Catching Up
I haven’t posted in a fair while. Partly because I’ve been busy with work. Partly because I’ve been working on weblayer.
The office has been busy on http://openideo.com and its offshoots. I’ve been managing the redesign and redevelopment of a major NGO’s websites and working on a financial startup on top of the usual load of proposals and whatnot.
weblayer is firmly in the Quixotic tradition. Yet another WSGI framework in a world of WSGI frameworks. So why do it? Well, proposals and whatnot are good so far as they go but a developer has to keep his hand in.
Inspired by this post on the Google Testing blog, I took a library I’d made earlier and used it to learn how to write testable code. I analysed and refactored, simplified and tightened, wrote exhaustive unit tests, functional tests and serious documentation.
At the end of the process, what did I have? On the one hand, it could be argued, an entirely pointless, even counter productive (given the lack of oxygen in the Python world and abundance of tools solving the same problem) new tool for writing web applications. On the other, a new ability to write bulletproof code.
It means I haven’t got round to writing unmissable posts on redefining web design (clue, you’re a “screen designer”) or the role of systems thinking in IA (study demand). However, I can tell you, it feels good to have a new super power.
