Ollivander The curse of the downvote I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've
Ollivander Machine Learning: a sound primer How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
Ollivander Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not
Ollivander Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan There's one pattern that, nowadays, I find amusing; the productivity mantra is repeated everywhere. Everybody wants to get more productive, every company is trying to make their employees more productive.
Ollivander Command line data crunching with Python Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one
Ollivander Shell scripting: short or long format options? This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep,
Ollivander Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth
Ollivander 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, Evidence That Computer Science
Ollivander 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 advantage of your Object
Ollivander 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 all the world's problems.
Ollivander 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 beast on this topic), and try implementing such function: def discover_type_of_object(obj): """
Ollivander 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 and I couldn't figure out what purpose it served. Now, after having used it for some months, I
Ollivander 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 into people's heads. For the few that have never heard about it, it's as simple as: Work expands
Ollivander Python Packaging Woes: part 3 A bit of wrap-up after part 1 and part 2 Current state of the things I seem to have missed something: there's now a very active Python Packaging Authority which is trying very hard to push Python packaging in the right direction, so that
Ollivander Python Packaging Woes - part 2 Check out part 1 for my thoughts on what packaging and dependency management should be. I forgot about this post and left it in a draft state for quite a lot of time, I'm sorry! How Python messed it up A Diaspora of Tools
Ollivander One Assertion Per Test Considered Ambiguous There's a practice of good programming which is often referred as One Assertion Per Test. In the opinion of some people, this practice would advocate the usage of a single call to xunit assert method for each test. I think that idea is plainly
Ollivander Python Packaging woes - part 1 This is a spinoff from my Europython 2012 talk (video, slides). Some days ago I got involved in a brief discussion on the topic, so here's what I think about Python packaging and dependency management: it's in a very bad state, requires a lot
Ollivander PHP Killer Features I don't like php, and I've got my reasons. I've met a lot of people who dislike PHP and don't see how possibly anyone, anyhow, could think about ever using PHP in any real-world project out there, and simply dismiss PHP as a crap
Ollivander Unicode and Encoding: Python vs Java Shootout, part 2 So, here we come to our second part; if you did miss the first, it's there. All of the following discussion is relative to Sun Java 6, but most details - if not every detail - is still valid for Java 7 and 8.
Ollivander Unicode and encoding: Python vs Java shootout, part 1 Before going on with this post, be sure you've read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - otherwise, I won't be able to solve your issues.Sometimes Java fans just say that Python
Ollivander Jetbrains IDEs: dock-aware launcher for Linux UPDATE:Most of this is pointless on IDEA >= 11 and PyCharm >= 2, since a Tools -> Create desktop entry menu now exists and will let you do everything my launcher did. You'll need to reinstall it at every update - or
Ollivander Deploy any Java webapp via war to Heroku Heroku Java support is something I longed for, but they apparently don't support deploying a plain, old war file to Heroku. I don't like that; I've got my own continuous integration setup, and I want to compile my files on my own box -
Ollivander Mock Javamail primer Small primer for mock javamail, a pretty useful project that will be handy whenever you need to test code that uses POP3/IMAP/SMTP and you wouldn't like to build wrappers for anything you need to test - javamail does not really offer interfaces
Ollivander Unit testing with Twisted: testing protocols I had some hard time when testing Twisted protocols. Although they should be decoupled from factories, most examples I could find, including those from the official doc, were just too noisy and suggested using a factory.I don't like that approach - I should
Ollivander Building a successful community-driven software project: part 4 This is a multipart post. See part 3Just a brief conclusion to my post sequence; the three principles for succeeding at community-driven projects are:Make it easy for the people to give you their feedback - it's highly valuable.Listen and reply to people's
