When you are writing middleware (be it SOAP services, REST APIs, or something else) an important point to realize is that *Back Ends Fail*. They fail in strange and interesting ways. Code for talking to back ends should always be robust: it should never make a call without some timeout …
Posted Wed 23 July 2014 by mcherm in Programming, Technology
Today is the deadline for providing public comment to the FCC on whether to classify broadband communications under Title II -- basically, whether or not to enforce Net Neutrality in a way that works. The following is the letter that I submitted (by email, since the FCC's website for posting comments …
Posted Tue 15 July 2014 by mcherm in Politics, Technology
In the Python discussion group, Skip Montanaro posted the title question: what's the "right" way to abandon an open source package?
He got one detailed and helpful answer from Ben Finney.
It was an excellent question and an excellent response. I thought it was worth sharing here.
Posted Tue 08 July 2014 by mcherm in Programming
A week or so ago Microsoft dug into a customer's Hotmail account in order to track down some information about code that had been stolen from Microsoft. Their terms and conditions specifically allowed them to do this, but despite that they received a fair amount of criticism.
With this announcement …
I have had people tell me things like "You should never throw an exception to return a value in an unusual case, exceptions are only supposed to be used for error conditions." And I HATE it when people say things like this.
There are a couple of audiences at play …
Posted Fri 24 January 2014 by mcherm in Programming