Author: Yaniv Aknin
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Heroku is great! However…
I like Heroku. We’ve recently made our first deployment on it, and all things considered, I don’t think we could’ve made a better platform choice at this time. Deploying to Heroku taught me quite a few things, easily the most important of them was hearing about the 12 Factor App methodology. If you haven’t heard…
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RESTfully atomically incrementing a counter using HTTP PATCH
So today I ran into the question of incrementing a counter in a RESTful manner, and wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. Googling around a bit didn’t find me a satisfactory answer, though I did find @idangazit asked the same question on Stack Overflow, but alas the question was answered by what I…
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I wish someone wrote django-static-upstream… maybe even… me!
I used to think serving static files (aka static assets) is really easy: configure nginx to serve a directory and you’re done. But things quickly became more complicated as issues like asset compilation, CDNs/scalability, file-specific custom headers, deployment complexity and development/production parity rear their ugly heads. Judging by the huge number of different asset management…
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Walking Python objects recursively
Here’s a small function that walks over any* Python object and yields the objects contained within (if any) along with the path to reach them. I wrote it and am using it to validate a deserialized datastructure, but you can probably use it for many things. In fact, I’m rather surprised I didn’t find something…
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enqueue: CLI utility to queue command execution
Update: As you can see in the comments below, and as I feared, it turned out that Lluรญs Batlle i Rossell already implemented something much like Enqueue, only better in many regards. I doubt I’ll keep maintaining enqueue, there’s no reason to. Oh well, it was a nice afternoon project. Something that always bugged me…
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pv: the pipe swiss army knife
When using UNIX, every now and then you run into a relatively unknown command line application which, once you master it, becomes part of your “first class” commands along with cut or tr. You wince every time you work on a computer that doesn’t have it (and promptly wget-configure-make-install it) and you’re amazed your colleagues…
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nginx+gzip module might silently corrupt data upon backend failure
There are several elements that make absolutely certain the page you’re reading in your browser is an accurate representation of the resource the HTTP server meant to send you1. Disregarding caching for a minute, we have two elements making sure the representation you get is protected from errors. The first protecting element is, of course,…
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Introducing django-ajaxerrors
Today I finished a small django middleware that facilitates development of AJAX applications. I reckon most if not all Django developers know about Django’s useful debug-mode unhandled error page (you know, the one that looks like this). However, when an AJAX request reaches a faulty view, the error page will not be rendered in your…
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Something’s horribly wrong with Dell (and HP)
Maybe it’s not the most interesting content I’ve ever published, but I’d like to share something with my readers, secretly hoping that maybe some Dell or HP employee would ever get to see this. My aunt, who lives in far-away London, asked me for help choosing her new computer. Her requirements from the new computer…
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zsh and virtualenv
A week ago or so I finally got off my arse and did the pragmatic programmer thing, setting aside those measly ten minutes to check out virtualenv (well, I also checked out buildout, but I won’t discuss it in this post). I knew pretty much what to expect, but I wanted to get my hands…