Curia

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned falling in love with Python. Now that I’m finally using Python for a large percentage of my development and am more than “casually acquainted” with its toolset, I thought it would be fun to highlight a few reasons why Python has become my new language of choice.

In an effort to help you understand where I’m coming from, let me (briefly) rehash some of my programming history: I spent much of the 90’s doing dynamic web development using Perl (weren’t those the days!). I eventually migrated to PHP which usually made things much easier on the web; and subsequently replaced most of my console scripting with BASH [shell scripting]. However, I’m kind of a hack and love languages so I have occasionally been known to write something in C; and although I’m not a complete stranger to Java and Ruby, I never really felt like I “clicked” with either of those languages.

Ok, now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that I’m not just a fly-by-night programmer, let me show you some Python code. Brace yourself, as this article is bound to get lengthy… (continue reading…)

There’s been a lot of noise in the development community over the last year or so about DVCS. Being highly opinionated myself, I can’t help but take a minute to share my own thoughts on the matter.

Let me start by first of all saying: Yes, it’s true. Distributed Version Control Systems really are everything that Centralized Version Control Systems (read: SVN/CVS) fall short on. However, having been a long-time Subversion user myself, as well as the fact that I hardly ever work on a team with more than a couple of other developers, it took a lot of noise to make me even care about the differences between DVCS and CVCS. So what is the difference you might ask? Almost everything; and that’s a good thing! (ok, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the benefits are so profound it almost feels that way)

Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the repetition of what has already been said elsewhere. My story is this: I spent about a month looking at the various DVCS’ and eventually narrowed it down to Git vs Mercurial (why anyone would use Bazaar over Mercurial is beyond me). Since I’m a Linux user, and since Github impressed me, I finally decided to go with Git on the next project that came my way. Boy oh boy do I wish I had run across this article beforehand… (continue reading…)

Note: A few months ago when I started drafting this post, Firefox v3.0 had just been released and I was enjoying it immensely. I started this post with a rant against IE (still included) and a call to Sarafi users to “get with the movement”. Well, a lot has changed since then. Safari 4 is really slick, Google did the unthinkable and released a browser of their own, and Internet Explorer 8 actually likes web standards. So, I am finally publishing this post with a few slight updates and edits.

I’ve been playing around with Mozilla’s latest release, and I’ve got to say: Firefox is where it’s at! If anyone out there is still using Internet Explorer, you deserve anything that comes to you by way of malware, adware, spam, viruses, etc. Seriously, get with the times and install a real browser! And to you Apple/Mac users out there: Yeah, Safari is nice, but don’t let pride keep you from branching out of familiar territory.

One of the great thing about Firefox is its add-ons, and I’ve decided it’s time to dedicate a post to a few of my personal favorites: (continue reading…)