I did a little bit of work using mongo recently, and I stumbled across some of those “lessons learned the hard way” things that I thought I’d share. If you haven’t used mongo or aren’t familiar with it, I recommend their official site and Wikipedia for a quick introduction on what mongo is and how it works.
After having written the afore-discussed Flask web service, I needed a framework to load test the whole thing. I wound up using multi-mechanize. Overall, it’s a pretty decent framework. It’s pretty easily configurable, the documentation is thorough enough for most needs, and presents the test data in a variety of formats. Projects are quick and easy to set up, leaving you to focus on your test scripts. Continue reading »
If you’ve Googled around for a quick and simple framework for putting together web services in Python, odds are you’ve stumbled on the Flask framework. In fact, quick and simple is pretty much Flask’s claim to fame.
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Around the end of 2011 and 2012, CodeAcademy.com starting promoting and subsequently launched Code Year, offering up a programming lesson every Monday for people to learn to code. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m doing the Code Year lessons myself, since I haven’t had a lot of web development experience in the past, and for the kicks.
Asking a lot of questions is important when you’re just starting a new job. It’s 1 of those things that cannot be emphasized enough. You didn’t get hired because there may be something for you to do sometime later. You got hired because that company needs help right then, and the idea is that you’re up and contributing in short order. But you’re just a newbie dumped into the middle of working on some piece of software that’s probably already large and involved, not to mention learning all about your new employer, and getting a sense of the new way of doing things there. There’s a very good chance your first instinct would be to find someone who knows everything that’s going on and ask “Herp derp?” Unfortunately, “Herp Derp” is a pretty useless question. Besides, very wide-open questions like that lead to basically you getting blasted with a firehose of information, overloading you and making it borderline impossible to remember everything you’re being taught. I don’t have the algorithm that optimizes the amount you can learn and the time it takes you to learn it. Having recently come through an initial round of firehosing, here a few things I’ve noticed.
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