Development

Designing, coding, testing, deploying.

Samurai Developers

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There are software developers much more skilled than what is usually called “guru”. I call them “samurai” developers.

While junior developers like the beauty of code they write, intermediate developers like the beauty of system architecture they design, and senior (guru) developers like the business effectiveness of market products they roll out, samurai developers like the beauty of doing nothing. Literally.

By the end of the 12th century, samurai became almost entirely synonymous with bushi, and the word was closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the warrior class. The samurai followed a set of rules that came to be known as bushidō. /Wikipedia/

So here is a code of conduct of the samurai developer. It is definitely not bushidō direct adaptation, but mostly a poetic interpretation of what is associated with samurais.

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Sticky Authorship

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sticky authorship

There is a little emotional and psychological problem I call “sticky authorship” syndrome. When you create something — a web site, a picture, an application — you inevitably become its author for life. No matter how long time ago it was, and how perfect you are nowadays, you are still the author and your work still characterizes your professional level.

Since our past produce (as seen from the future) are always far from perfect, we are usually ashamed by its mere existence. And we desire to re-make it, despite of the absence of time to do that or the boredom we will suffer while doing that. Inability or reluctance to remake it causes stress and depression.

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Automatically activate virtualenv on cd (even in mc)

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If you work with Python, you probably work with virtualenv. If you work with virtualenv, you probably work with virtualenvwrapper. Nevertheless, if you work a lot with many virtualenvs at the same time, you may become tired of al these “. bin/activate” or “workon smthng”.

You just want to cd into your project directory, and have everyhting ready to work. Especially if you use two-pane file managers, such as Midnight Commander, for file operations and tree browsing, and prefer not to type shell commands when it is not neccessary.

Here is how I do that:

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Building 32-bit ZooKeeper Python bindings in 64-bit Mac OS X

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If you need to build ZooKeeper Python bindings in 32-bit mode on 64-bit Mac OS X, it can be hard to do since ZooKeeper building scripts ignore the usual “-arch” flags for the compiler. But there is a simple workaround for this. And here it is.

Why?

If you have Mac OS X and you need Oracle InstantClient for your work as I do, you are in trouble: the 64-bit InstantClient crashes with “segfault” error code 11 on 64-bit Mac OS X. The only solution is to use 32-bit InstantClient, which does work.

But this workaround entails to every single bit of software, that uses InstantClient, should be 32-bit too. For example, if you code Python as I do, you need cx_Oracle to be 32-bit to work with 32-bit InstantClient (64-bit cx_Oracle binary part cannot work with 32-bit InstantClient libraries, obviously). And if you have 32-bit cx_Oracle, you ought to have 32-bit Python to load that 32-bit cx_Oracle. And if you have 32-bit Python, you ought to make all other binary libraries to be 32-bit. Thank you, Oracle, for this fun!

And if you use ZooKeeper together with InstantClient as I do, you have to build 32-bit ZooKeeper binaries and libraries. Well, lets work up to it from the beginning.

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MTurk Quality Experiment #1

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As I’ve previously mentioned in my Twitter (nolar), I’ve been experimenting with Amazon MTurk, and here are the preliminary results of the quality of the results for one specific task of translation of the texts from English to Russian.

Initially I wanted to name this article as “Zoo of Mechanical Turkeys”, but changed my mind for better SEO of this article (I mean relevancy, not the traffic and popularity of the Dark SEO). I don’t know why MTurk is so associated with turkeys in my mind, when it has nothing to do with these birds or nationality.

I guess, the results will show why it happens so. But before I will give you the results, I want to describe what the task is, and why is it so unusual.

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Amazon compact AMI with Ubuntu

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Did you ever try Amazon Web Services (AWS)? If you are an IT person and did not try it yet, then I recommend you to do so as soon as possible.  Just sign up with your Amazon account, and get their Free Tier for 1 year. Free Tier includes 10GB of EBS storage and 750 hours (24 hours * 31 days) of free time for “micro” instance. When the year will finish, this “micro” instance will cost you no more than ~$15/month (30 days * 24 hours * $0,02/hr).

You can easily run an instance of almost any modern OS — either Windows or any distribution of Linux — in less than a minute, with absolutely no need to go through difficult installation and initial configuration process. Just select an image (Amazon Machine Image, AMI), push the button, wait few seconds and connect with ssh to a running virtual server.

To be honest, the initial motive of making my own nano-AMI has came from misunderstanding of the Free Tier policy. I had found that the smallest of these images are 8GB in size, and one image takes all the Free Tier included EBS storage. So I thought that instead of  running one big 8GB empty image I can run ten nano-size 1GB images instead. Thus, saving money by fitting into Free Tier boundaries.

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