Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)
·98 words·1 min
Articles
scaling
development
Macieg Ceglowski breaks down what happened during the mass exodus from Delicious and how the Pinboard team dealt with the huge influx of users that resulted from that event. It’s a great analysis of how they coped the traffic increase, and what kinds of measures they needed to take in order to scale to meet the new demand. There’s a nice summary at the end of lessons learned from this, particularly what they did well, and what they should have done differently.
If you’re a developer looking to make any kind of scalable service, it’s worth a read.
Related
Bleach: HTML Sanitization
·132 words·1 min
Articles
development
python
html
security
Bleach is a rather clever Python module for sanitizing HTML input and auto-linking URLs. It uses a whitelist for the allowed elements and attributes (thank God), and will avoid trying to “linkify” URLs that are already within an anchor element.
Migrating a Django application from Heroku to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
·3467 words·17 mins
Articles
development
heroku
aws
elastic beanstalk
django
python
Here’s the scenario you find yourself in: you’ve built and deployed a cool little Django app, and successfully deployed it on Heroku. You’ve followed all the great advice out there and are using django-environ to help manage all the various configuration variables you have to retrieve from your Heroku dynos.
Goodnight, Writer's Ledger. Hello, Pacemaker.
·463 words·3 mins
Articles
writing
development
I’ve written here before about one of my side projects, a suite of productivity tools for writers called Writer’s Ledger. The idea began from a desire to convert the spreadsheets I use for tracking manuscripts to a reusable web app.