About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 102345 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

On Rewriting Software

Kevin Barnes has an interesting post about software rewrites. Here are some of the questions he thinks you should be able to answer "yes" to in order to proceed with a high chance of success:

Do you honestly believe that if you rewrote it without adding any features the resulting code would be 33% smaller than the current code?
Do you have a very senior sponsor who understands and believes in the project?
Can you get enough resources (even on a temporary basis) to support development on the old code base while the new code is written?
Is the project critically important to the company's future?
Can the company go without a major release of the product for half the planned coding duration?
Do you have anyone on the team who has successfully rewritten a major piece of software before?

I find his list thought provoking for two reasons. First, like (all|most) programmers, of course I have applications in use that I would like to rewrite.

Secondly, though, and perhaps more significantly, it seems like a really good list of questions to tape up by your desk when you start a new project. We end up with things we want to rewrite often because of the things that we were going to "fix later". Then "later" gets later and "fix" gets expensive and, well, there we are. A reminder of just how important some of those early decisions are might just be a tonic.

(If you are interested in the subject, Chad Fowler also has a recent post which I haven't had a chance to read yet.)

Thursday, January 4th, 2007
programming