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Aug 132012
 

Like everyone else who’s ever wanted money at any point in their lives (i.e. like everyone else on the planet), I’ve put a little thought into just what I’d do if I ever go so obscenely rich I could stop worrying about money. Now, since definitions are important, I’ll define obscenely rich as making so much money a year, your immediate reaction is to utter an obscenity.

One of the things on that list is starting an open source foundation at my old college. This would be a setup designed to have students create or maintain open source projects that are released to the real world. The idea here is to give students an easily-accessible option that gives them all kinds of crazy useful real world experience other than “get a real-world full-time programming job.” Part of this was inspired by Steven Hicks Steven Hicks’ [ed. Fixed my grammar] post on Computer Science classes he’d like to take.

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 Posted by at 2:04 am

Random mongo tips learned the hard way

 Education, Programming  Comments Off on Random mongo tips learned the hard way
Jul 262012
 

I did a little bit of work using mongo recently, and I stumbled across some of those “lessons learned the hard way” things that I thought I’d share. If you haven’t used mongo or aren’t familiar with it, I recommend their official site and Wikipedia for a quick introduction on what mongo is and how it works.

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 Posted by at 11:24 am
Jul 082012
 

After having written the afore-discussed Flask web service, I needed a framework to load test the whole thing. I wound up using multi-mechanize. Overall, it’s a pretty decent framework. It’s pretty easily configurable, the documentation is thorough enough for most needs, and presents the test data in a variety of formats. Projects are quick and easy to set up, leaving you to focus on your test scripts. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:00 pm
Jun 092012
 

Asking a lot of questions is important when you’re just starting a new job. It’s 1 of those things that cannot be emphasized enough. You didn’t get hired because there may be something for you to do sometime later. You got hired because that company needs help right then, and the idea is that you’re up and contributing in short order. But you’re just a newbie dumped into the middle of working on some piece of software that’s probably already large and involved, not to mention learning all about your new employer, and getting a sense of the new way of doing things there. There’s a very good chance your first instinct would be to find someone who knows everything that’s going on and ask “Herp derp?” Unfortunately, “Herp Derp” is a pretty useless question. Besides, very wide-open questions like that lead to basically you getting blasted with a firehose of information, overloading you and making it borderline impossible to remember everything you’re being taught. I don’t have the algorithm that optimizes the amount you can learn and the time it takes you to learn it. Having recently come through an initial round of firehosing, here a few things I’ve noticed.
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 Posted by at 1:08 am