Nice look at how 37Signals communicates internally about systems stuff. We use IRC instead, which prompted me to note a mistake I’d made earlier:
* ubernostrum broke Ellington with [17427]
* ubernostrum fixed Ellington with [17428]
Matt brought up this classic bit today; bookmarking so I’ll remember where it is in the future.
Marty is putting on a nice little class in little-known but extremely useful Python features; if you’re not already subscribed to his blog, you should be.
The * and ** syntax isn’t immediately obvious to most Python newcomers, but is an extremely powerful feature for defining functions or methods which take variable numbers of arguments, or which accept keyword arguments whose names aren’t necessarily known in advance. Marty has taken the time to write up a good introductory article explaining how they work.
Michael Trier is starting a project to take advantage of Django’s relatively-new ability to write custom commands which will be picked up by manage.py; looks like cool stuff.
Python interface to the Yahoo! search API. Could be extremely handy.
(Via Maura Chace)
Although it’s Yet Another Django Schema Evolution App, this one looks promising, and has a Django committer behind it.
This looks like it could be extremely useful.
Incredibly addictive charitable endeavor. I’ve been hovering right around level 48 all night, with one brief burst through to 50 (thank you, philosophy degree, for teaching me some Greek and lots of obscure words!) before I got tripped up again.
I’ve been noticing all sorts of odd issues in Safari (Safari 3 on Leopard) since the GMail refresh; for the time being, I’ve had to go back to the older interface.
If you’re considering developing a database backend for Django, or want to change how one of the existing backends works, you’ll want to read this. And if you’re using Django, you really ought to be reading Malcolm’s blog anyway ;)
Marty, like me, is trying to do one post every day this month, and this looks like the start of something far more interesting than the mundane tips I’ve been offering: a look at how he’s designing a system for modular (or “component-based”, if you prefer that term) Django applications using a simple and intuitive syntax. You’ll want to follow along with the rest of the entries in this series as he posts them.
Django’s admin interface, tweaked to suit MobileSafari and the screens of the iPhone and iPod touch.
Background here. More information from a friend of his here.
Interesting breakdown of factors which seem to impact the likelihood of a person using social networking sites, or using one specific site instead of another.
(Via danah boyd)
An excellent (Django-powered, of course) data project by Matt, Jacob and Christian detailing flights made by private jets used by the University of Kansas.
There are times when this sort of thing is exactly what I need, but I almost never think of it until it’s too late. Time to drill these into my head.
(Via reddit)