Inklings: a tumblelog

The title says it all. This is fantastically clever, you should have a go!

The Rubberbandits are made of pure awesomesauce!

Solid looking HTML sanitiser, and it’s written in Python, so I can see it being useful to me in the future when I port this site’s code to run on top of Flask.

Nice 0ZQ demo.

Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. An implementation of djb’s redo.

HotQueue is a Python library that allows you to use Redis as a message queue within your Python programs.

The main advantage of this model is that there is no queue server to run, other than Redis. This is particularly ideal if you’re already using Redis as a datastore elsewhere.

I worked for almost three years as a cog in a Japanese megacorporation, and one of the best parts about that experience (perhaps even worth the 70 hour weeks) was that they taught me how to be a professional engineer. Prior to doing so, my workflow generally involved a whole lot of bubble gum, duct tape, and praying. I spent a lot of time firefighting broken software as a result, to the detriment of both my customers and myself. Talking to other software developers has made me realize that I’m not the only person who was never taught that there are options superior to bubblegum. If you aren’t lucky enough to work at a company that has good engineering in its very DNA, you’re likely to not know much about them.

Must read!

Pocco is a Python port of Docco: the original quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator. It produces HTML that displays your comments alongside your code. Comments are passed through Markdown, and code is passed through Pygments syntax highlighting. This page is the result of running Pocco against its own source file.

One of the coolest patterns discussed in Release It is the Circuit Breaker pattern. The pattern enables you to wrap dangerous or risky operations with a component that avoids calling the real operation when a certain failure rate has been reached. For instance, suppose you need to call an external web service in your application. The external web service is known to be flaky at times which causes each call to it to hang for a while before it eventually fails. Now, if that service is in a bad state, your application threads will waste a lot of time waiting on the failure. Wouldn’t it be better if your application could detect when the service is in a bad shape and in that case, immediately throw an exception when the service is called? As the author of Release It often says: it’s better to fail fast if you know something’s wrong.

This is something I need to implement in the EPP connection multiplexer at work because certain registries are, em, somewhat unreliable…

jQuery plugin that arranges CSS floats in a more sophisticated attractive manner than the normal fashion.

Clever!

Mercurial Queues, or MQ, is a Mercurial extension that lets you keep work in progress as mutable patches, instead of as immutable changesets.

I don’t currently use Mercurial, but there are a few projects I’d like to contribute to that do. This might help me submit nice clean patches.

If you really want to save money, why not outsource your executives?

The exploration of design patterns is importantly a historical search. It is possible to tell in the present that a particular approach to design or coding works adequately in a particular situation, but to identify patterns which repeatedly work, or repeatedly fail to work, a longer term or historical perspective is needed. We benefit primarily from hindsight.

Also read part 2 (conflated designs), part 3 (unfixable designs), and part 4 (high-maintenance designs).

The Principle of Charity is a methodological presumption made in seeking to understand a point of view whereby we seek to understand that view in its strongest, most persuasive from before subjecting the view to evaluation.

Nice simple way to boost gain on an antenna.

I linked to this elsewhere so I guess there’s no harm in keeping a record of it.