Eric's Toolset
These are some of my favorite software utilities for development and life in general. Everything listed here is free.
PyCharm Community Edition (JetBrains) - A feature-rich IDE and debugger for Python built on the IntelliJ platform, with the free community edition having arrived in 2013.
Notepad2 (Florian Balmer) - This …
Dressing the Database in Big-Boy Pants, Part 2
Last time I wrote about using dbdeploy to easily create local databases and to automatically apply changes to the development, staging and production databases. The other change I made recently was to add stored procedure unit tests.
I looked briefly at frameworks specifically for testing databases, but didn't see a …
Dressing the Database in Big-Boy Pants, Part 1
I've mentioned previously that I'm in no danger of being mistaken for a DBA, but I've recently made a few changes in how we work with our database that have upped the maturity level a bit.
Previously we had a single development database shared by all. This is an inflexible …
A word is worth a thousand pictures
I found this sticker inside one of a pair of new shoes:
I didn't have any idea what this was saying. My wife suggested it meant that I ought to watch out for diamonds... and maybe nets.
I found this sticker in the other shoe. I think it means the …
Quotes
"No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better." -- Alan Cooper
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." -- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
UI Horror: Windows 8 BSOD
My PC is sad. I know this because of the frowny face. Unfortunately, I know not much more, because my PC won't boot, and Microsoft decided to provide as little information about the error as possible on their new BSOD screen.
Hmm... scary (but potentially useful) hexidecimal-laden error messages or …
Amazon Glacier and CloudBerry Online Backup
Offsite backup for critical files
This task has been lingering undone on my to-do list for months. I imagined that I'd figure out some way to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Sky Drive, or something to keep my data safe in case something catastrophic happened at the house. All those solutions …
Write Your Code for Humans
Sometimes when I bring up the subject of coding standards, I get an eye-rolling, aren't-we-all-adults-here kind of reaction from my fellow programmers -- or a fearful look anticipating endless debates about where the braces should go. Of course, "coding standards" can cover a gamut of subjects -- from techniques to avoid shooting …
Time to Think
With time drawing short before a major deployment at work, we ran into a problem. Some people testing our application reported it timing-out on an important function. It quickly became a high priority that I was assigned to solve.
Since most of the people on our team work remotely, a …
Python Packaging Demystified
IMPORTANT: Some of the information in this post is now obsolete. Please see here.
Randomly take a couple of words from the following list, put them together, and there's a decent chance you'll come up with something real involving Python packaging.
The …