At work I manage projects with Trac. It’s great. We have about ten different projects, including websites and internal web apps, with most of the code in a central Subversion repository hooked up to Trac so that it’s easy to see what got changed when (and why!).
But rather than bore you with Trac evangelism I’ll share a goofy hack I built to get a basic visualization of the ticket load in Trac over time.
I just learned that TIOBE (who maintain a popular but controversial listing of programming language popularity statistics) declared Python the “language of 2007”. Most notably, it is now (according to TIOBE) more popular than Perl:
Last month Python surpassed Perl for the first time in history, which is an indication that Python has become the “de facto” glue language at system level. It is especially beloved by system administrators and build managers. Chances are high that Python’s star will rise further in 2008, thanks to the upcoming release of Python 3.
I launched this blog in July of 2005. It was powered by a homebrew PHP5 creation that as of today has, finally, thankfully, been laid to rest.
The other thing that started absorbing my attention in July 2005 was Django. Every month since then, I’ve thought, “You know, I should make some time this weekend to port my blog over to Django.” I was using it for everything else, after all, side projects as well as web applications at work. The word “port” was the mistake there – if I had said, “I should make some time this weekend to destroy my old blog and make a clean-slate Django version”, I probably would have gotten it done about two years ago!
Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:
The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I’m looking forward to the white paper, “How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year”. We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site. I hadn’t realized what a pioneer and international pirate celebrity Chris was.
Lately I’ve been trying out the Mercurial distributed version control system on some real projects.
I currently use Subversion for production stuff at work. It’s reliable, has great Trac integration, and is most likely to be known by other developers. (In fact, we hired a new person at work this fall who will be helping me with web development, and it turned out that Subversion was what he was familiar with. So I feel vindicated on that last point especially.)