In the wonderful small city where I live, Northampton Massachusetts, there’s a fun annual music festival called Django in June. It’s all about gypsy jazz – performances, music clinics, and jam sessions.
Last year it occurred to me that the festival would be a perfect time for a get-together of Django (web framework!) people in the region. Nothing fancy – some short talks, coding, pizza, beer. With open blocks in the schedule to go hear some gypsy jazz of course.
It’s that time of year. In no particular order, here’s a quick list of goals for Paul-as-developer in 2007.
Convert my remaining legacy PHP code (side projects and regular work both) to Django. Write a useful PyObjC application. Make some kind of contribution to Python itself, if possible. Continue to add revision control and deployment automation to existing projects, as well as using it on new projects. Continue to add unit tests to existing projects, as well as using them on new projects.
My little pastebin site, dpaste.com, has been chugging along nicely since I announced it here about six weeks ago. Today I updated to the very latest Pygments codebase, which allowed me to add colorizers for Apache config files and bash scripts.
I’ve also started to add some Django-specific rules to the Python colorizer; it now recognizes Django model field types (model.CharField and the like). My thanks go to everyone who’s been using it, especially those who have given me feature suggestions and problem reports.
It took me about a year to get around to it, but I finally set up that nightly cronjob to fetch the Django documentation into a Plucker file. (Note that if you don’t have a handheld with a Plucker reader, or aren’t closely following Django, this is of no use to you. Sorry. The intersection of those two sets is not very large.)
In addition to the current documentation pages, it includes the Trac Timeline, posts from the Community page, and the latest Django Book chapters.
I’ve re-launched my little Django-powered pastebin (formerly paste.e-scribe.com) under its own shiny new $8 domain name: dpaste.com. Not that the world really needs another pastebin, but people have been using it daily and it’s a fun side project. From the about page: Philosophy: Simplicity and usability. The grayscale look makes the colorized source code stand out. Cookie-based personal defaults eliminate lots of extra form widgetry. Automatic expiry means the database never fills up.
Congratulations to Adrian and Jacob on the launch of their GFDL-licensed book on Django. From the Django blog:
This is a pre-release, which means we’re actively looking for comments, typo fixes, corrections and other suggestions from readers like you, all around the world. We’ll try to incorporate your suggestions into the final product, which will be published by Apress early next year. Amazon.com is accepting preorders for the print edition, and the number of preorders so far has been astounding.
My personal record of using revision control for source code has been pretty spotty. Today I took steps toward fixing that by working out a system for managing my Django projects. I wanted revision control (Subversion), I wanted Django’s “runserver” for development and mod_python for deployment, and I didn’t want it to be a pain.
Some highlights of the process:
I used my pastebin site as the test mule. I checked in the current live site’s source code, created “trunk”, “tags”, and “branches” directories per the Subversion manual, and checked out a copy of the trunk into a staging directory.