requests to our web farm. It even has this great feature called grace mode, where it will keep ...
Python: calculate lighter/darker RGB colors
Many times color palettes have lighter and darker variations of the same color. This may be used to convey relative importance, or for something as simple a...
Creating large XML files in Python with saxutils
In the past, when I needed to produce an XML file problematically, I typically turned to templating engines. Something like the following example in Django ...
Stripping control characters in Python
Want to remove ASCII control characters from a string? Have Unicode control characters that can't be encoded into XML? Here is how to strip them with regex ...
Python: Convert your FBML Facebook app to IFRAME
Recently, users started reporting that our Facebook app was returning a blank screen. Tracking it down, it turned out that it was specifically when the user...
Facebook: Authenticate w/o the JavaScript SDK (Python)
If you're using the Facebook JavaScript SDK to implement Facebook connect, your site may be more fragile than you think. Last weekend, I ran into an issue w...
Youtube: Detecting X-Frame-Options/framebreaking in Python
My current project involves URL shortening. Like many URL shorteners, we wanted to get into frame bars. These are alternately called banners, share bars and...
Backup your Amazon order history with Python
Ever wanted to download your Amazon order history? Maybe you want to get it into a spreadsheet, or just keep it around in case Amazon decides to delete this...
Python: Convert a Word/PDF document to html
My current Django project deals with resume files in Word/PDF format. In order to show a web preview of the file, it's necessary to translate these files to...
Redirect console output to a Django HttpResponse
Say you have some Python code that prints to the console, and you want to re-use that code in a Django view, but output the print statements as HTML in the ...
Free search string tokenization in Python
Want to do some simple lex parsing in Python? Using shlex, you may be able to get something that meets your requirements almost for free. Here is an example...
Parsing invalid xml with Beautiful Soup
Sometimes, bad xml happens to good people. In my case, I was getting a text stream back from a web-service call that proported to be xml, but was actually n...
Django ManyToMany error: “Cannot resolve keyword XXX into a field”
This week I was doing some refactoring, and started getting the following exception in Django's admin site. This was under Django 1.1.1, and Python 2.6.4.
Python smtplib long header folding using tabs instead of spaces
Unless you have done a lot of work with generating and parsing emails, you are probably not intimately familiar with the details of the MIME format. Here is...
Unit testing Django with doctest
There are two main ways to write tests in Django; doctests and unit tests. Units tests will be familiar to you if you're coming from Java. You basically wri...
Django - Externalize settings.py
In Django, settings.py is where you store configuration such as database connection strings, directory paths for static and media resources, as well as cach...
Python/Django: First Impressions
I've started a brand-new codebase at work. With new code comes the possibility of a new language/platorm. What we really needed was speed; we don't know exa...
Mint.com backup
Mint.com is a great personal finance tool. I started using it once I made the switch to Linux at home. I used to use Quicken, but I really didn't want to co...
blogger backup
Want to backup your Blogger posts? Here is a quick Python script that does just that. It will create an HTML file for each post, with the subject of the pos...
pythonmeme
New Year Python Meme 2012
View all #2012pythonmeme posts by the community.
qa
Two (more) Weeks in QA
Due to our regular QA engineer being out on vacation, I once again has the opportunity to do a tour of duty in QA. This time, for a big mobile release. I pre...
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...
My two weeks in QA
We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce - not the quantity of the product, but the quality. [Lister, DeMarco: "...
rabbitmq
Checking RabbitMQ queue size/age with Nagios
For months we were using RabbitMQ (with celery) with no real insight into what was going on inside the queue. Recently, we deployed the mangement plug-in, w...
rails
Ruby on Rails: anyType, soap4r and handsoap to the rescue
Perl makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible. - Larry Wall
react-native
Deploying React Native apps with Buddy Build
Buddy Build is a great tool for getting your app out to physical devices, whether that is during development, or in production. Their tool is fairly agnostic...
reading-list
Setting Direction: Create a Strategy
Good Strategy Bad Strategy using Apple circa 1997 as an example
How I use OmniFocus Get Things Done
This is my personal system for staying on top of everything.
Setting Direction: Define a Vision
This post is a collaboration with Jason Ramirez, Frances Klein, and Maria Handberg
Trust Eats Process for Lunch
A set of individuals can become a self-actualized team that can deliver working software despite uncertainty, not when they have perfect documentation or pro...
The Programmer Mindset - Main Debug Loop
Validating ONLY with tests is basically flying the plane on instrumentation, versus being able to look out the windshield. Flying visually and by muscle-memo...
Writing Your Self Review
The best feedback is tied to one or more specific examples, and also highlights the impact of what happened on the team or company.
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...
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...
Reading List (my common references)
This post is list of articles, blogs and other resources that I commonly reference.
Topics for One on Ones
I like to ask other managers what kind of questions they ask during their one on ones. Everyone has their own style, so I often get some interesting response...
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...
Rich client side web apps gone too far!
I have seen some Javascript in my time…
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.
Limiting Project Scope and Optimizing for Shipability
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actu...
Saving for Retirement as a Software Engineer
Take 100 young Americans starting out at age 25. By age 65, one will be rich and four will be financially independent. The remaining 95 will reach the tra...
Scrum in a Nutshell
Scrum is a fundamentally adaptable process. One of the core pieces is the retrospective, where the team can collaboratively change the process itself. Team m...
regex
Stripping control characters in Python
Want to remove ASCII control characters from a string? Have Unicode control characters that can't be encoded into XML? Here is how to strip them with regex ...
Java replaceAll() File.separator
When dealing with file paths, it's not uncommon to construct a path where the file separators are missing or duplicated. Ie, instead of c:\temp\test.txt, yo...
Regular Expression: Negative Lookahead Part II
When we left off, I had set out to replace any ampersand outside a CDATA segment with the XML encoded version. Instead of ditching the regex approach and us...
Regular Expression: Negative Lookahead
People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emi...
remote
Going Fully Remote as an Engineering Manager
Starting on the remote work journey
reviews
How to Give 360 Peer Feedback
Managers have a lot of practice giving people feedback. Most other engineers are only asked to give formal peer feedback once or twice a year. These are know...
rsyslog
Getting arbitrary log files into Rsyslog
Ideally, the applications that you're working with already supports the syslog standard. Failing that, it's often necessary to suck a regular text log file ...
Splunk/Rsyslog/Apache/Ubuntu Quickstart
I've been using Splunk for several years. It's a great tool for log file visualization and analytics. One thing I use it for is to generate a graph of avera...
sax
Creating large XML files in Python with saxutils
In the past, when I needed to produce an XML file problematically, I typically turned to templating engines. Something like the following example in Django ...
scorecard
Dependency Management Playbook
How to manage risk for your project dependencies, i.e. when you need another team to put something on their roadmap.
How to run a Retrospective
Retrospectives are a good catch-all for team health, bonding, and continuous improvement
💯 The Agile Scorecard – 12 Questions
Lots of people claim to do Agile. Most believe it. Many are not doing the basics right.
screenscraping
jQuery: remove (script) tags from a string of html
I'm in the middle of writing a bookmarklet to screen scrape web pages. My back-end piece is having trouble parsing pages with lots of script tags. Since I d...
scrum
Thanksgiving Epic Estimation Workshop
Epic estimation is as much about best-effort definition of scope and milestones as a cross-functional team, as it is about putting estimate values on roadmap...
💯 The Agile Scorecard – 12 Questions
Lots of people claim to do Agile. Most believe it. Many are not doing the basics right.
How to Choose a Team Size
Teams operate best at certain sizes. Try sub-teams of 3-4 engineers, and interleaving active projects more often at the sprint boundaries.
Getting Started Estimating with Story Points
How do you bootstrap a team to use story points?
Cross Functional Scrum Teams
Teams are also cross-functional; Team members must have all of the skills necessary to create an increment of work. - Scrum Guide
Scrum in a Nutshell
Scrum is a fundamentally adaptable process. One of the core pieces is the retrospective, where the team can collaboratively change the process itself. Team m...
Agile Motivations and Objections
Often when I first start talking to someone new about Agile and/or Scrum, they have questions and occasionally objections. More often they just don’t underst...
security
Using Access-Control-Allow-Origin to make cross domain POST requests from javsacript
Making ajax calls from javascript, even without a framework like jQuery, is pretty trivial. However, once you try to make the same request cross-domain, it ...
Regular Expressions Suck at Preventing XSS
Depending on who you listen to, XSS is now the top computer security vulnerability, having passed the venerable SQL injection in 2007. If you're a developer...
Keep those passwords safe
The easiest way to guess a password isn't to guess it at all, but to exploit the inherent insecurity in the underlying operating system. Bruce Schneier
selenium
Selenium: Execute arbitrary javascript (even jQuery)
We're very happy with our new-ish Selenium + Saucelabs setup for web site automation testing. But as easy as Selenium makes it to compose tests, you will in...
shell
Read only Django shell
Say you have a bunch of developers that occasionally need Django shell access to production, but you want this to be an exceptional event. Here is a drop-in ...
smb
Mount a Windows file share in Linux
Here are the basic steps to mount a Windows share under Linux:
smtp
Postifx Header Based Routing
I run a custom web-based email site. Some users requested the ability to smarthost any outbound mail from their accounts through an arbitrary server. In the...
soap
Ruby on Rails: anyType, soap4r and handsoap to the rescue
Perl makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible. - Larry Wall
solr
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 ...
Django/Haystack: latitude/longitude radius search w/ SOLR
Haystack is a great indexed search framework for Django. Getting started is easy, and it includes many data types and facets out of the box. However, one da...
source-control
Easier source control merges by trimming trailing whitespace
If you do frequent branch merges in any source control system, you have likely encountered merge conflicts. When two branches have legitimate differences, m...
spam
How to not get caught in spam filters
Reliably sending email without getting caught in spam filters is a full-time job, for someone. Surely not for an end-user, but for every end-user email, the...
splunk
Getting started with Splunk as an Engineer
What is Splunk, and how can you make the best use of it as an engineer? Splunk is first and foremost a hosted web-based tool for your log files. It gives you...
cron job to mail Splunk license violation alerts
Have a problem staying under the Splunk free edition cap of 500MB/day? Splunk is no help. It silently logs violations, only taking action finally by shuttin...
Splunk/Rsyslog/Apache/Ubuntu Quickstart
I've been using Splunk for several years. It's a great tool for log file visualization and analytics. One thing I use it for is to generate a graph of avera...
sql
Django: show me the sql!
This week, I noticed that there was a select query in our production system without a where clause, and it was running a lot. Tracking it down, I found the ...
Mixing and matching implicit and explicit JOINs
Back in the caveman days, there was only one way to JOIN tables in a SQL query. Now, we refer to this as "table list", "theta" or simply "implicit" JOIN syn...
sqlite
Django Nose/sqlite3 “too many SQL variables” error
Trying to get started with Django nose today on an existing project, I kept getting the following error trying to run my empty test suite:
sqoop
Sqoop/HBase Quickstart on Linux
Sqoop is a tool for bulk copying data between a relational database like MySQL and HDFS or another Hadoop based data store like Hive or HBase. It can either ...
ssh
testing facebook apps with ssh reverse tunnels
If you're writing a Facebook app, you may have to jump through hoops to test it out against your local development machine. Facebook requires that you confi...
ssl
nginx + SSL reverse proxy tutorial
If you have an existing HTTP application that you want to enable SSL for, nginx provides a convenient reverse proxy mode. In this mode, nginx is just respon...
startups
subprocess
Python Subprocess Asynchronous Read Stdout
Python has a great standard library when it comes to invoking external processes. But one weakness it does have is that it’s not easy to communicate with a s...
svn
Ubuntu Firefox/Chrome handle svn protocol
If you're using using a web-based bug tracking system (in my case, JIRA), or getting Subversion check-in emails in a web-based client, you may have seen URI...
syslog
Getting arbitrary log files into Rsyslog
Ideally, the applications that you're working with already supports the syslog standard. Failing that, it's often necessary to suck a regular text log file ...
Splunk/Rsyslog/Apache/Ubuntu Quickstart
I've been using Splunk for several years. It's a great tool for log file visualization and analytics. One thing I use it for is to generate a graph of avera...
template
Setting Direction: Create a Strategy
Good Strategy Bad Strategy using Apple circa 1997 as an example
Headcount Tracking for a Medium Sized Org using a Spreadsheet
Don’t do what I did, and spend 10 years headcount tracking in text documents
testing
The Programmer Mindset - Main Debug Loop
Validating ONLY with tests is basically flying the plane on instrumentation, versus being able to look out the windshield. Flying visually and by muscle-memo...
How to write effective unit tests
Unit tests differs from integration testing primarily in terms of what you’re testing for. Where as with integration tests, you testing for whether the entir...
Python Mock Cookbook
The python mock library is one of the awesome things about working in Python. No matter what code you’re unit testing, it’s possible to mock out various piec...
Django Nose Lint Quickstart - Enforce fast unit tests
In the battle for blazing fast unit tests, you need all the tools you can get at your disposal. Enter django-nose-lint, a new Nose plugin that lets you enfor...
threads
Python Subprocess Asynchronous Read Stdout
Python has a great standard library when it comes to invoking external processes. But one weakness it does have is that it’s not easy to communicate with a s...
timezone
Per user timezones in Django
A common requirement for sites that deal with dates (most of them), is to display date and time values in the individual user's timezones. Luckily, there ar...
tmux
Sync dotfiles with GitHub
What are dotfiles?
tutorial
Dynamic Attributes in Python
One of the strengths of a dynamic language is that it allows you to more easily work introspection and light weight meta-programming into your every day code...
jQuery hashtag input control
This jQuery snippet will turn an INPUT element into a hashtag input control. For example, if the user type "jobs business networking", it will translate it ...
ubuntu
Switching from Ubuntu Unity to LXDE
Canonical was founded with the goal of bringing polish, consistency and usability to the Linux desktop. Derided unfairly by some as not contributing much tec...
Ubuntu 11.10 Lock Screen - Suspend Monitors
Whenever I get up from my desk, I reflexively lock my workstation. Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, this has failed to put my monitors into suspend mod...
Running a JAR as a service (Linux/upstart)
Running a java JAR as a daemon in Linux is fairly easy, but it took me some digging to figure out how. This is using the new upstart init script functionali...
Ubuntu Unity: I want my KeePassX panel back!
Big props to Ubuntu for taking a risk and trying to innovate in the desktop experience arena. Unity is pretty cool, but pretty raw, too. For example, some a...
Ubuntu + Cisco VPN from the command-line
While the vpn client feature in the Ubuntu UI is very good, sometimes you need to VPN purely from the command-line. For example, if you need to VPN from a h...
Ubuntu keyboard shortcut cheatsheet
Everyone assumes that using keyboard shortcuts is more efficient than using the mouse. But by how much? One 2005 study found that keyboard shortcuts are app...
Letting ssh remember your passwords
If you're like me, you ssh into the same small set of machines over and over. Maybe sometimes you run commands that sit on top of ssh, like scp for file cop...
Ubuntu Firefox/Chrome handle svn protocol
If you're using using a web-based bug tracking system (in my case, JIRA), or getting Subversion check-in emails in a web-based client, you may have seen URI...
Mount a Windows file share in Linux
Here are the basic steps to mount a Windows share under Linux:
Rotate just one monitor with Ubuntu/Nvidia
I took some time this week to figure out how to rotate just my Dell 2005FPW in an Ubuntu dual-monitor setup. The graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 6200 LE,...
ui
In-context FORM help using jQuery
The Apple store checkout form redesign introduced me to the concept of in-context error messages.
unit-tests
Faster Django view unit tests with mocks
Unit tests need to be fast. Really fast. Some have suggested that speed is the defining characteristic of a unit test. But writing fast unit tests for Djang...
unity
Ubuntu 11.10 Lock Screen - Suspend Monitors
Whenever I get up from my desk, I reflexively lock my workstation. Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, this has failed to put my monitors into suspend mod...
Ubuntu Unity: I want my KeePassX panel back!
Big props to Ubuntu for taking a risk and trying to innovate in the desktop experience arena. Unity is pretty cool, but pretty raw, too. For example, some a...
unobtrusive
Reduce javascript UI code with Django forms
Typically, I try to implement a dynamic UI feature without javascript on the first pass. Then, I layer in a little javascript goodness to make it more respo...
Facebook: Authenticate w/o the JavaScript SDK (Python)
If you're using the Facebook JavaScript SDK to implement Facebook connect, your site may be more fragile than you think. Last weekend, I ran into an issue w...
Chained Select Progressive Enhancement
Perhaps you have encountered a chained select control in your travels. The canonical example would be on Monster or CareerBuilder, picking your area of expe...
upstart
Running a JAR as a service (Linux/upstart)
Running a java JAR as a daemon in Linux is fairly easy, but it took me some digging to figure out how. This is using the new upstart init script functionali...
userscripts
Blank Canvas brings @require support to Chrome
Quick shout-out to the Blank Canvas Script Handler, a relatively unknown Google Chrome extension that brings @require support to userscripts in Chrome.
uwsgi
Reload Python inside uWSGI as fast as humanely possible
The Django development web server you get when you execute ./manage.py runserver optimizes for one thing; fast hot reloading when you change your Python code...
vagrant
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, ...
Speed up your Vagrant NFS shares with cachefilesd
Most web based tech startups are deploying to cloud hosted Linux machines. At the same time, only a small percentage of engineers actually run Linux on their...
varnish
varnishlog top pages by IP address
Here are some quick recipes for getting information from varnish about top offending IP addresses, which pages those IP addresses are accessing, and which I...
Nagios check for Varnish Backends
We recently starting using Varnish to cache un-authenticated requests to our web farm. It even has this great feature called grace mode, where it will keep ...
Varnish caching for unauthenticated Django views
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a cl...
view
Keep Track of Vim Tabs Per Git Branch
Mylyn is a “task lifecycle management framework” plugin for Eclipse. I’m not 100% sure what that means, but I know I really liked one particular feature. On ...
The Post/Redirect/Get (PRG) Pattern
Anyone who has used a web browser has probably encountered the dreaded “form resubmission” dialog. This happens when the user tries to refresh or use the bac...
vim
Sync dotfiles with GitHub
What are dotfiles?
Using grep from inside vim
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. - Rifleman’s Creed
pydev colorscheme for gvim
I'm trying to make the switch from Eclipse to vim. I've started compiling a vimrc github project. So far, the only customization I had to implement myself w...
Stupid vim tricks
Quick hit today. Ever open a file in vim, only to realize that you need sudo to write to it? Usually, you have to exit out of vim, open vi as sudo, and make...
vpn
Ubuntu + Cisco VPN from the command-line
While the vpn client feature in the Ubuntu UI is very good, sometimes you need to VPN purely from the command-line. For example, if you need to VPN from a h...
web
Rich client side web apps gone too far!
I have seen some Javascript in my time…
workplace
How to prepare for a software engineer interview
Interviews for software engineering positions are equal measures normal job interview and extemporaneous logic bomb de-arming with an audience. Most develope...
workshop
Thanksgiving Epic Estimation Workshop
Epic estimation is as much about best-effort definition of scope and milestones as a cross-functional team, as it is about putting estimate values on roadmap...
Getting Started Estimating with Story Points
How do you bootstrap a team to use story points?
xml
Creating large XML files in Python with saxutils
In the past, when I needed to produce an XML file problematically, I typically turned to templating engines. Something like the following example in Django ...
Parsing invalid xml with Beautiful Soup
Sometimes, bad xml happens to good people. In my case, I was getting a text stream back from a web-service call that proported to be xml, but was actually n...
Using JAXB without a schema
A Yahoo HotJobs API project has been my first exposure to REST APIs. Usually, I'm working with SOAP web-services. Bullhorn is actually thinking about trying ...
xmlspy
Using JAXB without a schema
A Yahoo HotJobs API project has been my first exposure to REST APIs. Usually, I'm working with SOAP web-services. Bullhorn is actually thinking about trying ...
xorg
Rotate just one monitor with Ubuntu/Nvidia
I took some time this week to figure out how to rotate just my Dell 2005FPW in an Ubuntu dual-monitor setup. The graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 6200 LE,...
xss
Sanitize HTML with Beautiful Soup
If you have a website that displays user-generated HTML (emails, rich text entry, etc), you likely want to scrub that HTML before you display it. At the ver...
Regular Expressions Suck at Preventing XSS
Depending on who you listen to, XSS is now the top computer security vulnerability, having passed the venerable SQL injection in 2007. If you're a developer...
youtube
Youtube: Detecting X-Frame-Options/framebreaking in Python
My current project involves URL shortening. Like many URL shorteners, we wanted to get into frame bars. These are alternately called banners, share bars and...