Late Blooming Code

In this blog post, I show you how I automated entering credit card transactions in QuickBooks using the PyAutoGUI package for Python. Automating routine tasks is a great way to save yourself a lot of time. Whenever I spend a significant amount of time doing a partiuclar task on a computer, I ask myself if there is a way to automate it. Generally, as long as the input to the task is located on the computer, the answer is yes. The kinds of tasks that evade automation are those that have some kind of physical medium as an imput. While there are technologies that could help automate those tasks, it is much more complicated and difficult to do so. For tasks that can be automated, my favorite language for doing so is Python. Python has a wonderfully readable, expressive syntax, and there are an astoundingly large number of libraries and packages available that make the job of automating jobs much easier. One of my favorite simple examples of how Python saved me a lot of time is when I...

Writing and running automated tests can go a long way to help maintain the quality and reliability of a code base. Tests help ensure the code you've written executes the way you expect it to. However, even though automated tests are a great tool for helping to ensure quality over the years in which people will contribute to the code, they are not sufficient in and of themselves. It may be inevitable that all software products will reach a point of obsolescence no matter how much work is done to keep them current. The inherent problem is that if we view tests as constraints upon what the software system under test can be, then as we add more and more tests over the years, we will have more and more constraints on the shape our software is allowed to take. It then seems we must reach an inevitable point where we can no longer change our software system without violating a constraint, i.e. causing a test to fail. In more practical terms, we'll more likely first reach a situat...

"All programmers are optimists." Fred Brooks's adage is as true today as it was when he first penned the words. The truth is that people are naturally very poor estimators. We all have a tendency to believe everything will go more smoothly than it probably will. Things will work out just as we planned, assuming we bothered to plan at all. I encounter the reality of this often in my work. The first deadline passes, and we assure ourselves that we can catch up to meet the next one. The next deadline passes, and we finally come to terms with the reality that we're not going to make it. Then, we push the schedule back a week, when if we really reflected on the situation, we would realize we were probably a couple of months out from actually completing the project. The product gets later and later one day at a time. Lots of yelling and finger-pointing ensues. Management demands better estimates, but rejects any that don't fit with their view of when we "sh...