Mike's Blabberings

History is made today… Don’t forget to tune in at noon

We generally preach that you should not use real data in your unit tests. You should instead mock said data out in an effort to lesson potential side-effects, including degrading test performance and adversely affecting live data.
Sometimes, you’d like to test actual file handling in a unit test. If you do, you should [...]

After pulling most of my hair out, I realized a simple mistake in my Python regular expression usage. I had been trying to search a simple HTML document for some text, which happened to be broken across a newline such as:

<div>I’m some
[...]

A new list of the most dangerous programming mistakes was released today by SANS Institute. This is a great followup to the OWASP Top 10. The list of potential application security flaws is broken up into three sections, one for dealing with each of application component interaction, resource management, and weak defenses.

CATEGORY: Insecure [...]

Going against a prior thought I had, in which I told myself to make a single important resolution and stick to it for the year, my 2009 resolution is to make a new habit each month and stick to it for 30 days. After reading Leo’s The Power of Less, I was inspired to [...]

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Javascript seems to gets left in the dust when we consider code quality. It’s been rigged, scattered, and smeared every which way from Sunday. Most sites of significant complexity have a severe amount of legacy, rotting code buried deep in a countless number of files. There is little separation of concerns in [...]