OddThinking

In which Julian attacks weight-loss supplements, Agile development, TV show segues, Chaos Theory and Economics, just so build up enough momentum to attack a much-beloved (by him!) computer science legend about something he wrote over 20 years ago.

What my current project has taught me about refactoring:

Here are the specs for a great weekend project that I don’t have time for, that would improve my cross-development productivity.

In which Julian fails to persuade Python to perform a simple task: stopping.

In which Julian rubber-ducks a design for a Python Logging Handler, to overcome earlier email jams.

In which Julian proposes a hypothetical – how could the default parameters on urllib2 bring down an application 29 minutes past midnight on a Saturday morning?

In which Julian stumbles over a serious gotcha in Python’s SMTPHandler for logging messages.

The idea of the computer popping up each morning and saying “Well done! You just hit your highest week’s turnover ever.” or “Oh dear! You had your worst continuous run of profit-less transactions in a row!” might make my job more interesting…

Is the real problem with compilers (and web-development and unit-tests) that they force a context-switch in the middle of the development process?

Wherein Julian bitches pointlessly about unit tests because it is late at night and he is bored of running them.