Samba has a lot of tests, and we like to run them often. In order to easily do that, we've got a script that checks out a bunch of repositories and runs all tests in them, in parallel and independent of each other. It's living in the source tree at …

I'm currently writing a Python parser for GenBank files. I know BioPython has one, and it doesn't even suck, but BioPython requires a bunch of C extensions, so I can't go and just ship it with my Python application.

So I'm creating a BioPython-compatible API for the classes that I …

Another day, another piece of testing mayhem. I've completed the 0.1 version of my Flask-Downloader helper class. With this, I could complete my web app. Now, the downloader itself has a bunch of tests to make sure it's working as expected, but I was also going to test the …

Today, I decided to go for the downloader component that can download files on the behalf of the users. While looking at how to test this, I actually noticed that the mm_unit functionality has been merged into the minimock package. Sweet. I wanted to keep this modular, a downloader sounds …

Today, I decided to go and restructure my webapp into a package as recommended by the Flask "Larger Applications" pattern. Thanks to my existing test suite, the move was quick and pain-free. I had to fix imports in one of the tests, but apart from that, the only thing I …

Looks like my system strikes back. A fitting thing to happen for an episode 2, I guess. Turns out that nosetests and virtualenv need some extra care and feeding when kept together. Installing another copy of nosetests into my virtualenv fixed the test failures I was seeing. Thanks to the …

I've decided to start the campaign by ditching the existing PHP web app. I lost all confidence in it last Friday, when I found that it only worked by accident, due to a well-placed typo. As I'm rewriting the web app anyway, I thought I could also ditch PHP altogether …

Following the hallowed US American tradition of declaring war on whatever things you don't like, I've decided to declare war on legacy code this week.

By legacy code, I mostly mean untested code, following the definition of Michael Feathers' book Working with Legacy Code. That's a great read, by the …

Currently I'm involved in building the stage and props for an amateur theater, the Brechtbau Theater at my university. We're currently preparing for an Agatha Cristie play, "And then there were none". As a great opportunity, we are able to perform this piece in the city's professional theater, the Landestheater …

I just had to package up a python package to make installation of a software we use at work easier. The systems we run here are Suse- and Ubuntu-based, so I got to package RPMs and debs.

I did package the odd perl package and some bioinformatics tool before, but …