Dan Cochran's Blog

A place to share my thoughts and what I find interesting whether it'd be coding, music, or just something fun!

[dancochran]

Collaboration (and support) in a work environment

This past summer, I started a new position at the Canadian branch of Audience Partners(AP), formerly Bering Media as a Fullstack Developer focusing on their new flagship product, FlightDeck. 

Having spend nearly a decade in very small startups, usually as the lone developer or a member of 1-2 person teams, I was curious how I would adapt to a more traditional team structure made up of a Product Manager, UX expert, and other developers all with different expertise and professional backgrounds. 

I was pleasantly surprised and made me want to note some key observations I’ve made which help make for a positive work environment. Some of this will be all too familiar to some of my colleagues but to others it may serve as a gentle reminder that there might be something better out there for you if your current position doesn’t make you feel as fulfilled or happy as you would like to be. 

So what have I learned to appreciate at my new place of employment? 

1) Positivity: good collaboration is all about positivity from the type of language used during a brainstorming session to the demeanour of someone reporting bad news, whether a bug, or a change in direction of the project. Positive language  means there’s no finger pointing, feelings or resentment to the one bearing the bad news or no one feeling like the weight of a problem rests solely on one team members shoulders.

2) Equals: We are an agile shop. We have a backlog. We plan out sprints, and try to facilitate the process and keep the project moving at all times. This approach encourages self organization, to decide what you want to work on and become develop expertise. It gives a sense of value to an employee. Knowing you’re helping and being useful is one of the best feelings you can have.

3) Lunch & Learns: Sharing what you’ve learned makes everybody better. It builds cross knowledge and creates interest to members of other teams to what you might be working on. At AP, we’ll have at least 2 L&L’s each month. 

Spend an hour eating catered food, having a beer and listen or talk about some new programming language or the newest IDE, or something that’s being refactored on another team and the who, what, when, where, why’s of them doing it? Sign me up. If you’re newer to a company it’ll help see the bigger part.

We also have weekly, or bi-weekly demos to round off the week and for teams to demonstrate what they’ve been up to the last little while. 

Supportive teams just can’t be beat. If you’re faced with being one that’s dysfunctional, be open and address the situation. Your team is with you 40 hours a week. Be productive, collaborate and support your way through the course of your project. A collaborative and supportive team member helps everyone succeed.

[dancochran]

Testing doctests with Django 1.7+

I've been spending the better part of this week getting more familiar with django's testing capabilities as I warm myself up to developing using the principles of TDD. 

One sticky bit, however, was how to go about dealing with doc tests as the developers of django are removing automatic discovery of doctests and suggest using the recommendations from the Python documentation  .The pythons docs will help familiarize yourself with the unittest concepts and options but I was still confused. 

Finally I figured out all I needed to do was the following function and point the DoctTestSuite to my models module. 

from my_app import models #run doctests on models def load_tests(loader, tests, ignore):     import doctest     tests.addTests(doctest.DocTestSuite(models))     return tests

And that's it. Run your django tests as you normally would and you will see the doc tests within your models.

[dancochran]

How to deploy an angularjs app using git to your staging/production environments

Since angularjs apps are packaged to to be served statically, I was looking for find a good solution for deploying such apps. Our production infrastructure is fairly simple. We have an  asset server that feeds off a NAS. I simply want to package my angular app and push the build using git. I've done this before with python apps across multiple machines and that worked fairly well. I was also trying to keep things similar to my existing deployment strategies. Enter grunt-build-control and this wonderful short writeup on how to use it with git. 

Thanks you Curtis Blackwell for this great little article. It's just what I needed.

[dancochran]

PEBKAC and other ways to tell someone they're a moron

I work in the tech industry. We make mistakes all the time. Sometimes they're big mistakes and other times, teeny tiny. One of my favourite ways of admitting having screwed up is to refer to the term PEBKAC. 

Now for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about, allow me to explain: PEBKAC is short for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair". Still not sure? Its YOU! :) 

But today after wrapping me head around an issue I learned a new term: I D ten T. At first I wasn't sure but after someone suggested I write it out, sure enough the answer was clear...ID10T. 

Never a dull day....

[dancochran]

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my site. It’s a new year and I’m trying something new. I’m reviewing some classic computer science data structures and algorithms in order to revisit and re-learn these topics. My programming language of choice is currently Python.

I’m actually working on a couple of small projects which I’ll talk about in a later post. But for now I thought I’d share this great site helping me to review past topics that I’m supposed to know off the top of my head. 

http://interactivepython.org/ is an excellent source for Python developers to explore the world of data structures and algorithm design. 

Check it out!