Yay! Barcelona Python Meetups are here!

Back from the first Barcelona Python Meetup Group event. The event was good, with two talks:

• Maik Röder, based on the Eight tips to start with Python. Maik added an additional tip (use PyFlakes, a faster PyChecker) and asked the attendants for our own tips: IPython (a great shell that I should be using again) proved to have many fans! I mentioned my love for ctypes.
• Ramon Navarro Bosch, on Design Patterns in Python. Ramon recommended us Alex Martelli's Google TechTalk video on the topic.
  

If the event was good, the post-event (beers, croquetas and bravas) with Maik was great and I'm bringing home lots of food for thought. Most of the talk was about Funittest (Making it easy to go from use case to functional test). Maik uses daily a high level Test Driven Development flow:

• write the functional test, to get aligned with the user's needs/customer value,
  
• write unit test, that can be driven faster and focus in the approapiate level of abstraction
• write the code

My impression is that his ideas have lots of commonalities with Fit and Fitness, and the story-based-testing that they advocate. Maik said that Funnitest's theoretical foundation can be grasped in The Braidy Tester articles; I'm adding them to my to-read list...

Beyond functional testing, the programmer's flow, the business-technical gap, Barcelona, Sevilla, tele-working... an intriguing an promising idea: the I-told-you-that-this-was-a-wrong-decision year-end bonus.

gotApi: docs at your fingertips

Stumbled upon gotApi.com. Its Fast Api Search, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Python, Java, Flickr... is fast, pretty and extremely useful.

Tab Mix Plus + TiddlyWiki = [productivity | guilt]

• I'm a big fan of the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension. I have a hard time when using a browser without it and I cannot duplicate tabs, undo tab closing, store several browsing sessions, list all the opened tabs in a dropdown menu...
• I'm an even bigger fan of TiddlyWikis(*), personal wikis that are self-contained in a single html file that can be in your hard drive or usb stick, or hosted in the terrific and free tiddlyspot service. I use them to record personal knowledge, to write docs and "microtag" at the paragraph level, to write checklists, to keep my to-do lists...
  

I just changed a Tab Mix Plus preference to switch to my left tab whenever I close a tab. And my left tab always hosts my to-do list in the shape of a MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

Will this change mean that my browsing parties will end up being shorter and I'll be pushed to Get Thing Done instead of following yet another interesting link?

Or am I just adding guilty feeling drops to some future pointless browsing?

(*) aside: It was the former IBM Rational Doug Landauer that pointed me to TiddlyWikis (among the endless list of interesting links that he always posted in his intranet blog(**)). It was the magic of seeing a wiki run in my browser that changed my perception of JavaScript and got me interested in it.

(**) See? I just checked Doug's delicious bookmarks and see a link to the Atomisator, some Python scripts that I'd like to check closer to help me avoid drowning in the rss tide... (***)

(***) The pattern of me getting lost following links should be quite obvious at this point :-)

No lo leerán

No sólo este blog, sino gran parte de la documentación que se escribe en los proyectos de desarrollo de software.

Después del No Lo Necesitarás, el No Lo Leerán. O YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) y TAGRI (They Aren't Gonna Need Read It). Dos grandes principios que es bueno recordar en el desarrollo de software, al escribir artículos y correo, al hacer la carta a los Reyes, al ir a la ferretería...