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 …

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 …

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 …

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 my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2010 I would like to mention Emma Jane Hogbin.

Emma is an Ubuntu Member, published author, documentation evangelist, conference organiser, Drupal theming expert, tireless conference presenter, and many more things as well.

Her enthusiasm is infectious, and her passion for solving problems for …

Many projects that I work on, or follow the development of, and granted there may be a large selection bias here, are showing some of the same tendencies. Combined these indicate to me that we need to change the way we look at becoming a trusted member of the project …

I have a problem that I believe will be easy for someone with a bit of UNIX coding knowledge to solve, so I appeal to those that can to help.

I'm trying to write a DBus service that will spawn a command, and provide the output to the user. The …

As well as the new notification bubbles, jaunty now has something called the "indicator-applet", or various other names. If you are running Jaunty you may have seen it as an envelope in your panel. Not much is taking advantage of it yet, with only Evolution and Pidgin having the necessary …