Programming vs Programmer

Although I have many years of professional programming experience, it's still startling to realize the distance between writing a program for "Hello World", vs working as a day-to-day programmer. The amount of stuff you have to know, and use quickly in ever-changing combinations, is substantial.



A student decried that his two-month class in Ruby didn't really prepare him for being a big-P Programmer, it just taught him little-p programming.



My view is that the material in that class, as well as Computer Science in general, is meaningless. What you learn is not useful, it's all about learning how to learn.



The following article shows how to do professional-level deployment of your Python webapp onto a server.  It uses ten different technologies, only one of which is "Python"!  This is all after your webapp is programmed and complete.  The pieces are: 1) version control with Git, 2) Python, 3) separate environments with Virtualenv, 4) installing packages with Pip, 5) using Flask for the webapp itself, 6) running webapps with Gunicorn, 7) handling web clients with Nginx, 8) keeping services running with Supervisor, deploying with 9) Fabric (TLDR: don't use this), and 10) off by one errors.



Most of the above technologies are complex, and have multiple books written about them. Using them together requires a firm grasp not on each tech itself, but in which parts to ignore, and which to use, in combination with which other technologies.



This is a hard skill to learn, but this characteristic separates little-p programmers from professional Programmers.



Kickstarting Flask on Ubuntu - setup and deployment - Real Python

Why I prefer Python to Java, in two code samples.

Why I prefer Python to Java, in two code samples.



heh

Vagrant/Ansible trick: autoreload

When testing Ansible scripts, it's nice to have your Vagrant VM automatically re-provision itself when you change the configuration.  In this way just saving a file lets you see the VM reinstall packages and so forth, with errors appearing immediately.

The following runs a tiny reprovisioning script each time your Ansible YAML files change:

pip install watchmedo

watchmedo shell-command --drop --pattern='*.yml' --command='clear; vagrant provision'

Hidden features of Python - Stack Overflow

Hidden features of Python - Stack Overflow -- lots of great, semi-obscure features!

How to write dumber tests

Tests are hard.  The goal is to write a little bit of stuff that finds bugs in your code, you don't want to write unit tests so complex that they have bugs.  Charles (Luke) Lee breaks down some of the challenges, and gives solutions. Video from PyTexas 2014.

I have an entire rant about mocks, but that will wait for a later blog post.

How to write dumber tests