Not to be a shill in this series, but there are vendors that will print addresses on the outer set of wedding invitation envelopes when you place an order (the one the post office uses to deliver mail). Well, at least David’s Bridal does, which is who we happened to use. I’m not going to go so far as to say you should spend money on this kind of thing, just that we decided the convenience was worth it for us, and this is how it played out on our end. Continue reading »
One thing I’ve noticed the more I work on anything is that reusability is everything. Even if you’re slapping together some simple little script that is intended for 1 specific thing to do some piddly little task, odds are you’re going to need to dig it back out and adapt or convert it for something else. In short, you’re always going to need it. So what does this mean to you as you write any sort of code? Continue reading »
I have to be honest, I’ve never understood part of “soft” deletes that makes it a good idea. You know the basic gist, labeling an action “delete”, and removing it from display, but behind the scenes all you’re really doing is flipping a bit somewhere to tell your application to never show this thing again, as opposed to actually removing it. I suppose it makes sense for when you absolutely, positively, need to retain data (auditing purposes, court orders, etc.), but as far as a general practices go, “delete” should mean “delete”, not “please just don’t show it to me again”.
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Recently, I was looking what it would take to notify a Zabbix server whenever an error is encountered in a Python web server. Ultimately (before I realized that Zabbix has log monitoring and that we weren’t going to be installing a Zabbix agent on the server), we went with Zabbix’s log monitoring, but before that I started looking at sending the notification directly from the Python code itself. The quick and dirty lesson here is to thoroughly research the features of monitoring servers (and discuss them with your system admins) before writing code to solve a problem you don’t actually have. The other lesson is here’s how I learned to send notifications directly to Zabbix servers directly from your Python code. Continue reading »
Not a lot of useful, thought out content this time (like every time really, but that’s another point), just a few quick things that I’ve run into over the past few weeks that are worth noting for future reference. Continue reading »
All developers have been in this situation, sitting around, staring at the monitor, trying to make sense of the code staring us back. It’s a tough, miserable period for developers going through this. Specifically, it’s a tough, miserable period for developers that doesn’t have to happen. No matter what the code that does this to you, there’s 1 common, glaring thing in common with the code that does this to developers – there are hardly any, if any at all, comments in the code. In the interest of sparing developers this pain, here are some simple rules about commenting that will reduce developer suffering whenever somebody has to read your code. Continue reading »
I want to tell you a story. It’s a story of failure, heartache, and not a lot of sleep. It’s also set during a college course, so it’s not like lives were totally ruined by the end of this or anything. Continue reading »
In honor of Christmas, I wanted to put up a little script I wrote for a family holiday tradition. Every year, we each pick a name at random and fill their Christmas stocking. There’s a few rules to this little game, but the one that applies for the purposes of this script is that you cannot be assigned your own stocking. While this script randomly assigns someone a stocking, you can use the same code to dole out Secret Santa targets if that’s more your thing. Continue reading »
While perusing the Internet, I stumbled on some question about getters and setters and why people are supposed to use them (which of course I can’t find the link to now, even with the help of the mighty Google). After reading the question, I realized something. Holy crap, a lot of getter/setter examples on the Internet aren’t that good. Most of the tutorials on getters and setters talk about variable visibility, and you don’t get any real useful discussion about how to use them properly outside of technical forums or discussion boards. So, I thought I’d write a quick little guide on the topic in part to increase the number of useful pages on the topic out there on the Internet, and thus make it easier to find a good reference on the matter. Continue reading »
Maybe it’s just that I’m slow on the uptake, but I didn’t get the whole hype over using virtual machines for development up until I actually started doing it. After all, why use virtual machines when you have a perfectly good physical box sitting right there and ready to go? I get that it saves money and power and is easier to administer, but that’s an administrative reason to use virtual machines, not a reason for me to put my server set up on a VM rather than the computer sitting right here next to me. Continue reading »