E-Scribe

I love visiting high school and college classes to help students learn what it’s like to do software engineering professionally.

I was recently asked: “What if you start a new job and their codebase is a mess?”

I love Django management commands.

Python 3.8 (2019) added “assignment expressions”, aka the “walrus operator”.

I’ve replaced my Disqus comment integration with a Mastodon-powered solution.

I enjoy writing tests because I love what they give me.

Welp, I did it, I switched from Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code.

I can be kind of a stickler about leveraging the ticket/issue tracker in software projects (which always seems to be Jira these days, but nevermind that).

(Note: this post presumes you have, or want, a CDN in front of your site, which not everybody does.

My recent reinstall of Ubuntu 21.04 (to fix some driver problems) reminded me there is more to the world than XMonad.

I’m quite fond of Mercurial, despite (though perhaps partly because of) using Git daily for the last ten years.

In July I deployed a major update to dpaste.com.

I came across an interesting CSS library the other day, awsm.css.

I’ve been a full-time remote worker since 2010.

I migrated my blog from a Django system I wrote 12 years ago, to a static site generated via Hugo.

TLDR: Use python-future.

This past week I started playing with GatsbyJS, a static site generator and framework centered around React.

I wanted to have a quick way to see what the other team members are doing, and after pillaging a half-dozen SO posts this is what I came up with. git branch -va --sort=-committerdate --format='%(HEAD) %(color:yellow)%(refname:strip=-1)%(color:reset) - %(c…

A couple weeks ago I accidentally replaced our live, production database with a 17-hour old snapshot.

After a couple years of mostly using XMonad on my Linux machines instead of a standard Desktop Environmnt, I’m coming around to using XFCE.

You could say Z-80 assembly language is what really turned me into a software developer.

One of the hazards of working in the web biz is impulse-buying domain names.

noSQL is a big tent with lots of interesting tech in it.

(I recently posted this on Quora in response to a question along the lines of “Engineers, when did you decide to study Computer Science?”)

(Note: This is a writeup I did a few years ago when evaluating Riak KV as a possible data store for a high-traffic CMS.

I really do like Quora (you may have seen my SadQuora tweets, a side effect of the time I spend there).

When I first switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my daily development work, one of the things I missed a lot was Divvy.

Non-engineers want to know: what happens when a big bug is found in your software, and the bug is causing real users real problems, and you’re the one who wrote the code?

When we were growing our team of Python devs at CMG, I was involved in a lot of interviews.

How do you comprehensibly explain to non-programmers the challenges of programming?

I’ve been working as a remote software developer for over five years now.

First in an occasional series where I show how old I am by reminiscing about the ’90s World Wide Web.

I’ve been reflecting recently on my twisty path from being a kid with a computer to being a grown-up who is (apparently) a bona fide software engineer.

(This is another thing I found myself writing on Quora and wanted to keep.

(Somebody on Quora asked about “traits that the best programmers seem to have”.

Last summer I switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my day-to-day work.

Once in a while I look at a sampling of recent dpaste activity.

A step-by-step guide from real life.

In July, I switched from OS X to Ubuntu as my workday environment.

Recently I switched my work environment from OS X to Ubuntu (a post on that project is in the works).

Eight years ago, I launched a simple pastebin site written in Django.

O’Reilly Media recently asked in their “Programming Today” newsletter: For many old-school software engineers, developing code has always been as much an art as a science.

A little-known bit of trivia about our book, Python Web Development with Django: we wrote the manuscript in Markdown.

Today I’m launching my first Google App Engine site.

I move between a couple different computers regularly: my old 12" PowerBook and the 15" MacBook Pro my job provides me with.

At work I still mostly use Subversion for version control.

Spam is occupying more than its customary share of my attention in recent weeks.

Among the many anti-spam measures on my mail server – which help me reject 5000 spam attempts per day – is SPF.

I’m still loving my iPod touch.

This evening, the Western Mass.