Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • How to SOA an existing project

    SOA or service oriented architecture is a way of building a complex project so that each individual unit can stand alone with a documented API.  There are many benefits to taking an SOA approach to designing a complex software system. To those familiar with programming, SOA provides the same sorts of benefits as OOP but…

  • Finding a good A/V receiver

    My 12 year old A/V receiver bit the dust last week.  It seems to have overheated and burned out some components judging by the smell. So now I’m looking for a replacement.  The first thing I learned is that the Canadian stores all price the products at about 2x what they go for on eBay…

  • Next Gen Websites

    the web 1.0 was defined by static html pages and simple cgi scripts.  Web 2.0 was marked by improvements in CSS and HTML capabilities, as well as growing influence of Javascript especially with AJAX to make things a bit more interactive. The next significant shift in the development of websites is moving a lot more…

  • Another Personal Test

    There are 3 different things you can do to affect your weight. Exercise changes Dietary changes Take drugs It is possible to take any weight management strategy and estimate percentages of effectiveness to each of these 3 categories.  You can lose weight by just exercising more, or just eating less, or doing both. I have…

  • Lines of Code Per Day Performance

    There are few arguments with programmers that can elicit such passionate hatred as a debate about measuring a programmer’s performance by tracking the number of lines of code they write per day. There are far too many variables at play which can affect a programmers ability to type code – how well they understand the…

  • Why you should use Celery and Django

    Celery is something that I kept hearing about but took me a while to wrap my head around.  Why is it important? What is it good for? With a couple of big Django websites under my belt it has become more obvious where something like Celery fits and why it’s useful. The first thing you…

  • Migrating from Apache to Nginx + Gunicorn

    I was never really sure why people opted to swap out the heavily tested, widely deployed Apache web server for alternatives other than those trying to eek out a little bit more performance.  Finally I found a good reason to change my setup. When trying to enable Celery for asynchronous tasks on my web server I ran into some…

  • UFO Invader Update Coming

    The first game I did for iPhone was released back in 2011. Seems like eons ago. The game hasn’t been updated, or promoted since that initial release and yet there are still an average of 100 people playing it every day. I’m working with Colum on a strategy to launch a bunch of new games…

  • Playing With Node.js

    When exploring ways to build a good chat server there are an overwhelming number of options. The old way of doing things with polling the server for new messages was simply not an option but the alternatives are a little scary.  Using a SQL database seemed a bit overkill for just posting messages. In the…

  • What to do with a Raspberry Pi

    I’m trying to think of some ideas for what to do with a Raspberry Pi. There’s just so many things that people have done with these little $35 computers that it is overwhelming to think of what to do with one. Here’s a list of ideas I’ve scoured from the web: Webcam server Vehicle tracking…