Aftermarket Pipes

"SO, WHAT DID I JUST BUY?" That was my first impression of Paul Allen. I was a 20-year-old who had just gone from intern to tech lead when Paul bought the startup I was working at. The other pro...

https://www.timlesher.com/2018/10/rip-paul-allen.html

This is a piano key. It belongs to a piano that we inherited from my sister-in-law, who inherited it from the school where she worked, who inherited it from a church sometime in the 1940s. W...

https://www.timlesher.com/2017/10/this-is-why-we-dont-put-changelogs-in.html

I started programming in junior high, writing BASIC code on a Commodore 128 . At the time the only learning resource I had was the owner's manual and some issues of Compute!'s Gazette , so I was ...

https://www.timlesher.com/2012/05/its-probably-been-done.html

In my experience there are two kinds of "rock star" software developers.  There's the Neil Peart rock star developer, who combines a natural blessing of talent and intelligence with a relentl...

https://www.timlesher.com/2011/11/3-simple-rules-that-will-make-you-real.html

One of my favorite features of Python is its interactive shell. If you want to try something, you type in the code and try it immediately. For someone whose first coding environment was the equal...

https://www.timlesher.com/2011/09/case-study-python-as-secret-weapon-for.html

After doing "this programmer thing" for a few years now, I've noticed a pattern in how I acquire skills and techniques. It's surprisingly consistent, and consists of these stages: 0: AWARENESS ...

https://www.timlesher.com/2011/08/stages-of-competency.html

One of the consequences of the 2.x-to-3.x Python changeover is that I need to keep both versions around for a while on my Windows dev workstation. Actually, strike that: I need to keep many vers...

https://www.timlesher.com/2010/10/switchpy.html

Several some many years ago, I decided to learn a new programming language a year. I don't subscribe to the "once you're a programmer, you can learn any new language in a few weeks" theory, so I ...

https://www.timlesher.com/2010/05/language-of-year.html

I'm a command line geek. Windows' style of installing everything in its own directory makes it easier to clean up after uninstallation, but it makes for very long PATH environment variables. If ...

https://www.timlesher.com/2010/02/mpath-command-line-path-manipulation.html

Following the example of Catherine Devlin and Carl Trachte , I thought I'd put together a list of the five Pycon talks I need to see in 2010. But I couldn't--I struggled to get below a dozen. So...

https://www.timlesher.com/2009/12/five-pycon-2010-talks-i-need-to-see.html

A few years ago, the "five things I hate about my favorite programming language" went around. I think it originated with Brian D. Foy's post on Perl . I like his reasoning: if you can't think of ...

https://www.timlesher.com/2009/10/five-things-i-hate-about-c.html

Most software developers are familiar with the "buy-or-build" question: is it more effective to find existing software and try to make it work in your situation, or to build it to your exact spec...

https://www.timlesher.com/2009/10/buying-or-building-furniture.html

To be the most awesome Dad ever, capable of carrying out feats of skill and mastery usually reserved for the likes of the Avatar , James Bond , or the Doctor , requires just a few common ingred...

https://www.timlesher.com/2008/09/how-to-be-most-awesome-dad-ever.html

Sometimes it's hard to shake old habits, especially when you've burned them into your brain as the "standard" way to do things. For example, I've been doing network programming with C and C++ for...

https://www.timlesher.com/2008/06/fun-with-itertools.html

About three months ago, I started writing a blog post on why my (development) life has changed for the better since I started using git for version control. It's been stewing in my "Drafts" fold...

https://www.timlesher.com/2008/06/git-what-he-said.html

tlesher@badwolf:~$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head     109 ls     107 cd      78 git      26 sudo      14 rm      12�...

https://www.timlesher.com/2008/04/that-looks-about-right.html

This December, I took a deep breath and jumped. I left a great job at a great company , working on cool projects with fun people, and executed a perfect swan dive back into the tech startup blen...

https://www.timlesher.com/2008/01/oh-look-startup.html

Now that, my friends, is a Sad Mac .

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/12/sad-mac.html

In person, Sue Loh sounds exactly like you'd imagine from reading the CE blog . In person, Doug Boling sounds exactly like you'd imagine from reading his book (except his humor comes off bett...

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/05/10-things-i-learned-at-medc.html

Just call me a sheep .

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/05/ok-i-give-in.html

Ok, so I've missed PyCon for the past three years running because of work conflicts. But at least this year they've been nice enough to send me to the Microsoft Mobile and Embedded DevCon (MEDC)...

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/05/o-sole-mio.html

Microsoft Research has put significant effort into implementing a near-literal version of Vannevar Bush's "memex " in its MyLifeBits project. I think we have the memex already: we just don't real...

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/04/your-memex-is-here-are-you-using-it.html

Adam Rifkin says, "Having a blog means feeling perpetually behind ." Well, today I'm slightly less behind. The Pipes have been blocked for a few months (you might notice that this happens every t...

https://www.timlesher.com/2007/04/slightly-less-perpetually-behind.html

One of the neat features in TurboGears is the @jsonify decorator. It uses RuleDispatch to define generic functions to convert data model objects into JSON notation for use in AJAXish applications...

https://www.timlesher.com/2006/09/turbogears-decorator-madness-linkify.html

In the late 1990s, the game industry was starting to tackle "best practices". Basic techniques common in the rest of the software world (and mostly taken for granted now) weren't getting much tra...

https://www.timlesher.com/2006/08/yes-games-are-different.html