• I ❤ Code Review

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on February 8, 2018

    Code review has the proven benefit of reducing bugs, but there are so many more reasons to love code review. It is also a great way to improve code clarity, avoid the “hit by a bus” problem, learn new things, and solidify the team.

  • How To Use Django’s Signing Functions For One Click Unsubscribes

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on February 13, 2014

    Sometimes it is handy to allow users to change part of their profile without having to log in, as long as we can be reasonably sure of their identity. The most common use case is to unsubscribe from email newsletters, where it is annoying to have to login first.

  • Deploy with ‘Git Push’

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on November 5, 2012

    Single command deploys are awesome. When setting up a testing or production server, I always setup a script to deploy in a single command because it makes life easier and encourages frequent deploys.

  • How to Setup a Linux, Nginx, uWSGI, Python, Django Server

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on July 25, 2012

    This is a tutorial for setting up a Linux, Nginx, uWSGI, Python, Django server with a PostgreSQL database. This is the easy, straightforward approach to server setup and deployment. The intended audience is developers or teams who need to get an application or two running in production without too much hassle.

  • How To Use Source Control Effectively

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on June 30, 2011

    There are a number of great version control systems out there; the most important thing is to pick one and learn to use it effectively. No matter which source control system you decide to use, there are a number of universal principles that will help you to get the most out of source control.

  • Test Driven Development and the Meaning of Done

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on October 23, 2010

    There is quite a bit of disagreement on how Test Driven Development affects development speed and code quality. As with any programming methodology, the success of TDD depends on many variables, but research suggests that the most critical factor in the success of TDD projects is the definition of done. Case studies of projects developed at IBM and Microsoft bring a bit of empirical evidence to a debate that has been dominated mainly by anecdotes and opinion.

  • How To Setup a Windows SVN Repository

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on January 7, 2009

    This is a tutorial on how to setup a Subversion (SVN) repository on Windows that allows secure connections over SSH. The tutorial also goes through setting up an SVN client and connecting to the repository. Some basic knowledge of a UNIX based command line will help, but you might be able to muddle through without it.

  • J2EE Application Environment Optimization Checklist

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on February 15, 2008

    Optimizing J2EE applications is hard. Even if all of your algorithms have been analyzed in big-O notation and finely tuned, you can have abysmal performance due to a poorly configured environment. J2EE applications depend on many lower layers which all must be properly optimized in order to give good overall performance. This page gives a checklist of optimization tips organized by layer. It includes optimizations for the HTTP Server, Application Server, Java frameworks, database, and the application itself. This page isn’t intended to be a comprehensive optimization guide; it is a checklist of the most effective optimizations I have found that can be applied in most situations. This checklist is a good place to start before more focused optimizations – and you may even find that nothing more is required.

  • Using Axis to Generate Java Files From WSDLs

    by Jess Johnson in Tips & Tutorials on December 29, 2007

    Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP protocol. It is a framework for constructing SOAP clients and servers. A Java client application is able to use a Web Service by calling Java stub classes created from WSDL files. These WSDL files are made availible by the SOAP server application. As an example, we will go through the process of creating a jar file from WSDLs using the Yahoo’s Enterprise Web Services (EWS). The EWS platform makes Yahoo’s Search Marketing API available.