In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service.

"It is not about solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention. Tattoo that on your forehead in reverse so that you always see it reflected in the screen. What is truly decisive on the battlefield are attitudes: hard work, responsibility, and paying attention to reality instead of the voiceover in your head."

It'd be interesting to see if Flickr could do this.

This system seems promising.

Great article -- "It's tempting to blame the business leaders ("MBA-types") for this mess. And in a mess this big, there is certainly blame to go around. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they don't find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they won't be able to survive. So they are legitimately suspicious when, instead of working on adding monetization to their product, some engineer wants to take a few weeks off to go polish code that is supposed to be already done."

Using pip and virtualenv to build reproducible and isolated Python environments.

In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

"Enterprise Applications are built by committee. The committee's job is to put as many bullet points on paper as possible. The more bullet points they've put on paper, the more successful the committee was. The more complicated and long the documentation is, the
more work the committee had to do and the more its people should be paid for being able to envision and document a system that is so complicated - without regard for whether that system had to be complicated or not."

Fantastic post about the prevention of bugs.

"Even if you don’t know anything about unit testing, you should be able to factor it into a technology decision. Software package A is unit tested, and B isn’t. Which do you pick, if all else is equal?"

Amen.

Anecdotes that reinforce not having a shared DB for developers.

Brings up several points on the advantages of Python and its frameworks over Ruby on Rails.

An interesting primer on Ruby that makes extensive use of cartoon foxes.

My personal site.

I write code. But why do I write code?

This full-text search was added by Curse, Inc which have one of the heaviest traffic Django sites. Looks *really* simple to use.

A way to automate some db migration in django

A resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs

Quick rundown of getting a credit card system setup including links to security whitepapers and other things to look out when deploying a backend processing system.

Some thoughts on what content management is and should be on the web.

Reasons why not to use prototype.js. Written in December '05...have things changed?

Very informative site about the business and life of webdev freelancing.

Let's you finally get a peek into what IE is thinking when it is rendering a page