Tips for impressing in interviews

How a language could add special handling for monads.

Why everyone is on about monads.

Priciples are incredibly powerful and valuable. They translate our values in to guidance of how to build something. Values are important, but they don't point to how to do something. For instance writing secure code is important, but simply saying to someone "write more secure code" doesn't help them all …

At UDS last week there was another "Testing in Ubuntu" session. During the event I gave a brief presentation on monitoring and testability. The thesis was that there are a lot of parallels between monitoring and testing, so many that it's worth thinking of monitoring as a type of testing …

I recently finished reading "All Art is Propaganda" by George Orwell, a collection of some of his critical essays. It was a fascinating read, and would recommended it. Each of the essays is thought-provoking and enlightening, and the topics covered are numerous and varied.

The most interesting feature of the …

Today is the first day of the Linaro Connect in Cambridge. Linaro has gathered to spend a week talking, coding and having fun.

The Infrastructure team is spending most of the week coding, on a few select topics, chosen to make good use of the time that we have together …

If you are an application developer and you want to distribute your new application for a linux distribution, then you currently have several hurdles in your path. Beyond picking which one to start with, you either have a learn a packaging format well enough that you can do the work …

This was the confusing part when I first ran couchapp to create a new app, I couldn't really see where the "entry point" of the app was. In the hope that it might help someone else I'm going to present a quick overview of the default setup.

jml just announced testtools 0.9.8 and in it mentioned the soupmatchers project that I started. Given that I haven't talked about it here before, I wanted to do a post to introduce it, and explain some of the rationale behind it.

soupmatchers is a library for unit testing …

[ Apologies to those that saw this half-finished when I published rather than saving a draft ]

This is the part that it took me a long time to understand: how the different parts of the default couchapp collaborate to present data to the user.

In this post I'm just going to …

Today I would like to talk about the couchapp tool. This is something that you can use when working on couchapps, and provides a way to quickly iterate your design.

However, rather confusingly, the couchapp tool isn't actually required for couchapps. If you get a design document with HTML attachments …

Couchapps are a particular way of using couchdb that allow you to serve web applications directly from the database. These applications generate HTML and javascript to present data from couchdb to the user, and then update the database and the UI based on their actions.

Of course there are plenty …

The examples for Django testing point you towards hardcoding a username and password for a user to impersonate in tests, and the API of the test client encourages this too.

However, Django has a nice pluggable authentication system that means you can easily use something such as OpenID instead of …

I'm keen to try and write more about the things that I work on as part of my job at Canonical. In order to get started I wanted to write a summary of some of the things that I have done, as well as a little about what I am …

Normally when you write some code using launchpadlib you end up with Launchpad showing your users something like this:

This isn't great, how is the user supposed to know which option to click? What do you do if they don't choose the option you want?

Instead it's possible to limit …

Dear Mr Neary, thanks for your thought provoking post, I think it is a problem we need to be aware of as Free Software matures.

Firstly though I would like to say that the apparent ageism present in your argument isn't helpful to your point. Your comments appear to diminish …

The deadline for students to submit their applications to Google for Summer of Code is imminent.

If you were waiting for the last minute to submit, that is now!

If you are mentor and have the perfect student you have been working with, check with them that they have submitted …

If you don't want to read this article, then just steer clear of python-multiprocessing, threads and glib in the same application. Let me explain why.

There's a rather famous bug in Gwibber in Ubuntu Lucid, where a gwibber-service process will start taking 100% of the CPU time of one of …

As you've probably heard by now, Ubuntu has been accepted to Google Summer of Code this year. We're currently at the point where we are looking for students to take part and the mentors to pair with them to make the proposal. We have some ideas on the wiki, but …