Celebrity Fantasy Game in Django

Monday, August 18 2008 9:53 p.m.

If you've played fantasy football or any fantasy sport you know what I'm takling about. If you're new to the concept, you pick a roster of celebrities and if they show up in the news, you get points.

The site was written using Django (trunk as of the 13th!) and Postgres 8.2. We've built a fantasy games package on top of the Django core which we would probably open-source if the community showed some interest in it.

This is our 2nd major site in Django and we really love it. To begin with, Python is a great language. When we built our fantasy engine, it was originally coded on MySQL. We encountered quite a few problems porting it over to Postgres. There are lots of little things where MySQL does type conversions for you automatically and Postgres (correctly in my opinion) does not. I definitely feel the conversion was worth it so that now we're on an enterprise level database.

MySQL Connection Pooling with Django and SQLAlchemy

Friday, July 25 2008 12:41 p.m.

Here's a quick and dirty recipe to get connection caching from SQLAlchemy. This is really not connection pooling as that would require a separate process to only handle connections. All this does is prevent the connection from closing after you finish a query. We're also not replacing the Django ORM.

To give a little more background, normally when you use Django to get to your database, Django will automatically disconnect from the database when the thread is done with that query.

Launching a High Performance Django Site

Sunday, July 6 2008 3:29 p.m.

Are the brakes on your Django app?

When building an application using an application framework like Django... the priority is often to get the application working first and optimize it later. The trade off is between getting it done and getting it done for 1 million users. Here's a check list of things you can do to make sure your application can be optimized quickly when you put on your optimization hat. Note, most applications don't need all of this since most applications do not get anywhere near enough traffic to justify even bothering. But if you're lucky enough to need to optimize your Django app, I hope this post can help you.

MySQL, Dates and Time zones, Postgres and Mindshare

Saturday, May 10 2008 12:27 a.m.

A database can’t be all things to everyone. Each one has its sweet spot. MySQL happens to be the Wal-Mart of the database world. A large market sweet spot with lots of really cheap stuff, questionably good for you and serving a basic need.

Occasionally, MySQL will let you down with some basic things… like time zones.

New Site. Now With 80% More Blog

Thursday, May 1 2008 11:56 p.m.

Hope everyone likes the new updated blog format. Been trying to get this online for several months, but never had enough time to get it just right. It's still not, but it's good enough.

Complete change in technology for the new version. Using Django app framework on top of Python. Python is the most fun coding since SQLWindows (another OOP language with forced language formatting).

Features coming soon... RSS feeds and tagging.