Review of "Don't Make Me Think"
Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a quick, easy to read introduction to usability, especially as it relates to web design.
Some sections are very web-specific, but you'll also find plenty of things that apply to any kind of user interface. He also doesn't try to be comprehensive, often …
The Feedback Meeting Game
We hold lots of meetings with the intent to gather feedback from members of a team. These can be architecture reviews, requirements walkthroughs, sprint or release retrospectives, and others. How do you conduct meetings like these in an efficient and productive way?
Some challenges that arise in meetings like these …
PyCon 2016 - Day 3
Wednesday was the final day of the main PyCon 2016 conference in Portland, Oregon.
One of the interesting talks was about Web accessibility. It isn't always top-of-mind for me since I do little Web front end currently, but the speaker mentioned the Accessibility Developer Tools for Google Chrome …
PyCon 2016 - Day 2
Today's PyCon was a lot about meeting people. I hadn't really anticipated that, but it was a nice surprise nonetheless. But first things first...
There were two sets of lightning talks today, book-ending the rest of the events. One interesting one was about using Minecraft to teach …
PyCon 2016 - Day 1
PyCon is in Portland, Oregon this year, which is not only more accessible to me than eastern Canada (the previous location), but also the area where most of my extended family lives. Those facts combined to make it a great time to attend for the first time.
In a way …
Time Warp in VirtualBox
Here are a couple of tips for manipulating the clock in Oracle's VirtualBox.
Sometimes you need to tweak a virtual machine's clock for some kind of test or another. With the VirtualBox Guest Additions installed, you'll have trouble because the service will keep the guest's clock synchronized with the host's …
Granular Profiling in PyCharm
PyCharm added profiler integration in version 4.5, which I thought was pretty cool. Used as documented, though, it hasn't been terribly useful. Here's a way to improve on that.
In my case, I was interested in profiling a web service -- specifically requests to a particular resource. I started up …
Solipsistic Backups
I noticed this banner ad the other day from Mozy:
Um... I actually do prefer to have background processes (such as backup) defer to the real work I'm trying to do on my computer.
Run/Debug as root in PyCharm
I'm working on a Python project that needs to run as root in order to work properly. Previously I've just run the whole PyCharm IDE as root, but this has some down-sides, and I think I have a better approach now.
The biggest hassle with running the IDE as root …
Password Management
It's been two years since Wired's Mat Honan declared the age of passwords over, but somehow the successor hasn't yet found its way to the throne. That being the case, this is how I currently manage my passwords.
The challenge with security is that it tends to be in direct …