Revolution Systems Blog

Django Training

I'm pleased to announce that this September, Revolution Systems will be offering a four-day Django training course here in Kansas City, taught by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob has taught a number of similar courses privately in the past, but this is the first time we're opening this up to the public.

If you've been wanting to really learn Django, this is a great chance. The class is intended for relative beginners to Django, but by the time you leave you'll know enough to create some pretty awesome websites.

The class will be Monday, September 21 - Friday, September 25, 2009 in Kansas City, MO.

For more, or to sign up, check out the full details.

Some quick updates

It's been a busy and exciting week for us.  Jacob has been at PyCon in Chicago where he is participating in a number of panel discussions and giving quite a few talks as well.   Right now I imagine he's neck deep in code in the Django sprint helping to finish up the upcoming 1.1 release. If you're running a production site built with Django you should absolutely check out the talk he is giving with James Bennett on Real World Django.

While my week has been busy hacking away on several client projects and moving my main work machine to a shiny new MacBook Pro (can't recommend these highly enough), I was interviewed by Daniel Dern of Business Trends Quarterly in his post about scaling and performance titled For Scaling, Brains May Beat Brawn. We talk about how just throwing more money and hardware at a problem is not always the best solution.  Often there are architectural, design, and/or configuration changes that can bring significant cost savings to your project.  Both in terms of the hardware necessary to keep everything flowing, but also in on going system maintenance labor costs.  I'm not talking about pre-optimization evils or complicating things for your admin, often these changes are transparent to day to day operations, but certainly not to your bottom line. For example, just using the proper RAID levels and physical disk configurations for your particular PostgreSQL database can be a huge win in performance.

I also added a tidbit of wisdom in an advice post to budding entrepreneurs called 163 Ways How To Become An Entrepreneur.

 

  

Welcome Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I'm very pleased to announce that Jacob Kaplan-Moss has joined Revolution Systems to head up a new line of services around the ever growing Django web development framework. First up are commercial Django Support Plans, but look for more Django related offerings in the near future.

Jacob has been a good friend of mine since before Django was even released.  It was a pleasure to work with him at our previous day jobs and I'm very excited for the future ahead.  Not only is he obviously an authority on Django, he's an amazing developer and generally an expert on all things tech. Jacob and Adrian are both great examples of how to lead an Open Source project and grow a real community around it.

By offering Django Support packages we hope to help adoption of Django in the business world, which helps grow the community at large.  

ORD Camp a Huge Success

I was luck enough to be invited to attend ORD Camp this last weekend in blisteringly cold Chicago.  ORD Camp is an invite only, FooCamp style unconference targeted at geeks living in the Midwest. Having never attended a FooCamp style event I wasn't sure what to expect.  I can now say if you ever have the opportunity to attend an event like this it is well worth your time.

As you can see from the attendee list it was a very diverse group of people, not just the usual crowd of notable Open Source geeks.  The amount of brain power in that room was simply amazing and I can't remember when I had as much fun.  Some sessions were presentations, others were just focused discussions.  Everything from how words work, brewing beer, life hacking, to what not to do as a startup. 

While I loved the sessions the most fun was getting into random conversations ( some ended up being NSFW after midnight and many beers ) others were more typical.  Spent some time talking with people about PostgreSQL's advantages over MySQL, alternative business models, how a certain entrepreneur might improve the performance of their servers, etc.

It is difficult to determine how important this conference will be to my business in the future, but I can easily say that it has increased my drive, ambition, and overall excitement level.  Passionate people, doing amazing things will do that to you! I can't wait to attend next year.

Fret Free -- Introduction to Django and the Django Software Foundation

LinuxPro Magazine just released my latest article, an introduction to Django and some discussion about the newly created Django Software Foundation. Being a life long Perl user, I didn't think I would enjoy Django at all. I have to admit that it is a VERY polished system.  It has great PostgreSQL support, in fact the core developers smartly prefer it over MySQL for their own systems.

You can download a PDF copy of the article at, Fret Free -- Django and the Django Software Foundation.  The print issue will hit the stands in October.  Hope you enjoy it!

Django Software Foundation

The Django guys have scored another milestone today with the creation of the Django Software Foundation. Being a huge Open Source advocate I love hearing great news like this.  You can read more about the foundation at:

• Announcing the Django Software Foundation
• New Foundation for Django

On an unrelated note, an article I wrote for LinuxPro Magazine last November about using Perlbal was recently put online.  You can read it at The Juggler -- Let the nimble Perlbal webserver keep your traffic in balance .