posts filed under dev

Functional first development

This is an introduction to functional first development, a coding and design practice that brings some of the benefits of functional programming to any programming language.// read full article

Why be functional?

I gave this talk at OC Tanner during a functional programming boot camp for our developers. It looks at complexity, the influence of language design on program design, and how pure functional programming may provide strong benefits.// read full article

Idiomatic Erlang in 42 minutes (or less)

A quick introduction to Erlang// read full article

Navigating the Bazaar

This is my presentation on Navigating the Bazaar of Open Source libraries, presented at That Conference in the Wisconsin Dells on August 14, 2013.// read full article

Civic Hacking with IPython and Pandas

IPython Notebook is a browser-based Python shell that supports rich media like graphs. Pandas is an open source data analysis library. This presentation introduces how these tools used together can be used to explore a civic data set such as parking citations or water use to ask and answer interesting questions interactively.// read full article

Don't comment your code

Comments lie. Instead of writing comments, write specs and functions. This post talks about why and how to do this.// read full article

Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL using SQLAlchemy

This is basically a guest blog post. The content was created almost entirely by Paul Morel (owner of Tartan Solutions) and Mike Bayer (author of SQLAlchemy and other fine Python libraries.) I was invited to compile and edit the conversation.// read full article

The tyranny of the database

Databases model our world, and to do that they necessarily distort it. This lightning talk prepared for PyCon2013 explores the impact on us as individuals and society as a whole.// read full article

MODX can beat up your content management system

Tonight's Milwaukee Web Design Meetup featured a CMS MegaPanel - eight pros in eight content management systems, head to head on development, features, ecosystems, costs. I represented for MODX.// read full article

jQuery.multiup plugin for multiple files

I'm a progressive. By this I mean I like things to get progressively more complicated. Don't you? Of course, I don't mean that things should be more complicated than they are — in fact, I think they should be *at most* only as complicated as they are. But they don't have to start off that complicated; they can get complicated *progressively*.// read full article

Blog reset

My blog had been hosted on a legacy shared server account that I don't manage, running Wordpress. I was frankly embarrased to tweet links to it - often it wouldn't come up at all. Now that's all changed. Now my blog is on Django. (But only kinda.)// read full article