VirtualTam's bookmarks

  1. "Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia. Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two."

    https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

  2. Ode to Spot 2016-11-16

    Felix Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, An endothermic quadroped, carnivorous by nature. Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses. I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations, A singular development of cat communications That obviates your basic hedonistic predelection For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection. A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents: You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance; And when not being utilitized to aid in locomotion, It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion. Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array. And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend, I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend. -- Lt. Cmdr. Data, "An Ode to Spot"

  3. Bigger than my head 2015-03-17

    A friend of mine was once interviewing an engineer for a programming job and asked him a typical interview question:

    • How do you know when a function or method is too big?
    • Well, said the candidate, I don't like any method to be bigger than my head.
    • You mean you can't keep all the details in your head?
    • No, I mean I put my head up against my monitor, and the code shouldn't be bigger than my head.

    ~ from http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database.html

  4. 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: