Link I remember seeing these pictures in a book in my local library and being absolutely enamored of them. The juxtaposition of New England-style countryside inside of gleaming, bright cylinders looked like the most wonderful world to my young eyes. I recently re-watched Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and was amazed how it, like this, despite how dated it is, still is my vision of ’the future'

Sometime in April of 2012, I came into work to find out that my crazy co-workers had, over a bottle of scotch, spent the previous evening throwing together an experimental dating site called CupidCurated. I admired their audacity and congratulated them for pulling it off and then chuckled to myself as I went back to ‘real’ work on StartupDigest VIP. You may have read about this a few weeks ago. This is the story of what comes next and what it really means to build a minimum viable product – from the engineer who built it.

While Django encourages a healthy degree of decoupling in how apps and modules are structured, the settings file can very easily become a monolithic mess. There are some good resources for how to divide up settings file between environments, but with a big application, even that can leave you with a mess of configuration settings. What is particularly annoying in this situation is that many of these settings really just affect one app.

The Great Law of Unix and its progeny is to do one thing and do it well. Although Unix programs may have great complexity, they are focused and modular. This has certainly lead to the amazing success of Unix, BSD, Linux and other *nix operating systems in the tech world, but I think that this law is more generally applicable than simply ‘how to write Unix programs.’ My previous post is, in essence merely a re-statement of this law.

This isn’t your ordinary guide to deployment and tools. As a matter of fact, this is somewhat of an anti-guide – a guide on how to approach tools and deployment – rather than a guide to any specific approach. I was inspired for this by a post yesterday to Hacker News by Hynek Schlawack on Python Deployment Anti-Patterns and other tools used in doing Python web development. The article and associated discussion on HN are both excellent and I highly recommend a read.