VirtualTam's bookmarks

    1. Understand user needs
    2. Do ongoing user research
    3. Have a multidisciplinary team
    4. Use agile methods
    5. Iterate and improve frequently
    6. Evaluate tools and systems
    7. Understand security and privacy issues
    8. Make all new source code open
    9. Use open standards and common platforms
    10. Test the end-to-end service
    11. Make a plan for being offline
    12. Make sure users succeed first time
    13. Make the user experience consistent with GOV.UK
    14. Encourage everyone to use the digital service
    15. Collect performance data
    16. Identify performance indicators
    17. Report performance data on the Performance Platform
    18. Test with the minister
  1. Beware! Very cool book dealing with Lisp programming, with plenty of examples

  2. Python's built-in unittest module is quite cool, but a bit limited and way too verbose (read: it's quite not easy to incite developers to write unit tests)

    I'm currently looking for more dev-friendly solutions, the key points being:

    • writing test code should be easy and straight-forward -keep the focus on "what to test" instead of "how to transcribe a process to a test"
    • parallelization! -we, spoiled developers, should make good use of our way-too-many-cores build machines...
    • complete feature set!
      • we don't want to just run tests...
      • coverage reports (find dead/weak/untested code sections)
      • output formatting (JUnit-XML seems to be quite a common format out there)

    There seem to be 3 solutions in Python:

    • stock unittest + project-dependent customizations / test helpers
    • nosetests
    • py.test

    And 2 ways of gettings things done:

    • keeping things stock: no external dependency, project-specific implementation...
    • using a test framework: one more module in your (test) virtualenv, more concise tests, more features (// run, code coverage, etc.)

    Some links:

  3. Plenty of fun tasks, riddles and puzzles to solve altogether with learning Python!

    Get ready for:

    • basic Python exercises (data structures, language features, common libraries)
    • a handful exercises on string and data processing
    • algorithmics! pathfinding, map exploration, optimization...