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I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a usability expert and, in general, I think that there is too much talk about usability with little real benefit. However, as a good computer scientist, I believe that it is an important part of software engineering. There are people who know a hell of [...]

At VendAsta we use automated build scripts and a TeamCity server for continuous integration. Whenever someone commits code to a project, a whole suite of automated build targets are run against the code base to check things like unit tests, python syntax (via pylint) and code coverage. One thing that was missing from the mix [...]

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you! (To do [...]

I work with an amazing group of people. The project I am working on is called MyFrontSteps which is a social media application for getting and sharing

A little while ago I wrote a post about getting Django unittests to work on DreamHost. The particular problem with the DreamHost setup is that they don’t allow you to programmatically create and drop databases and the default Django unittest behaviour is to do just that: create a brand new test db, use it and [...]

Today at VendAsta we had our first full day of planning for the MyFrontSteps Sprint #2. We did some high level planning yesterday as well as demoing and a post mortem for the first Sprint. Having had a chance to relax this evening watching a few episodes of Long Way Round with my wife, there [...]

The default test behaviour for a Django site creates and then destroys a whole test database on each test run. Normally this is not a problem, but the way Dreamhost has their MySQL setup running, the commands to create and drop databases are not available outside of their administration panel. What follows is the solution I have come up with and am currently using to run Django unittests with my Dreamhost MySQL databases.

Just a quick post to mention the fact that I have finally upgraded my WordPress! It’s been a long time coming and I have to say, I am impressed with how easy it was. Unfortunately, the copy I am using for this site was not installed with the DreamHost one-click-installs, so I could not do [...]

I have been a long time fan of open source software. Over the years I have utilized countless open source projects to accomplish large tasks with ease for both my day job and my consulting work. Using these projects has always saved me a lot of reinventing the wheel and has made work on projects [...]

Well, I have been working and living with a MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and I have to say I’m liking it a lot more than I had thought I would. I am starting to get the hang of how everything works and I am very happy about just how similar things are [...]