Eric Holscher

I don't love ads, so if you goal is to just not have ads on your product, I get it. We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money. We decided to build Ethical Ads, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-mo… We talk about what ethical advertising is here: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ -- and if you're building a dev-focused site, know that you have an option if you want monetization without sacrificing your values.

Some good points for reST instead of markdown: * Markdown has many flavors, reST is standarized * reST is extensible * reST is semantic, Markdown is just text. http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technic… reST is marginally harder than markdowns, so is it really worth sticking with MD ?

This is great -- lack of a standard that was actually used (unlike CommonMark) was one of my main issues with Markdown (http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technic… -- It's really great to see GitHub leading in this department, and it gives me hope that one day we might actually have Markdown that is portable between implementations.

Hey! I've got the following resources bookmarked: - https://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/ - http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-qua… - examples: https://github.com/PharkMillups/beautiful-docs/blob/master/README.md - also checkout this heavybit video: http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2014-12-09-jacob-kaplan-moss

Eric Holscher also has an excellent blog post, http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-server-che… , describing how to deploy using both fabric and chef. There are certain instances where one tool works better than the other, and in that situation that tool is used.

You're right. Another handy way to do this is to keep debug as False and use middleware to show the debug error if you're logged in as an admin or from an IP that matches in INTERNAL_IPS: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2008/nov/15/debugging-django-production-e… Sort of the best of both worlds.

You shouldn't feel that way at all. I don't think I've ever had a bad experience meeting people at a conference. It has actually been the opposite. Many people are there to make connections (and have their own doubts as well). You might be surprised at how receptive they will be. Also, many conferences actively promote inclusion. See the "Pac Man Rule" attributed to Eric Holscher which was referenced at PyCon US. https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2017/aug/2/pacman-rule-conferences/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18848278 https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-te… https://dev.to/practicalprogramming/we-need-a-new-document-markup-lang… https://mister-gold.pro/posts/en/asciidoc-vs-markdown/

I've always found that documentation is a skill on it's own. You need to learn how to say something efficiently while answering as many questions as you can. If it's too much people won't read it, if it's too little then it's not useful. Also learn how to ask questions, you know your project inside and out, try to go to someones position of not knowing anything. I always find stuff that seems so simple at first but then later realize that most people wouldn't know it or connect the dots because they don't know the project. Here are some resources I've looked at. https://jacobian.org/writing/what-to-write/ http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-qua… https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/api-where-to-begin/ http://warpspire.com/talks/documentation/

ReST is really big in the Python ecosystem, thanks to Sphinx (docs generator), and the read-the-docs website. The main advantage for ReST is that it is well defined and consistent. It's a bit heavier than .md, but I think it will pay off for large projects. Here are some articles about it: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/restructuredtext-vs-markdown-for-te… http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technic… I've written docs for personal projects in markdown, but now that I work on larger collaborative projects I feel like ReST is the way to go. PS: If you're using Sphinx, you can actually support both .md and .rst in the same project, and slowly transition from one to the other, see https://github.com/ivanistheone/ricecooker/blob/docs/improve/docs/conf…

You might find James Bennett's book "Practical Django Projects" helpful: http://www.apress.com/open-source/python/9781430219385 https://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/practical-django-projects/src It talks about Django's apps focus and tries to get one out of the habit of "dumping it all in one app in the project". Eric Holscher wrote an article about Reusable App conventions: http://ericholscher.com/projects/django-conventions/app/

I don't know for puppet but Eric Holscher has a nice tutorial/walkthrough[1] with Chef with a repo of examples. [1]http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-server-che…

I've been using a simple Fabric script from http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-server-che… to automate Chef deploys. Blueprint tried to install a lot of nonsense on my box, and I decided that learning Chef proper would be a much better investment of my time.

See http://ericholscher.com/projects/django-conventions/ also.

A) The template system rocks B) Use PISTON for APIs: he could have had it working WAY easier C) Use SOUTH with the ORM. The ORM wouldn't make much sense on its own unless you like wiping your database a lot during development. http://ericholscher.com/tag/largeproblems/ "Large Problems in Django: Mostly Solved" It is a shame the tutorial doesn't point out South and Piston, everyone should be using them.

You mean like this http://ericholscher.com/projects/reusable-app-docs/ ?

Wow! Thanks! http://south.aeracode.org/wiki/About http://ericholscher.com/blog/2008/sep/12/screencast-django-command-ext… Edit : Holy Shit!

A screencast on the subject: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2008/sep/12/screencast-django-command-ext…

I didn't file a bug report because I'm not entirely sure what I would file it as; "Excessive use of magic?". What happened in my case is that when using multiprocessing with Django, if a database connection is opened by the main process to make a query that connection is kept open and workers end up using it instead of spawning their own. If I manually close the connection, they all make their own. This isn't sufficient, however, because global imports related to transaction support still manage to step on each other when queries are run concurrently. This turns out to be a pretty rare race condition, but it does happen. You can read more at the comment here, including my workarounds: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2008/nov/10/announcing-django-crawler-tes…

> I think it's time Markdown should be supported natively by browsers. I'd rather have AsciiDoc become the default lightweight documentation format. Markdown suffers from competing standards regarding extensibility beyond basic formating, whereas AsciiDoc is a quite direct translation of the solid standard Docbook. Extending Markdown to anything more complex than bold, italic or headers requires deciding among a number of competing tools with different syntax and installing them as extensions. AsciiDoc has features as tables, references, images or metadata integrated in the standard, and it has been designed for extensibility, while Markdown was not. There is an advantage of using Markdown over AsciiDoc, which is that it is currently supported by a larger variety of tools. But that advantage is somewhat negated by its different and slightly incompatible flavors. https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-vs-markdown/ https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-te…

Next time you come across a project documented solely in Lithuanian / Japanese / Swahili, I hope you will refer to http://ericholscher.com/blog/2014/feb/27/how-i-judge-documentation-qua… for insight. English is the de-facto language of the Internet (let's not discuss here how damaging that is to English as a language in general). I strongly believe that public-facing software projects should be documented in English first and foremost, with translations to other languages added as resources allow. I work for a small company in Quebec (that's the Canadian province that has a Language Police) - despite most of the team being Francophone, all our internal documentation and code docs are in English. Why would that be? Because everyone realizes, without ever really having discussed it, that it is the only efficient way to do it, if we want to collaborate with others, if we want to grow, if we want others to contribute, having everything in French would be creating unnecessary hurdles.

> Most developers have high-end salaries, IMO. David Glick and I are currently the top two on Gittip, and neither of us have high-end salaries right now: http://blog.gittip.com/post/27072581481/i-believe-in-gittip http://glicksoftware.com/blog/goodbye-groundwire #3 is Eric Holscher, and he's specifically using his gittips to host ReadTheDocs.org: http://ericholscher.com/blog/2012/sep/20/help-fund-read-docs/ #5, Alex Gaynor, has a high-end salary (I'm assuming). So far it sounds like he's planning to use his gittips to attend an extra conference or two this year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438937 #7, Mike Bayer, has also said that his gittips are covering his infrastructure costs, for SQLAlchemy: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/10a32v/gittip_is_the_future/c6… > Gittip also lacks focus, it doesn't commit a developer to work on something, it's merely a thank you, a donation. Not sure where you're coming from on this. It sounds like you're talking about the focus and drive of someone receiving money on Gittip. The idea is that people worth giving money to on Gittip are people with a history of productive self-motivation, people that don't depend on coercive economic relationships to stay focused. Honestly, for me, there's nothing more humbling and motiving to get me out of bed in the morning than knowing that 100+ people believe in me enough to freely give me $1+ this week. That keeps me way more focused than a corporate salary ever did. >…