Revolution Systems

I learned a lot by watching this and I highly recommend it but the viewer should be warned that many of the tools and techniques seem to have fallen out of favor in the Django community. In my personal experience nginx+gunicorn turned out to be much easier to deal with than the reference Apache+mod_wsgi. It also seems to be JKM's current preference. Likewise, buildout, while very powerful can be a bit burdensome, and has fallen out of favor relative to pip+virtualenv. For more current info, check out this extended chat with JKM and other lead Django developers here: [discuss] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112160 [direct] http://www.revsys.com/officehours/2010/nov/05/ Note: This video is a dup to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830696 though I'm surprised that post only got one point. There are probably others.

Here's another reasonable summary: https://www.revsys.com/tidbits/greet_pause-a-new-anti-spam-feature-in-… I get several thousand SPAM attempts per day: I estimate that this one technique kills a large fraction of them. And look how old the feature is...

Revsys put out a nice Django cheatsheet a while back. I don't think it's been updated since 1.5, but I've used it when I'm starting a new Django project for the first time in a while. I find it helpful for reminding me of things I've used before, but not often enough to remember the exact syntax off the top of my head. http://www.revsys.com/django/cheatsheet/

In default configuration for mysql and postgresql daemons, these benchmarks don't do anything to make full use of the hardware cited. Here are guides for the respective db configs. http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/09/29/what-to-tune-in-mysql-s…

http://www.revsys.com/officehours/2010/nov/05/ See jacobian's comment here saying "I know of at least one publisher who's decided not to print any more Django books because they decided they can't compete with the docs". Django comprehensive docs were what convinced me to choose Django over RoR 3 years backs when I had to choose between RoR and Django first.

My problem with PostgreSQL is that you're half expected to tweak it to your needs. That's a myth. Postgres runs out of the box just as well as MySQL, with no more configuration effort. A good starting point could be: http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html As you can see there is only a very small number of settings that you really should set consciously, just as you have to choose consciously between InnoDB/MyISAM and various baseline settings on MySQL. Beyond these eight parameters (most of them relate to the amount of RAM you want it to use) postgres ships with reasonable defaults. All the other options may become interesting to tune it later for special workloads (something that you can hardly do with MySQL) but are usually safe to ignore.

Some more SSH tips 1. Use SSH connection multiplexing If you are connecting to same computer multiple times, this saves up quite a bit of time http://www.revsys.com/writings/quicktips/ssh-faster-connections.html 2. Use autossh For a persistent ssh connection (ex. for reverse tunnels) http://www.debianadmin.com/autossh-automatically-restart-ssh-sessions-…

The problem with the pure service model is that only RedHat and a few other companies have been successful at it. The argument “I created it, so I can service it best” doesn’t hold anymore- too many people have technical expertise in open source software. So unless your service is the cheapest and the best, it’ll be killed off by other service providers. I've seen this claim quite a few times ("the service model only works for Red Hat") - is it actually true though? Sure, there aren't that many billion dollar companies built around services, but I've seen dozens of smaller lifestyle businesses built around consulting against open source projects. Off the top of my head... Hwaci for SQLite: http://www.sqlite.org/support.html Dozens of companies for PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support Revolution Systems for Django: http://www.revsys.com/services/django/ Spring Source for Spring: http://www.springsource.com/ Lucid Imagination for Solr/Lucene: http://www.lucidimagination.com/ Lemur Consulting for Xapian: http://www.lemurconsulting.com/ Then there's the fact that a bunch of the current NoSQL efforts (MongoDB for example) are getting funding, which suggests investors still believe you can build a business around open source support.