Hello Sir/Madam,

I am Andrey Khavryuchenko, owner KDS Software specializes in innovative IT solutions and complex software projects development.

My company based in Ukraine. We've earned ourselves a reputation of a reliable and trustworthy partner working successfully with a number of West European companies and providing them with reliable software development services in financial and media sectors.
Unfortunately we are currently facing some difficulties with receiving payments for our services. It usually takes us 10-30 days to receive a payment and clearing from your country and such delays are harmful to our business. We do not have so much time to accept every wire transfer.

Speaking politely, that’s a bullshit.

If you go and provide those guys the info they’ve requested:

1. Your Full Name as it appears on your resume.
2. Education.
3. Your Contact Address.
4. Telephone/Fax number.
5. Your present Occupation and Position currently held.
6. Your Age

you, actually give them a legitimate way to access YOUR bank account.

Don’t be fooled by that!

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If you’re working with somebody at a startup, you know that they think it’s possible they might be one of the best in their field, and they’re willing to work very hard to prove it (or to find out otherwise). You also know that they’re working sufficiently hard that they will absolutely demand your best, and boot you if you provide anything less. A lot of people might consider that high-pressure, and it is, but high pressure is often a result of high standards, and high standards are a very good thing.

If you consider you fit the description above and you are interested working with me - be sure to apply.

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Even if it’s tiny, nearly empty and easy to fill. Things only become worse when you have to test lots different cases that contradict each other and yet are small enough to justify a separate database fixture.

Thus, tonight I’m fighting my laziness to decipher django.db.models enough to be able to create slim and easy db mocks inside a nose unit test.

So far is far too late for my brain to spin at full speed and no code was produced. Yet I’ve come down to two distinct ways to implement this:

1. Completely mock django.db.models.query._QuerySet to use in-test dataset and respond to various queries
2. Construct in-memory python SQLite and replace application connection with the one of the unit test.

Definitely the second way is faster to either implement or fail. So will it be.

Watch for updates with working code..

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Here are 3 points that I’ve learned:

1. Read and follow instructions at docs/unicode.txt and communicate on the django-users list
2. Use latest db adaptors
3. Beware of your database encoding

Long story.

It took me several hours to trace why cyrillics is stored as ‘????’ in the database. Starting from top - my code - to the database itself.

Distilled down for mysql:

• make sure you’re using latest python-MySQLdb: earlier versions have known problems with utf8
• make sure that your db server is started with using utf8 charset in mind
• backup your database as json using

     manage.py dumpdata > <dumpfile>.json

• recreate your database making sure it has “utf8″ character set and collation:

    mysql> show variables like 'ch%';
    +--------------------------+----------------------------+
    | Variable_name            | Value                      |
    +--------------------------+----------------------------+
    | character_set_client     | latin1                     |
    | character_set_connection | latin1                     |
    | character_set_database   | utf8                       |
    | character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
    | character_set_results    | latin1                     |
    | character_set_server     | utf8                       |
    | character_set_system     | utf8                       |
    | character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
    +--------------------------+----------------------------+
    8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

• load your data back from json dump:

    manage.py loaddata <dumpfile>

Happy hacking!

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Imagine you’re trying to present a (cyrillic) tag in url-ready form. Usually this is solved by

{{ tagname|urlencode }}

But when the ‘tagname’ contains non-ascii symbols, urlencode barfs:

KeyError at /
u'\u0420'
Request Method:     GET
Request URL:    http://localhost:8088/
Exception Type:     KeyError
Exception Value:    u'\u0420'
Exception Location:     /usr/lib/python2.4/urllib.py in quote, line 1117
Template error

My current (temporary) solution is to encode this manually, in python:

urllib.quote(tagname.encode('utf8')

But this is not DRY and makes me think there’s a better way.

Perhaps it’s time to add a custom filter and push it into django codeline.

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Now have a pleasure of not starting django development webserver, nor using apache to do http-level tests in my project.

Thanks to twill and its wsgi integration.

Works smoothly now, but caused me little cursing when twill refused to see rss feed.

After digging the twill code I’ve changed a single line - still don’t know how correct is this:

--- /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/twill-0.9b1-py2.4.egg/twill/wsgi_intercept.py.orig 2007-06-04 21:10:37 +0300
+++ /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/twill-0.9b1-py2.4.egg/twill/wsgi_intercept.py      2007-06-04 21:10:45 +0300
@@ -265,7 +265,7 @@
                 for data in self.write_results:
                     self.output.write(data)

-            if generator_data:
+            if generator_data is not None:
                 self.output.write(generator_data)
                 for data in self.result:
                     self.output.write(data)

Nevertheless it didn’t break anything and I have a luxury to test rss feeds too:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# $Id: tests.py 326 2007-06-04 15:58:48Z akhavr $

from nose.tools import *
from twill.commands import *
from twill import add_wsgi_intercept

def setup():
    import os
    os.environ["DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE"] = "web.settings"

    from django.core.servers.basehttp import AdminMediaHandler
    from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler

    app = AdminMediaHandler(WSGIHandler())
    add_wsgi_intercept("127.0.0.1", 9876, lambda: app)

@with_setup(setup)
def test_rss():
    'test rss feed'
    go('http://127.0.0.1:9876/kds-djangofeed/feed/rss/')
    code('200')
    find('<rss version="2.0"><channel><title>Django Feed Planet.</title>')
    return

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There’s more than a single solution to do this. Being django fellow, I’ve decided to utilize FeedJack.

So… Well, I guess, it might work flawlessly for other people, but in my cause it failed miserably after adding two feeds:

• official django blog http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/ and
• djangosnippets http://www.djangosnippets.org/

Just after adding djangosnippets, it messed up the order of posts terribly.

What’s going on? The code shows.

FeedJack urls.py says:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    [...]
    (r'^$', views.mainview),
)

That, after couple hops, translates to the fjlib.get_paginator:

def get_paginator(site, sfeeds_ids, page=0, tag=None, user=None):
    """ Returns a paginator object and a requested page from it.
    """

    if tag:
        try:
            localposts = models.Tag.objects.get(name=tag).post_set.filter(\
              feed__in=sfeeds_ids)
        except:
            raise Http404
    else:
        localposts = models.Post.objects.filter(feed__in=sfeeds_ids)

    if user:
        try:
            localposts = localposts.filter(feed=user)
        except:
            raise Http404
    if site.order_posts_by == 2:
        localposts = localposts.order_by('-date_created', '-date_modified')
    else:
        localposts = localposts.order_by('-date_modified')

    paginator = ObjectPaginator(localposts.select_related(), 
                                site.posts_per_page)
    try:
        object_list = paginator.get_page(page)
    except InvalidPage:
        if page == 0:
            object_list = []
        else:
            raise Http404
    return (paginator, object_list)

Quick introspection reveals that localpost order isn’t broken just until the FeedJack creates the paginator with:

    paginator = ObjectPaginator(localposts.select_related(), 
                                site.posts_per_page)

After that, the post order is messed up and the cause is optimizing call to select_related.

I’m not yet sure if it’s a feature or a bug, but certainly, the premature optimization is the root of all evils.

• Django - unicode branch
• python 2.4
• FeedJack 0.9.9

Good luck!

PS. Finally it was solved by leaving select_related in and adding sorting by id to preserve the original order.

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In FRIM, the team writes 3×3 sticky notes about the events, impediments, and boons* of the iteration. (If you want to get fancy, you could use different color sticky notes for events, impediments, and boons.) Team members write sticky notes to include as many events, impediments and boons as they can remember. They may work individually or in pairs or triads if you have a larger team.

The retrospective leader draws a large 6×6 grid on the whiteboard or a flip chart-papered wall. Team members post their sticky notes on the grid according to the frequency of the event and its impact on the team.

Impact (vertical dimension)
5 = Maximum Impact
4 = Significant Impact
3 = Moderate Impact
2 = Some Impact
1 = Little Impact
0 = No Impact

Let each team member devise his or her own concept of relative impact, or, if time allows, hold a brief team discussion to define “maximum impact” vs. “moderate” or “little”.

Frequency (horizontal dimension)
5 = More than daily
4 = Daily
3 = Every 2-3 days
2 = 1 or 2 times in a Iteration
1 = Once or fewer times in a Iteration
0 = 2 or 3 times a Release/Rarely

When all the notes have been posted, review the overall story. Start by reading the notes in the top, right-hand cell first (5I-5F), then work across and down, focusing on impact first (5I-4F, 5I-3F, 5I-2F…) and frequency second (4I-5F. 4I-4F, 4I-3F…). As a group, discuss commonalities or patterns. Refer to the grid as you shift into a discussion of the insights gained by telling the story of the iteration.

How pity that some teams decide that even simplistic “what are the causes? what should be done differently?” is too difficult for them.

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Fresh features are marked done, and then disappear somewhere in QA to eventually fire back at unknown time with unknown bugs. Grey scope creep. Stop it. Instead, insist on taking less but making it “done” within an iteration. Done reads fully developed, thoroughly tested, debugged, fixed including regression, and accepted by product owner.

That’s it. No comments necessary.

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• Backups Team always has a backup specialist, if the assigned one is away, sick, or was hit by a bus.
• Skills Every human being has an incredible capacity for learning. And even more - most of us like to learn new things. By learning even something unrelated to my current major activity, I discover something common and something new that I can bring to happy software development.
• Rules By agreeing explicitly on the expectations inside a team, the team improves cohesion and lowers tension. Better relationships - better software.
• Management Much less management is necessary for such team. In fact, the only real management is necessary is setting up/discussing goals from long term (years?) to short term (end of the week or today) and just giving the team the resources they need. “What can I do for you, team?”

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