Blog
Are you looking to quickly make and host a small web app cheaply? Here's the software stack that I use nowadays.
Using that stack I can get a new (small) site up and running for almost no incremental cost.
This blog is now migrated to the excellent Mezzanine CMS engine and hosted on Heroku.
If you haven't noticed, the blog started getting some errors across the top a while back due to some software incompatibilities. The hosting had previously also been costing me a bit too much. Hopefully, I'll start blogging more regularly again.
One thing I find a little weird is jumping between the user communities
Earlier in my career, when I was doing c++ development, that was it. During my Java days, that's what I coded day in and day out. Flash/Flex, same thing. Sure, I've always dabbled in various technologies. Some scripting (perl, ruby), maybe play with the latest hotness (an iphone app). But I only ever felt like I was part of one developer community at a time.
But now, I find myself switching between the Flash/Flex world in my dayjob, and the Python communities in my extra-curricular. And they're vastly different. The flash world tends to be heavily design focused on one side and real enterprisey-development on the flex side with new frameworks, patterns, and methods of development popping up all the time. The python communities feel more pragmatic. Getting things done quickly and efficiently. Each new framework that comes out tries to be leaner and smaller, yet more expressive than the last.
But I found that I'd really like to be able to replay those requests on a server running locally. A quick look behind the scenes at postbin, and it's open source on GitHub, and runs on google app engine.
So I forked a copy, made my changes, and uploaded a new version to my own google app engine account so I could use it right away.
I also sent a pull request to Jeff Lindsay, the developer on Postbin so he could incorporate the changes on the main site.
None of that is particularly amazing. But the fact that I did it in less than a half hour is!
Distributed VCS, running apps in the cloud, I hope this is the future of software development.
But perhaps even more important, we are officially open source now. If you're a Django developer, and you use Scrum, consider pitching in some help. We've got a list of area's that we're specifically looking for help in and would be happy to have other things worked on as well.
Follow the project on twitter.
p.s. ScrumDo not ScrumDoo -- The doo wasn't working, t0o many people thought about poo.
