Fry-IT

Programmer Competency Matrix

By: Peter Bengtsson, 1st of July 2008

If you're a Level 0 IT recruiter/HR hiring a programming you wouldn't even understand what to do with this. If you're Level 1 you would you would try to use this but get most of it wrong and end up not benefiting from it much. If you're a Level 2 you'd use this and be able to ask all the right questions. And lastly, if you're Level 3 you wouldn't need this stuff because you're probably already a Level 3 programmer.

Programmer Competency Matrix

My first Grok tutorial

By: Peter Bengtsson, 3rd of June 2008

This is my first published full Grok tutorial which I'm quite proud of. In my view it manages to keep things very simple and easy to follow even if you're not a senior Grok developer and shows a very powerful pattern.

Fry-IT will run in London Marathon 2009

By: Lukasz Lakomy, 24th of April 2008

Not whole company, just me :) I'm hoping for a big support, encouragement not to mention some sponsorship. So there are two major challenges. First is to ran 26 miles and 385 yards without injury and not to die at the end. And it is not simple. I'm a beginner and I've never run, but it doesn't discourage me. If 35000 people can do it, even 80 years old - I can do it too! The second challenge is to raise funds for charity. I'm running for Sense that helps disabled people.

Lesson learned on "Save expense" button usability

By: Peter Bengtsson, 13th of December 2007

Yesterday I sat down with a lady and introduced her to SnapExpense and I stayed whilst she was submitting the first expense. Between the talking I shut up and just sat back observing what she was doing how she reacted. A cheap and quick usability study. I learned a lesson about the "Save expense" button on a form.

Plone sites in UK

By: Lukasz Lakomy, 7th of December 2007

How many Plone sites are in UK? I was wondering about this for quite a long time. So I've decided to somehow count those sites. Instead of months of manual labour I wrote a simple spider (Python script) that crawled the web for me. Read more to find out the results.

Linux Virtualization: OpenVZ vs. Vserver

By: Jan Kokoska, 7th of December 2007

Article version: 1.1 (incorporated feedback from Herbert Poetzl)

Today I will compare relative merits of the two main players in opensource Linux OS virtualization (note the differences to para- or full virtualization explained previously), the venerable Linux-VServer project and a relative new-comer, the commercially backed OpenVZ.

Book highlight: The SAIC Solution

By: Jan Kokoska, 28th of November 2007

The SAIC Solution chronicles one American technology corporation that grew to long-term success ($8bln. revenues) while motivating its employees by shared company ownership and high degree of autonomy.

change_zope_root_password.py

By: Peter Bengtsson, 19th of November 2007

Here's a little quick script I put together to change a password of a Zope root user with the Manager role.

We needed this script since we often want to change the root password of many Zopes at the same time instead of having to manually log into each and change it.

The virtues of OS-level virtualization

By: Jan Kokoska, 13th of November 2007

After deciding that virtualization is the way to improve efficiency in server infrastructure, one faces a choice from a vast number of technology options to realize that improvement. There is hardware assisted virtualization, paravirtualization, operating system level virtualization, each with a number of concrete options from various vendors and open source communities.