code – Chad Dotson

You're Too Close

By chad December 9, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, TipsNo Comments

Have you encountered the following scenario? You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, "why don't you do it this…

Python Logger

By chad June 29, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

The Scenario This scenario illustrates two possible mistakes people make when using the python logging module. Analyze the following code and look for issues. try: ... except SomeException as e: logger.error("Some meaningful error message. message={0}".format(e.message)) So what is wrong with that? First and foremost, the code fails to use the…

C-Style Unions And Python

By chad May 8, 2015ProgrammingNo Comments

So, you're creating a C Union (used to create a variant type) and writing it to a file, socket, etc and want to read that in Python. There are two ways to deal with this. Assume the following union definition in C typedef union { int i; unsigned int u;…

Node.js vs Python vs PyPy – A Simple Performance Comparison – Updated

By chad December 30, 2014Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, Uncategorized5 Comments

Some History This is a followup to my original post: Node.js vs Python vs PyPy - A Simple Performance Comparison. This article corrects a discrepancy caused by a slight difference in the JavaScript implementation which skewed the Node.js results. The Algorithm As stated in the previous article, I've attempted to…

Notes On Writing Testable JavaScript Vol 1

By chad November 6, 2014Programming1 Comment

When writing JavaScript, I am a big fan of minimizing functionality and variables exposed publicly, which we all know to be good practice. However, this leads to anonymous functions and functions hidden within closures. So.... How Do You Test That? How exactly do you test private methods in JavaScript? To…

Make It Easy

By chad October 18, 2014Key Concepts, Programming, Software Engineering1 Comment

Building a successful product is usually complicated business. With any luck a project will have an automated deployment process. This however is only part of the equation. Another significant part would be an automated build process. Long Term Success Long term success means making it easy for new people to…

My Swift App – An Ongoing Experiment

By chad October 2, 2014Programming, Software Engineering2 Comments

Work is progressing on my first iOS app written in Swift. I think that I might have a rudimentary alpha product ready to start testing in a few weeks. Based on my experience with it so far, here are some of my thoughts, observations, and concerns. Developing in Swift is…

Comparing Node.js and Python on the Raspberry PI

By chad August 25, 2014Key Concepts, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Software Engineering8 Comments

Programming on the Raspberry Pi Python seems to be the more popular language for writing programs on the Raspberry Pi. However, it is far from the only language: Python, C, C++, Java, and Ruby are some that are automatically supported out of the box. As it turns out Node.js is…

Everyone's A Coder

By chad August 24, 2014Software EngineeringNo Comments

Question: Are we headed to an era where everyone should know how to write at least some rudimentary code? Learn to Code Today, there are many sites on the internet offering to "teach you to code." Two of which are KhanAcademy and CodeAcademy. These sites offer a selection of…

Project Excelsior – Technology Update

By chad August 18, 2014Diversions, Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

For the past month or so I've been working on a little side project that I've dubbed "Project Excelsior." I've not had an abundance of time to spend on it over the past few week, so I'm just now wringing out some of the technology stack. I've almost decided completely…