About a year and a half ago I started looking for my next thing in a post-Tribune world and my first email was to my friend Peter Wang. A few months after we closed down Quickie Pickie talking about the future of Continuum Analytics and data science I joined as the Web and UX Architect. During my time there I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to almost every product with a UI that the company ships.

Versions are dead, long live versions What version of Chrome are you using? Beyond the major version number, what version of your operating system are you on? If you deploy using Linux code, what version is your Linux Kernel? My answer to those questions: I don’t know. Or didn’t. I just checked and I’m on version 42.0.2311.39 beta for Chrome, 10.10.2 for OS X, and 3.16.7-tinycore64 for my Docker VM I use for testing images.

I’ve been toying with my Git workflow the past year at Continuum and have come up with a good workflow for handling semantically versioned software inside Git. This post is my attempt to catalog what I’m doing. Here’s the TL;DR version: master is always releases that are tagged Code gets merged back in to develop before master, all work happens in feature branches off of develop Bug fixes are handled in branches created from tags and merged directly back in to master, then master is merged to develop.

This past fall a (new) good friend offered to marry Brandi and I as we traveled to Terlingua to share our vows with each other, our families, and close friends. As Sharron prepared, she asked for a favorite author or two of each of ours so she could find a quote to use at the ceremony. There are few things that will make you question your reading than to be marrying a professional writer and being asked who your favorite author is.

Writing usable, functioning code can be hard enough. Now imagine writing code that you need to make extensible enough that other developers can extend without simply copy-n-pasting your source code and making their own modifications. That can be rough. There are some patterns that you occasionally find in frameworks like Django, however, that I haven’t seen documented. This morning, I contributed a bugfix to werkzeug based on a pattern I’ve seen before.

This morning I read an article on what the ideal operating system should look like. I devoured all all three parts and it got me thinking about my thought process and how I approach development. This post is a loose collection of those thoughts. What Problem? One thing that I’ve discovered about my thought process is how I approach problems. Too many times, it’s easiest to start from where I am right now and how I can modify the existing tool / code / product to do what I need.

Listening to @pragdave talk about Exlir’s pipes he was talking about how these two styles, while fundamentally the same, have vastly different readability: "".join(sorted(list("cat"))) Try to explain that line of code to someone who doesn’t program. You start by telling them to just skip over everything until they hit the center, that’s the starting point. Then, you work you way back out, with each new function adding one more layer of functionality.

I’ve been told I should check out Docker for over a year. Chris Chang and Noah Seger at the Tribune were both big proponents. They got excited enough I always felt like I was missing something since I didn’t get it, but I haven’t had the time to really dig into it until the last few weeks. After my initial glance at it, I couldn’t see how it was better/different than using Vagrant and a virtual machine.

… we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. The above quote is in the opening chapter of one of my favorite books of all time, The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. Alexander is famed in programming circles as the author of A Pattern Language which set the stage for programming design patterns some 40 years before the Gang of Four wrote the book.

I get asked a lot where to start if you’re looking to python for web backed work. A lot of people look at Django and Flask and feel that Flask is where they should start. It’s nice and small, very simple, and after all they’re not doing anything big and complicated, so why start with a big, complicated framework? This reminds me if something that happens in the running world. People get started running then either a) read Born to Run, or b) hear someone talking about the benefits of so-called barefoot running.