I have been working on migrating my company’s Pivotal Tracker to JIRA. We love most of the features of JIRA, but we were really missing the nice updates to our Campfire room to tell us what is going on with our issues.

Sure, we could use an RSS feed plugin for Campy, but that is not real-time enough.

I didn’t want to write a huge plugin just to send messages to Campfire (it seems like such a simple thing to do!). I was poking around for solutions, and came across this plugin. It’s a plugin that runs scripts written in the Groovy dynamic language for Java. One nice thing about this plugin is that it lets you execute Python (Jython) or Ruby (Jruby). The only problem is that you can’t write a listener using Python, so I ended up having to learn Groovy.

I have recently upgraded to OSX Lion, and I have to say that I love everything about it. Except for one thing. In many apps, the key repeat has been disabled in favor of the new press-and-hold popup for getting alternative characters.

This is fine for most apps, but for apps like PyCharm where I use vi key maps, it becomes very, very frustrating.

I came across this little tip to re-enable the key repeat, and my life is measurably better (first world problems, I know…).

In my previous post about unit testing for django, I laid the groundwork for how to unit test any django application. One nice feature that django includes with its test framework is the test database syncing. Even better is if you are using South to do database migrations - it will run the migrations in  your test environment for you.

However, what if you are using a NoSQL database backend like MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB or something similar and you aren’t using the Django ORM? How do you handle setting up and tearing down the database environments?

Unit testing is a very important part of any software project. It helps you know that the new code you are deploying works, and isn’t going to blow up in your face. It also helps you feel good about changing large chunks of code without destroying everything you’ve done for the last 3 years.

Unit testing with django is as simple as pie. The documentation is very good, and you can learn a lot about more advanced testing methods from the python documentation. In this blog post, I aim to show a quick way to get up and running with testing your django application.

VIM has been my editor of choice for at least 15 years. I love how fast I can edit files, perform menial tasks, and wreak general havoc on any code project I am working on at any given moment. One of the things that I have missed about VIM from an IDE perspective has been code completion (a.k.a. “IntelliSense”). I have spent a lot of time on websites and man pages trying to figure out syntax and function names for several types of languages, and just recently discovered a long-included feature of VIM called omni completion, or Omnicomplete.