Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:15:08 GMT
yep.. 100% django.. 100% paid.
it’s for a week or two. which is cool, as my other non-django work can be shifted around for that period.
Of course .. the job was listed on GypsyJobs.
I’ve had a couple of inquiries on how long it will be ‘free’, and how long the ‘beta’ period will be.
I’ve decided the we will ‘launch officially’ will be when we get 500 unique vistors a day for over a week. as then it will truly be a valuable resource in it’s own right. (and as such companies should pay).
we’ve got an average of 50-60 unique users visiting every day at the moment, which is pretty good for what I can estimate being a 2000-strong user base so thats got to grow a bit as well before gypsyjobs gets too large.
Posted in Business Related | Tags django | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:10:59 GMT
Some folks benchmarked Symfony, Ruby on Rails and Django.
Check it out here:
Performance Benchmarks
I dont particularly care which framework (django or rails) is fastest, I don’t think it’s going to change a person’s mind on which to use.
I also think both are good enough to get the job done and other factors like your app design will limit you way before your framework will.
but Django’s choice to go in process and use modpython looks to have paid off in this case.
but what did surprise me was how poorly PHP and lightty performed.
<shameless plug>Perfmon </shameless plug> can help you find your django bottlenecks
Posted in Development | Tags django, rails | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 14 Jul 2006 07:52:00 GMT
OpenID is a decentralized identity system which allows you to store your details on a single machine, and use that to login instead of having to continually re-register and remember the passwords for each place you go to. (they describe it better).
anyway..more importantly .. Zyons now uses it. (yay!)
two services you can use are:
I’m sure there are more. but I’ve had excellent support from the owners of BOTH of these services.
svn code for this is avilable in my cool SVN repo
on a admin note: all other zyons updates will be reported on the Zyon’s Status Blog which of course is written in Django :-)
Posted in Development | Tags django, openid | 9 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 12 Jul 2006 04:40:41 GMT
my screencast is all done. It was about setting up django to run on a webfaction host.
long story short: installing django took less time than the post-production of the screencapture.
For the record I used:
- IShowU – to record the screencast. It was easy, and more importantly worked on my macbook pro (SnapZ pro doesn’t have a version yet). so now I own 2 screen cap tools :-(
- Audacity – to post-process the audio
- QT Pro – for general editing and exporting
I found the whole process very time consuming and a bit frustrating, none of the tools worked together very well imho.
The good news for me is the ‘payment’ for the screencast was free hosting.
I’ve moved my blog over, and I’m hoping to move zyons, gypsy jobs and economy-chat over when I have some spare time (syncing the DB with the DNS change is the hardest part). and then I will be able to turn off the machine at home.
Posted in Development | Tags django | 7 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 09 Jul 2006 15:57:45 GMT
Perfmon is a tool to help you diagnose your performance and QA issues within your Django application.
I’ve decided to charge $20 for it.
People using it for debugging open source projects can get it for free.
Is this a sell out? I hope people don’t see it this way.
Posted in Development | Tags django, monitoring, performance | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 05 Jul 2006 10:45:00 GMT
for the 2nd time in as many months, zyons has got a makeover. (as did the django job site a week or so ago)
It still has it’s signature orange colouring, but it looks more professional I think.
props to Solucija.com for making such nice templates available.
as for ‘features’ zyons now has a blog subsection as well.. as we all know every django developer needs to write a blog app. I think it’s a rite of passage.
Stay tuned I plan on adding some more features soon.
Posted in Development | Tags django | 6 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 04 Jul 2006 16:46:00 GMT
James Bennett brings up and interesting viewpoint, about where he thinks django should draw the line on what it offers.
Which means that here and now, in 2006, if you call yourself a “web developer” you have absolutely no excuse for not knowing JavaScript. And if you don’t know JavaScript, you have absolutely no right to call yourself a “web developer”.
personally I can also see the same argument being made about a templating language, a ORM layer, and a HTTP webserver, and I think it is flawed.
let me first get back to the basics on why I develop.
my job is to create (and capture) value for my company. Value in this case is money and enjoyment. (I happen to like coding).
Do I know how how to write javascript? yep.
I also know SQL, and have writen webservers modules (although not much lately) but knowing how to do it doesn’t mean I should be doing it every time I want to develop an application if I don’t have to. Having me writing (and debugging) javascript is not a good use of my time. I should be spending my time doing more valuable things like creating job sites or content aggregators. If django had a fancy javascript layer those sites would be using it right now, instead of waiting for me to develop and integrate it.
Having django or any other framework provide a “optional” layer for me to use if I want to just makes good business sense. If I care enough to write my own javascript (or SQL layer) nothing is stopping me doing so.
but if can get get by with a ‘ok’ one shipped with the framework I’ll do that, and concentrate my time on adding value to my application in other areas. (the stuff where I can actually make money for my company)
The key point here is that it is OPTIONAL, just like generic views, and the admin app. I can choose to use them to do most of the boring stuff, and IF they don’t work out I can use a custom solution. That is the beauty of django to me.
Posted in Development | Tags ajax, django, framework | 7 comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:18:00 GMT
two interesting posts arrived on the memcached list which might be interesting to performance people.
The first was a comparison of The fastest lanugage binding on which ‘P’ language performed better. To make a note the PHP version actually uses libmemcache a ‘C’ library which goes a bit of the way to explain the wild disparity in speeds.
The 2nd more interesting one (to me) was the discussion of how Digg switched from using mysql to memcached with v3 of their new interface to handle storing sessions, due to a hardware crash on their mysql server.
others mentioned using InnoDB for this instead of MyISAM, with the biggest issue being clearing out expired sessions (which memcached does for you with less overhead), but storing the sessions in the database still suffered due to OS-contention.
of course with django you can choose either, to cache your stuff.. but the session handling is stored directly in the database .. looks like I have a weekend project ;-)
Posted in Development | Tags django, memcached, mysql, performance, PHP | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 26 Jun 2006 04:27:08 GMT
I’d like to announce the initial release of Gypsy Jobs a job matching service dedicated to helping
developers find work using Django.
It is a beta product, which started about two weeks ago, and thanks
to the power of django is a reality now.
your comments and feedback are most welcome.
either on the post, email or in the Job Forum
Posted in Development | Tags django | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:38:00 GMT
are you a committer or a member of a large OSS project?
do you participate in any other large open source project?
I’m trying to get a understanding of how all the different major oss projects are being cross pollinated by having people participating in different projects.
feel free to comment, or mail me directly at ian at holsman.net
Thanks!
Posted in Development | Tags django, mysql | 4 comments | no trackbacks