When it comes to reaching language proficiency, vocabulary is important. To reach proficiency as quickly as possible, the choice of vocabulary is important.

I'm going to explain my approach a bit.

Let's start with a disclaimer: I'm not a teacher, and I have no experience in teaching languages. I've been trying to learn quite a few though. Everything stated here is in my own, anecdotal case study opinion.

If the goal is some level or proficiency, I feel ...

Test Classes don't work as a test structure.

It's worth clarifying what I mean by the test class. I'm speaking specifically about the following structure of an test:

• having a test class, that contains the setup and teardown method for test fixtures
• putting multiple tests in that ...

At Zillow, I've done a lot of work on the design and development of the test infrastructure we use for full-stack tests. It's always fun to watch your tool become popular, but even more interesting is the discussions around test suite design that come with it.

Many discussions ...

Refactoring is a book covering the basics tenants of refactoring as dictated by Martin Fowler: a very smart person with some very good ideas about code in general.

First, the interesting thing about the definition of refactoring (as defined by this book) is that it doesn't encompass all code ...

If you've ever used Mock (or the built-in mock in python 3), you'll know how powerful of a tool it can be toward making unit testing on functions modifying state sane. Mocks in Python are effectively a probe that you can send into a deep, dark function:

import ...

I'm an avid xmonad user, and I've recently switched over to conky + dzen as my status bar. A recent issue I had is with getting Dropbox status information into my conky.

I did some hacking and here's the result. I love the way it turned out:

This ...

Someone asked me about how to get a programming internship from a career fair. I've had a bit of experience at career fairs on the interviewer side, and I thought I'd outline some of the points for me personally.

If your interested in how to do well on ...

This is a quick guide on getting a base project started with Monogame. I've tried to use tools that are platform agnostic, so hopefully this will work no matter if you're on Windows, OSX, or Linux. Let's get started!

The second day of PyCon was just as amazing as the first. The day started with a couple keynote speakers: