Blog

The blog is currently being ported from WordPress to over 12 years of static pages of content. If there's an article missing that you're hoping to see, please contact me and let me know and I'll prioritize getting it online.

Abstract questions to ask during technical interviews

I’ve always loved being part of an interview team, whether as a hiring manager or just someone on the team thinking up creative new questions that give us insight into a candidate’s personality or traits. The Next Web wrote an article in 2014 about nine non-typical interview questions that really help to learn about a developer. I recommend reading the entire article linked above, but for brevity, here’s a TL;DR list of the questions.

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10 Best practices for developers, from top devs at Google, Pinterest, Signpost, ILM...

Found a great article on http://venturebeat.com about 10 best practices for developers, curated from engineers at some of tech’s biggest sites such as Google, Pinterest, and more. http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/06/10-best-practices-from-top-coders-at-google-pinterest-more/ The article is worth reading, but here’s a summary: Think carefully before you choose your first language pick a language based on the community You’re no code monkey! understand the motivation behind why you’re being asked to build something Stay agile and don’t stop shipping fail fast, always be testing, release early and often, practice TDD Stay in control of the testing process TL;DR: TDD is awesome, do that.

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Denver hosts the first Go Language conference, GopherCon, April 2014

The first Go Language conference, GopherCon, held in Denver in late April will have over 700 attendees! 28 of those are from SendGrid. Still can't believe the first @GopherCon is going to have 700 attendees! — Erik St. Martin (@erikstmartin) February 25, 2014 Not all of us made the photo:

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In support of Miguel Grinberg, I bought the pre-release of 'Flask Web Development'

I’ve chatted with Miguel several times online and we met up in person for the first time at PyCon in 2016. I was excited to meet him in person and started explaining how he might remember our chats, etc., and he interrupted me with “Yes, Ian, I know who you are, I remember you.” Heh. Sorry, let my fanboy show a little. Miguel is the author of the much-acclaimed “Flask Mega-Tutorial” which he explained on his blog was updated for Python 3 and written into book format, sponsored by O’Reilly.

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Sometimes having kids means accelerated upgrade timelines

In retrospect, maybe getting a “paper white” display wasn’t such a good thing.

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Live Template for PyCharm to support Emmet codes in HAML

Weekend project: write up a Live Template for PyCharm (should work on other JetBrains editors) for basic emmet.io shortcuts to use within #HAML documents. Examples: start a new HAML document, type just an exclamation point and hit TAB and you should see a basic html/head/body structure take form just an ‘a’ and hit tab to get “%a(href='' title='')” and so on. Contributions are more than welcome. The first pass at this basically copied the “Zen HTML.

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Flask App, Gunicorn and Nosetests, help requested.

I have a Flask app that’s successfully accepting POST/PUT data via JSON input (tested through curl while gunicorn is running) but running nosetests is failing. (okay, technically I’m using Flask-Restful too…) I’m curious if there’s a better way to debug this than tons of logging/printing, etc. I’ve been using PyCharm for development but its debugger doesn’t seem to actually run any of the tests. I can go into detail on anything that’s unclear but cannot post the project publicly.

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Has PHP evolved? Or is it the same ol' same ol' that everyone loves to hate

Has PHP evolved? Or is it the same ol' same ol' that everyone loves to hate? I love to call PHP the “Nickleback of Programming Languages” – everyone loves to give it crap, but there are still some die-hard fans out there. Some thoughts from Blackshawk In which I do a little digging about the choices I've made with PHP. This is a long read, but it isn't something that can be explained in one or two paragraphs.

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