Deep insights from our research and experience

[with apologies to Mr. Orwell] I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how we approach building up new sites over the last couple of years. Our approach to site construction used to favor collecting open source apps and gluing them together …

Maverick by Ricardo Semler was an eye-opening read for me a while back. It is a detailed account of his (highly profitable) company which is a radical departure from the traditional workplace. Rework (published over 20 years later) reads like …

Our team functions in different capacities for each business engagement, but we typically have a project or few where we’re exclusively building a large site for a client. In those scenarios we tend to use a loosely defined two-week development …

We’ve made it a general rule to move away from relying on fixtures in our projects. The main reasons are: Fixtures are fragile. They often break when the schema changes or even worse they appear to work but introduce subtle …

For our latest product, Ginger, we wanted to marry the real-time functionality we needed with the traditional Django stack we know and love. After some false starts and falling on our faces in the beginning, we ended with a stack …

The recommended way to add decorators such as login_required to class based views in Django is a bit verbose. Here’s a little metaclass-producing function you may find handy: def DecoratedDispatchMethod(actual_decorator): """ If you want to decorate the Class-based View with, …

Development is a creative endeavor. Often developers are creating something where there was once nothing. For most us, the thought of being productive for 8 consecutive hours 5 days a week is laughable. 2-3 hours on a single problem is …

Our team of 10 is distributed across 8 countries and 3 continents. We have no central office. When we first started, a couple years might go by without ever meeting in person, now we meet in person for at least …

Without patching, the rsync utility lacks support to detect when a file was renamed/moved across multiple directories inside the synced tree. There is a ––fuzzy option to save bandwidth by building upon similar files on the target side, but only …

When you develop a sizable content heavy web site you quickly learn, hopefully not the hard way, that caching is a very important piece of your infrastructure. The database servers are the typical bottleneck in high volume website. Common wisdom …