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Measuring developer productivity

So you’re responsible for one or more developers? Of course you want to know how well your developers are performing. That’s perfectly understandable. So now you’re looking for some metrics you can use to measure their performance. This is where you’re going to have problems … First of all, this post is mostly directed at people that have never held a developer role (or perhaps have, but it was a long time ago, and they’ve pretty much forgotten what it was like, or the world has changed a bit since then).

September 19, 2023 Read
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try...except...else...finally

Like many languages, Python provides functionality for catching errors using a try...except block. Java, for example, has try...catch which operates in a similar way, but Python goes beyond other languages by providing extra blocks. Basic exception handling Let’s have a quick run through how exception catching works in Python. x = 0 # x = 10 try: y = 100 / x except ZeroDivisionError: y = 0 except Exception as e: print(e) This is your standard try.

March 21, 2023 Read
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Scheduling backups with GitLab CI/CD

I recently created a small Django project to manage a rolling menu for our family meals. It’s not a large project. I’m hosting it on a Digital Ocean droplet (for which I pay $4/month, and it runs more than one project), and I have a free-tier Postgres database with ElephantSQL. Because this is only a personal project, I didn’t want to pay for the database or any backups there (though my experience so far of ElephantSQL is positive, and for a larger project I may well do this!

March 11, 2023 Read