Deep insights from our research and experience

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Saying Goodbye to BotBot.me

By Peter Baumgartner on

Our venerable IRC logger, BotBot.me logged its first lines in the summer of 2012 . Since then, it has logged over 100 million lines for more than 400 IRC channels, primarily on the Freenode and Mozilla networks. Despite the rise …
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Sandboxing Services with Systemd

By Peter Baumgartner on

With Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) now a year away from end-of-life, we've been planning and performing upgrades for the soon-to-be legacy OS. The biggest change is the move from Upstart to Systemd for managing services. It's trivial to convert a service …
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Goodbye manage.py

By Peter Baumgartner on

Every Django project starts with a manage.py file in its root. It's a convenience script that allows you to run administrative tasks like Django's included django-admin. In our last post, we discussed the merits of including a setup.py file in …
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Django Logging, The Right Way

By Peter Baumgartner on

Good logging is critical to debugging and troubleshooting problems. Not only is it helpful in local development, but in production it's indispensable. When reviewing logs for an issue, it's rare to hear somebody say, "We have too much logging in …
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Disabling Error Emails in Django

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of Django's nice "batteries included" features is the ability to send emails when an error is encountered. This is a great feature for small sites where minor problems would otherwise go unnoticed. Once your site start getting lots of …
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Dynamic Test Servers with Salt

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of the things I love about the DevOps movement is how (when done right) it empowers developers to work with infrastructure in a safe and controlled manner. Once you've nailed down deployments to a static set of servers (production, …
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The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 2

By Peter Baumgartner on

In this long overdue follow-up to Part 1, I'll be discussing the infrastructure issues associated with creating and serving image thumbnails at scale. The naive solution to generating thumbnails is to declare the image sizes you want in your templates …
Image for Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of my favorite patterns in Django is the combination of "fat" models and cached_property from django.utils.functional. Fat models are a general MVC concept which encourages pushing logic into methods on your Model layer rather than the Controller ("view" in …