Ben E. C. Boyter

Something I always forget and have to search for is how to use Python to serve a directory for local testing and the like.

It started by wanting to write a code counter that would be faster than cloc Update 2019-03-13 This is now part of a series of blog posts about scc Sloc Cloc and Code which has now been optimised to be the fastest code counter for almost every workload.

UPDATE The below is here for historical reasons, but since 2021 very out of date.

A collection of my favorite posts to read and re-read about optimizing code to an extreme.

A simple blog post here to introduce a new command line tool licensechecker (lc), which is similar in purpose to the library Licensee http://ben.balter.com/licensee/ which attempts to identify what software license(s) code is released under. lc itself is…

Another one of those things I need to look up every now and then.

Plexus “A combination of interlaced parts; a network.”

So a few weeks back I received an interesting email that at first thought looked like a scam.

For a while I have been wanting to play with a new programming language.

A very brief update about the progress of searchcode server.

A quick post.

EDIT – I have since taken the ideas below improved them and released a command line application you can use to build software license reports https://github.com/boyter/lc/ The below is mostly a log of my thought process while building out some functionali…

At work there is a tradition of a Friday quiz being posted by the winner of the previous week.

[Concourse CI][1] is a very nice continuous integration server.

One feature that I have wanted for a long time in searchcode server was a page which would give an overview of a repository.

I have been working on real time indexes with Sphinx recently for the next version of searchcode.com and ran into a few things that were either difficult to search for or just not covered anywhere.

The varnishhist tool is one of the most underused varnish tools that come with your standard varnish install.

Posted more for my personal use (I have to look it up every time) but here is how to run a mysqldump without impacting performance on the box.

I am writing this on behalf of all developers/engineers out there.

UPDATES Following some feedback I am going to rename my usage of “Time-Bomb” due to potential negative connotation on the words.

A very quick blog today.

Taken from a comment I posted on HN in a thread about a Soccer Con Man.

There are many different types of testing which exist in software engineering.

Recently it came up to perform a slight integration piece between a on premises Stash/BitBucket install and a searchcode server install.

When using fabric for deployments you will sometimes want check an existing file for the presence of a value before applying an update.

27th July 2016 at about 9:30pm my local time (GMT +10) I updated the A records for searchcode’s nameservers to point at a new stack that has been several months in the making.

Occasionally you may want to hide a method from appearing inside the fabric listing of available tasks.

Showing or displaying the available tasks inside a fabric fabfile is one of those things that almost everyone wants to do at some point and usually works out you can just request a task you know will not exist (usually found through a typo).

Annoyingly most cloud providers have an irritating habit of not adding any swap memory to any instance you spin up.

With the advent of cloud computing where you spin up and tear down servers at will it becomes extremely useful to pick the hosts you want fabric to run on at runtime rather then through the usual env.hosts setting.

A blog post by the excellent technical people at Netflix about Chaos Engineering and further posts about the subject by Microsoft in Azure Search prompted me to ask the question, What is chaos engineering and how can chaos testing be applied to help me?

A quick collection of all the fake Orly book covers I find around on the internet.

searchcode server the downloadable self hosted version of searchcode.com is now available.

A month or so ago I started collection emails on searchcode.com to determine if there was enough interest in a downloadable version of searchcode.

Because of the fact that I personally work for an ad supported company and that searchcode.com is currently supported via third party advertising I tend to keep an eye on the state of ad blockers on the web.

I am going to copy the searchcode pitch itself below quickly before explaining it a bit further.

A very fast update.

I was recently tasked with exporting a large collection of documents from KnowledgeTree (KT) for a client.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Decoding CAPTCHA’s which has become what appears to be the first resource most people encounter when searching for information in the decoding CAPTCHA space.

Recently the very cool hard working developers working on Stripe released a post about how they modified their build/test pipeline to reduce their test suite runtime from 3 hours to about 3 minutes.

The best working environment I had the pleasure to work in had a strong emphasis on testing and software quality in general.

The more I use C# as a language for writing things the more I am convinced that its approach really is the best language approach out there.

A/B testing is testing the comparison of two outputs where a single unit has changed.

Having a reliable test suite should always be the goal in software development.

“Why does all software contain bugs?”

One of the things that has always bothered me about searchcode.com was that it never generated any money.

“Fixing regression bugs is analogous to digging a hole only to find the next day it has been filled in and having to dig it out again” Ask any manager, developer or tester working on software without tests what the main pain points are.

When you are running test agents on AWS knowing what instance type to run as test agents (for TeamCity or otherwise) can involve a lot of trial and error.

December 2011 the Google Engineering team published a blog post about bug prediction at Google.

Usability tests are manual tests used to check that the user interface is understandable.