A tiny python library for faking out filesystem operations for tests.

How file descriptor leaks are causing your processes to stick around longer than they should.

A feature proposal for avoiding spoilers on social networks.

Distinguishing EPERMvs EACCESS, and how that helps debug file manipulation scripts.

Starting new java processes in your scripts considered harmful. Let’s compare “hello world” startup times for different languages.

When comparing long strings in unit tests, make sure your assertion failures give you useful output.

How being lazy and procrastinating led me to adopt test-driven development before I realized it.

Working with vendor code in C can get very tricky, especially when you except breaking changes to occur. Especially when you have multiple binaries depending on that vendor code, updating at different times, necessitating different live versions. Let’s explore. Introduction Assume you’re working with an external vendor, who is providing you with code for a wonderful function getFoo: // foo.h version 1.2.3 int getFoo(); // foo.c version 1.2.3 int getFoo() { sleep(1000); // TODO improve performance return 42 } You use this function in many of your products - for example, in your best-selling barApp application:...

Vacations are a great time for doing that problematic category of things every management course teaches you about: important, but not urgent. For some people, it’s housework or schoolwork which gets drowned out by day-to-day life. For others it’s keeping up with friends and family. Myself, I also like to read and write. Writing, for me, is usually about practical stuff. Sometimes it’s simply code (most of those projects were written on vacations)....

As part of my M.Sc. studies, I’ve recently completed a small laboratory project in natural language processing. I’ve learned quite a bit from it, and had a chance to use a few of my favorite technologies. The project was coded in Python, which is not my favorite programming language - Ruby is. However, since Python is more popular at my workplace, and seems to have a richer ecosystem around it (sometimes, at any rate), I’ve grown to love it almost as much over the years....