A long time ago, when I started building my first video game server for Double Cluepon, my video game company, I did a bad thing. I looked at the AMF library for Perl and Python and decided that Python's looked better. I had always meant to learn Python, and this felt like the perfect opportunity. It had cooperative multitasking (Twisted) and it had an ORM (SQLAlchemy), so along with the messaging format (PyAMF), I had everything I needed to build a server for a Flash MMO (later migrated to AIR).

Let me reiterate my mistake: While under time constraints, I chose to learn a new programming language. I didn't realize my mistake until it was too late.

Continue reading Between Learning and Doing...

At the Bank we have a home-grown ETL framework that we've been using for quite some time. We recently completed a total rewrite, but unfortunately we left out a few changes. Had I gotten those changes in 5 months ago, I would have only had to break the API of about 10 modules. Today, in order to make those changes, I have to break the API of 122 modules.

What follows is an account of this ordeal, provided for entertainment value only. There will be a future post that explains some of the things I did to make this task surmountable.

Continue reading Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework......