Number #3 on Praeclarum’s list hits home for me, but all his points are both valid and strong. As a programming language nerd I had mixed feelings when Jon Galloway tweeted about Microsoft’s new programming language. “Why are your feelings mixed?” I kept asking myself. I love new programming languages. I took an internship at Microsoft just so I could be closer to the people who made C#. I read language specs for fun. I write compilers for fun. I sell a programming language, interpreter, and IDE. ...

I barely knew Colin. He sat two offices down from me, but we never worked on anything together, never laid eyes on each other after 5 p.m. Our relationship consisted, in its entirety, of work-related small talk in the break room, his lunch rotating behind us in the microwave. Ding, stir, have a good rest of your day. via What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies | The Billfold. ...

Many web developers know about SSL, but it is very common to see it only partially deployed, or not deployed where it should be. This basic guide on when and how to deploy SSL will help you avoid the most common mistakes. via A basic guide to when and how to deploy HTTPS — Erik Romijn.

On seeing WarGames for the first time in the 1980s, I wondered which magazine it was. Later, after seeing it on TV and on VHS/DVD, the same question kept nagging at me. I believed that I would one day get to the bottom of this matter. I correctly assumed that the magazine was a real world magazine with a fake advertisement added to it. Through some effort and persistence I finally achieved my goal on 2013-02-24 at 5:30pm. ...

Fred Brooks wrote the software development classic The Mythical Man-Month almost 40 years ago. In this interview, Brooks explains why managers still make the same mistakes. via Why Good Programming Projects Go Bad.

If you write Python code, switching to IPython is the number one thing you can do to immediately improve your productivity. Bold words, I know. Let’s look at how IPython can make you a more productive programmer. via You Should Change Your Python Shell | GrokCode.

The new release changes the way validation errors are reported. Please note that these changes will also affect future releases of Eve, the Python REST API Framework. What we had before was basically a list of human-readable errors. Each item in the list, while perfectly fine for human reading, wasn’t really ideal for algorithmic parsing. Why would you want to parse the errors with an algorithm? A common case would be when your client is using business objects to represent API resources (think a client-side ORM), and would have a hard time binding validation errors to the objects themselves. ...

I’ve been using a Kindle for a long time now, and I love it. But I keep buying paper books. Lots of them. Actually I buy a lot more books than ebooks and it doesn’t even stop there. Admittedly, I am guilty of repeatedly buying paper editions of ebooks I’ve read on the Kindle. For a very long time I’ve not been able to tell the precise reason why I keep going back to traditional books. It’s not about the reading experience or the sexiness of turning physical pages. Well of course that matters too, as I’ve always been kind of a book fetishist, but since the very beginning of my love-hate relationship with the Kindle I’ve always known there had to be something else, and I couldn’t pin it down. ...

I had the opportunity to give my RESTful WeB APIs and MongoDB Go For A Picnic talk at both MongoTorino and NoSQL Day. The folks at PUG Friuli where so nice to record all the NoSQL Day sessions, so here you have it: the full length video of yours truly speaking to a fully packed room crowded with 120 very attentive attendees. Unfortunately audio is horrible and while all MongoTorino talks were in english, NoSQL Day was an italian-only event. The slide deck is in english however, and is available on both SpeakerDeck and SlideShare. ...

A little more than a year ago we closed our offices to become a fully distributed company. This story, which is still unfolding, has been the subject of my We Are All Remote Workers talk at RomagnaCamp 2013.