Spolksy - Man with a Mission
Nice guys do sometimes win
[tl;dr Go and read Joel Spolsky's own blog post - quotes printed here are taken from there without explicit permission.]
Joel Spolsky is a man who set out with a simple goal - "make a company where the best developers want to work" - and has in the process created two of the best known (amongst their target audience) . . .
Django's CommaSeparatedIntegerField
It doesn't do what you think it does, but it can still be useful.
I've you ever need to store lists of IDs in a field in Django, you've probably
come across the CommaSeparatedIntegerField. It sounds ideal - you can save
lists to and from the database. Brilliant.
Except that that's not how it works. The CommaSeparatedIntegerField is in
fact nothing more than a CharField with . . .
Go, go, go...
What would Murray Walker do?
Seems like the buzz around Go over the last couple of years since its 1.0 launch hasn't just been hot air. There were a couple of high profile projects such as Cloudflare's Railgun back in 2012/23, which many (inc. myself) suspected may have been at least partially sponsored / encouraged by Google themselves to get #golang into the . . .
Is DNS the new HTTP?
No, obviously not - but the title got you here.
Back in 2010 I wrote a blog post called HTTP self-service, which advocated the use of embedded HTTP servers inside software running in on the server, to make it easier to manage and maintain. The basic premise then was that HTTP was everywhere, and that everyone seemed to have their own lightweight embeddable HTTP server software library. In . . .
Heartbleed response
What we did in the aftermath of Heartbleed
Last Tuesday (8th April) we had a period of unexpected downtime on the site (from 8pm BST). This turned out to have been caused by Heroku (our hosting platform) resetting their SSL certificates in response to the now infamous Heartbleed bug. (One of the advantages of using a platform like Heroku is that you have the people on top of these . . .
Is Skydock Fig's missing link?
Runtime DNS resolution of Docker container IP addresses.
Three months ago I wrote an article entitled "Is Fig Docker's missing link?" It wasn't, quite, and I abandoned my attempt to move off of a single Vagrant VM and onto a super-clean Docker-powered development environment. My discovery of Skydock has reeled me back in.
First, some background - my experience of getting . . .
Django model cascade delete
Where to put side-effects in the event of a cascade delete.
Django's ORM supports the concept of a 'cascade delete' - whereby the deletion of an object via the ORM results in the deletion of its related child object (related via a Foreign Key relationship).
We had an open question re. where to put side-effects that we wanted to run every time an object was deleted, irrespective of . . .