All articles by Peter Baumgartner

As you start scaling an application out horizontally (adding more servers/instances), you may run into a problem that requires distributed locking. That's a fancy term, but the concept is simple. Sometimes you have to be sure that when a block …

I’ve been working quite a bit lately on streamlining Lincoln Loop’s standard deployment systems. One thorn we’ve always had is how to handle application configuration. In the past, we would have our configuration management system write the configuration out to …

Two of the biggest benefits pipenv and poetry are dependency locking and hash checking. Dependency locking means you can specify the direct dependencies your code requires, for example, celery==4.4.* and the tooling will lock, not only celery to a specific …

In a previous post, we showed how to use shiv to bundle a Django project into a single file for distribution and deployment. Running a large Python project as a single file feels like magic -- which is great until …

This post covers portions of my talk, Containerless Django, from DjangoCon US 2018. Deploying Python has improved significantly since I started working with it over a decade ago. We have virtualenv, pip, wheels, package hash verification, and lock files. Despite …

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 …

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 …

I'll be the first to admit that I was skeptical about Systemd and its companion log aggregator Journald, but after working with if for a few months, I've seen the light (or drunk the Kool Aid... not sure). Typically I …

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 …

A client recently asked me why all the Django projects we create have a setup.py in the root of the project. Lots of projects get by just fine without one, so why do I use it? The explanation turned out …