Tag Archives: Tutorials

Motivate Me!

Posted by Tom Schultz on June 24, 2010 2 comments

Ok, more than a cry for help, I want to know what motivates people in the technology industry.

Some of you may say…”Oh, it’s obvious. We’re in the coolest industry of our time.” or “Um, have you seen these gadgets lately????”
But, I think there’s more to it than what initially fires our neurons.

Quote of awesomeness…

Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you.

That’s from the first line of Joel Spolsky’s post titled “A Field Guide to Developers“.
If you think you have this problem then READ the article.

ParticleTree.com has some brilliant writing and information that should be read on this topic as well(and many other topics).

http://particletree.com/notebook/on-motivating-programmers/

This awesome video has a good explaination that kind of falls in with Joel Spolsky’s view.

Jason Fried of 37signals has an interesting outlook on this idea of motivation as well.

So what are some things that motivate us?

  • Make money a non-issue. Salaries don’t have to be extravagant.
  • Give us a real purpose and direction.
  • Try your best to make us comfortable(Chairs, noise, etc).
  • Attempt to reduce destructive politics and micro-managing.
  • Don’t burn us out, we do that on our own.

What motivates you?


What gets me out of bed each morning and off to work?


 I have cooler stuff at work than I do at my home.

 I can't wait to see my friends!

 I'm a professional, so it's what I do.

 If Jimmy get's there first my code is hosed!

 I want to feel like I'm making a difference with what I do at work.

 Um, paycheck...duh.


Week In Links – 8/21/2009

Posted by Tom Schultz on August 21, 2009 None comments

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a few things,

  1. I always have a lot of links open in FireFox that I haven’t looked at yet.
  2. Blog traffic drops like mad on Fridays ;)

These are just some sites or articles that I found interesting or helped me in some way this week.

So here’s what I have this week!  (other posters can add to this page as they wish)

  1. http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control
  2. http://kenai.com
  3. http://oauth.net
  4. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/DebuggingTechniques
  5. http://blog.lowkster.com/2008/01/getting-to-pesky-foreign-key-data-in.html
  6. http://www.box.net
  7. http://beanstalkapp.com
  8. http://www.ducea.com/2006/08/11/apache-tips-tricks-deny-access-to-some-folders
  9. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz
  10. http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-to-do-list-30-minutes

How to get a Sansa Clip working with Rhythmbox in Ubuntu

Posted by Tom Schultz on April 23, 2009 6 comments

So I got me an 8gb Sansa Clip from Walmart the other day for $50.  Yeah I know pretty decent deal for an 8gb. Anyway I was trying to get it to work with Rhythmbox, and I was having some trouble but then I ran across this post on Ubuntu Forums.

So apparently all you have to do in order to get the player to show up in Rhythmbox is to  add a file called “.is_audio_player” in the root directory of the Sansa MP3 player.

Read more »

# __getattr__ Deserves Some Respect

Posted by Eric Shull on March 9, 2009 None comments

One of Python’s built-in functions is __getattr__, which turns out to be quite useful but at the same time slightly dangerous. It is especially helpful for creating complex classes without using inheritance. For a brief tutorial, read on.

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# Threading in Python

Posted by Eric Shull on February 12, 2009 None comments

Henceforth all posts regarding a certain programming language shall be denoted in the title using comments specific to that language. This is for visual purposes, as well as for fun.

Threading in Python

Setting up separate threads is incredibly easy in Python. There are several tutorials out there suggesting one subclass the threading.Thread class and override the run method, but this is not necessary. Simply do the following:

import threading

def func():
    # ... some code here
    pass

new_thread = threading.Thread(target=func)
new_thread.start()

This will run func in a new thread. Interacting threads is a bit trickier, but I refuse to write anything about that until I know something about it.