To add a personal anecdote, I was accepted to speak at a large regional conference as my first speaking gig. I explicitly stated I did not have any previous conference experience. I attribute this partially to having a relatively niche topic.
I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.
We use http://www.dbmaintain.org at the Java shop where I work. It enforces all of the best practices in the article.
Something else that we do is to have the schema/mandatory data in a separate git project. This has the added benefit of having a separate deployable artifact from the application itself.
Is "So if there are 23 people in a room there's a 50% chance that one of them will share a birthday with me?" correct? If you pick a fixed person (you) that would break the pigeonhole principle, I think.
I would think that saying "So if there are 23 people in the room there is a 50% chance any 2 of those people share the same birthday" is better.
Edit: I misunderstood, you're saying that other people are misunderstanding. My mistake!
You're misquoting or misunderstanding. The comment to which you are replying said:
The paradoxy bits of the problem are the things that
people find confusing. "Only 23?!" or "So if there are
23 people in a room there's a 50% chance that one of
them will share a birthday with me?"
In that comment he is saying that people mis-understand the question, and assume that it means that once there are 23 people in the room, then there's a 50:50 chance they will share a birthday with them specifically.
And that's exactly the wrong question, as you point out. So when you say:
Is "So if there are 23 people in a room there's a 50% chance
that one of them will share a birthday with me?" correct?
No, that's not correct, but it is what people think they hear, and it's that confusion that makes this whole thing sometimes called a paradox.
So let's be clear:
If you're in a room with 22 other people, the chance
that one of them shares a birthday specifically with
you is nowhere near 50%
However, the chance that among the 23 people in the
room there is, somewhere, a shared birthday, is indeed
slightly greater than 50%
And my experience is that it really doesn't matter how carefully you word this, some people simply will not understand it.
I think that programming is a microcosm of culture as a whole, not just pop culture. On one end you have the pop aspects of it (Node, Ruby, <insert trendy language/framework>, and at the other end you have COBOL and Fortran and other 'un-hip' languages. In-between is everything that makes up the programming culture.
I notice that some of the tips have code examples and some don't. I know that people other than the author of the tip can post comments, but it may be useful if they could also post gists along with the comment. This way tips without examples could be fleshed out by someone other than the author.
This might be an obvious suggestion, but have you tried building something useful? I have found myself in that strange in between space before when learning a new language, and by starting to build something I am able to quickly move past that middle ground.
I see a couple mentions in this thread of Flask taking a while to adopt Python 3. I am relatively new to Flask, could you explain why they are seemingly behind things in regards to Python 3?
Few core developers (mainly, one, Armin) that couldn't be bothered enough. It's a volunteer project after all.
He did write about the unicode problems with the Python 3 changes and the need for an improved WSGI spec (heck, he even co-wrote the unicode literal change PEP).
But after the new WSGI spec was out, and the u thing was already implemented in 3.3 pre-release, there was no much motion in Flask, whereas Pyramid, Django and others have already started work.
Even the "When will Flask support Python 3" document has not updated and is 2 years out of date in it's contents.
I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.