Friday - July 18, 2008

Technology and Compromise 

"I can't use [X] because of this small feature which I find objectionable."  I have some other places where a sensible compromise was discarded in favor of an "all-or-nothing" strategy.  I don't know why someone would take an all-or-nothing demand for the impossible.  But it does tell me how valuable the software is if they'd prefer none of it when they could have had some of it.

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: Technology Python Django
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Saturday - July 12, 2008

What's Central Here?

The requirements describe a kind of "broker" application that makes heavy use of a vendor's web services.  Sadly, the requirements also give a lopsided view that leads to heavy refactoring.  Lesson learned: don't take the requirements literally.

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: Python WSGI JSON REST
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Sunday - July 06, 2008

Voice of the Customer

Or What do people want in a book on programming?

Author: Steven Lott
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Sunday - June 29, 2008

The "Which Language" Question

A recent email said "I've read a little about C++, and Objective-C.  My next step will be to read a bit about Perl, Python and Ruby."  I have a suggestion... 

Author: Steven Lott
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Wednesday - June 25, 2008

Wrestling with REST

REST has some advantages over SOAP.  Django totally rules.  But the Django-REST interface causes me hand-wringing as I learn more about it.

Author: Steven Lott
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Wednesday - June 18, 2008

Building Skills in OO Design

Revised some additional things that have confused readers.  And -- bonus -- added four appendices on testing and documentation.

Author: Steven Lott
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Saturday - June 14, 2008

Denormalization or "What did you mean by that?"

Denormalization -- like Normalization -- is a buzzword that can be interpreted several ways.  It can mean "duplicated data", or it can mean "alternate forms of normalization."  It's a loaded word, and it leads directly to at least five different kinds of objections.

Author: Steven Lott
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Saturday - June 07, 2008

Genius Move -- Characteristic Functions

The name is obscure, the math isn't obvious,  but this is a genius play for data analysis applications.  Thanks!

Author: Steven Lott
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Friday - June 06, 2008

My Query Is Slow -- What To Do?  Or Dumb-As-A-Post SQL (Revised)

When in doubt, step away from the IDE -- stop typing -- start thinking.  Here are some epic non-solutions to a standard, well-understood problem.

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: SQL Denormalization Query Performance
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Friday - June 06, 2008

Tech Visionaries

Christopher Null lists top 50 tech visionaries in a PC World article.  My personal hero makes the cut.

Author: Steven Lott
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Tuesday - June 03, 2008

In Praise of Serialization via __repr__ (Revised)

The Pythonic distinction between __repr__ ("If at all possible, this should look like a valid Python expression that could be used to recreate an object with the same value") and __str__ ("the 'informal' string representation of an object... a more convenient or concise representation [than __repr__]") is very, very cool.

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: Python StarSchema
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Saturday - May 31, 2008

Building Skills in OO Design -- Updated

In response to reader comments and questions, I've made a few updates to the OO Design book.

Author: Steven Lott
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Thursday - May 29, 2008

My Peers Don't Get PL/SQL, What Can I Do?

Give up.   First, no amount of "evidence" -- like blog entries -- will change their minds.  Second, PL/SQL isn't a very good programming language.

Or, rewrite things in your preferred style and quit explaining to your peers how wrong they are.

Author: Steven Lott
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Tuesday - May 27, 2008

Brain Dead and Visual Basic: Coincidence?

Here's something I stumbled across.  A bunch of VB versions of the same algorithm; all of which are bad in the same unthinking way.

Author: Steven Lott
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Saturday - May 24, 2008

Some "Duck Typing Can't Scale" crap-ola

I've run into this vague hand-wringing that lifts up "trust" among programmers.  They use the buzzword "scalability" to differentiate between a small team (where there are no trust issues) and enterprise-scale programming where "someone" doesn't "play by the rules".  What?

The paranoid claim that these "others" can't be trusted, and specific defensive measures are required to protect "us" from the malfeasance of "them".  They call it defensive programming and waste endless brain calories on writing pointless junk code.

It's simpler than that.

Author: Steven Lott
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