Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure
There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, »
Primitive types are not your friends
Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full »
Enabling Process vs Bureaucratic Process
The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to »
badblocks: test your mass storage!
Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros »
Automated cleanup of Docker leavings
As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. »
Python: discover the type of an object
This seems a simple enough question: How can I discover the type of any given Python object? Suppose Python 2.7 (Python 3 is a different »
Git Flow is superflous and complex
Some years ago, a git workflow model called git-flow took the software development world by storm. I'd always thought that the workflow was far too complex »
Python requests SSL and InsecurePlatformWarning
Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems »
Parkinson's law and estimates
Each and every time I think about Parkinson's law, I think that Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a sort of genius, who could gain a great insight »
chmod and the capital X
This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, »