In this Google Clean Code talk, Miško Hevery presents the evils of global state, how this relates to Singletons, testing and what to do about it.
Questions starting at 31:20 are pretty interesting.
I have lost count of the times I have heard a developer exclaim ‘but I could write that in X days’ when discussing adopting an existing piece of technology developed somewhere else. This is usually given as a reason not to adopt an existing external solution but to instead write a custom solution with [...]
I have been trying to install the excellent MatPlotLib graphing module for the Python programming language on my iMac for a while now. Unlike most python module installations I’ve done the excellent python SetupTools (a.k.a easy_install) has not been up to the task. So I ended up using MacPorts (version 1.8.1) to get MatPlotLib (version 0.99.1.1) installed on Snow [...]
Python has had support for SQLite built-in since version 2.5.
This is a very convenient pairing as SQLite is an excellent lightweight SQL implementation that I find very useful for a variety of tasks e.g. data mining. Or any task involving manipulating complex data sets where I’d otherwise end up resorting to using a full blown [...]
The more experienced I become the more aware I become of what I don’t know and the more I come to terms with the fact that I make mistakes.
The awareness of what I don’t know helps keep me humble, humility makes working as part of a team easier: as there is no pressure to have [...]