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(originally published at headspring.com) Have you ever had an existing application using Entity Framework and then needed to import some data from spreadsheets? Maybe it was even IMPORTANT that the import go through your existing entities. For example, a customer may want to upload updated lookup tables or import sales data from another system that…

(originally published at headspring.com) Duplication in code often arises organically and can cause problems like missing updates of the duplicated cases or just obscuring the actual flow through the code due to large amounts of boilerplate code. Refactoring code to eliminate duplication can take a bit of knowledge on how to break down that code…

When we spend time on a piece of code, we can feel like that code is a part of us. Criticism about your code can feel even worse than a seemingly more personal criticism, like comments about appearance. We can come to feel like our code is a reflection of who we truly are—how we…

(originally published at headspring.com) Dealing with multiple programming languages is usually a sign of progress – maybe you’ve bought another company and you have a whole new amazing product line to go with all the stuff you’ve done forever! Or, maybe you’re taking a look at your diverse company that’s grown over time and you…

(originally published at headspring.com) Software modernization is fundamentally all about change—new technologies are the most visible and often most exciting aspects of modernization. However, technology doesn’t stand alone: Systems are created, maintained, and used by teams of people across organizations—from the developers to the business stakeholders to the end users—and people have built-in limits to…

So, I was opening a new project in mercurial that had a bit of a history.  I ran the normal: hg clone ssh://**@*******et.org/mycompany/somerepository Which has worked pretty fast on the smaller repositories that I’ve cloned.  THIS time, it got to “adding file changes” …. and stopped.  The thing appeared totally hung, for at least the…

This week, I’ve been playing with implementing an HTTP client in Python. Why Python? It seemed like a straightforward language for this sort of thing, and the fact that I don’t know it at all is a bonus learning opportunity! In any case, I make no claim to be any kind of authority at all…

37 Signals was in the news last year for the wrong reasons: they experienced multiple outages in a short time period.  From their own site, “The virtual machines had severely degraded network and CPU performance causing them to grind to a halt.” Sounds unfortunate, but these things just happen, right? Well, there’s more to it than that.…

Recently, I was proofreading a technical design document written about a system that was unfamiliar to me. It described the flow of execution through a fairly complex system. I found it more difficult to follow the design than it should have been, but I wasn’t sure why.  After some thought, I narrowed down on the…

I don’t know if you can say I’m a programmer solely because of my dad(by training a physicist and by profession an engineer), but he was a big part of getting me there.  I had my first experiences with a computer when I was very young, no older than 4 or 5- my dad would…