Disqus, one of the largest Django applications in the world, will explain how they deal with scaling complexities in a small startup.

There are many benefits to keeping a lightweight stack. At Disqus, keeping the stack thin helps us scale Django to reach over 125 million unique visitors a month with just a small team of engineers. Avoiding complicated software packages until needed reduces unnecessary overhead, and has let us stay nimble, and use new capabilities in Django (i.e., database routing) and other software as they arise. The talk will cover key parts of the architecture and development process at Disqus, including databases (relational and non), queues, automated testing, and continuous deployment.

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left. It also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Django Pre-flight is meant to help with creation of simple pages on which one can quickly gauge health of the system and its external dependencies. It's a great help for testers before actually delving into the system to be sure that all is configured correctly and any found problems are due to bugs in the code itself and not because of misconfiguration.

This article shows you how to write a relatively simple script to extract text paragraphs from large chunks of HTML code, without knowing its structure or the tags used. It works on news articles and blogs pages with worthwhile text content, among others…

Pyramid is a small, fast, down-to-earth Python web application development framework. It is developed as part of the Pylons Project. It is licensed under a BSD-like license.

polib is a library to manipulate, create, modify gettext files (pot, po and mo files). You can load existing files, iterate through it's entries, add, modify entries, comments or metadata, etc... or create new po files from scratch.

polib is pretty stable now and is used by many opensource projects.

Briefly, the solution works as follows: the crawler finds a pretty AJAX URL (that is, a URL containing a #! hash fragment). It then requests the content for this URL from your server in a slightly modified form. Your web server returns the content in the form of an HTML snapshot, which is then processed by the crawler. The search results will show the original URL.

Non-myth #4: Programming is asocial.

Yes, but it depends what you mean by asocial. It is true that a programmer spends long hours by herself in front of a computer screen, although there are also meetings with team members and customers. There certainly are “social” professions where you are in constant contact with other people. The problem is that in most cases the human contact is superficial and asymmetrical, because you don't “chat” with your “clients.” You may not even want to develop a warm relationship with your clients, for example, if you are a police detective interrogating hardened criminals.

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It is reasonable for Tiffany to choose to become a social worker because she likes helping people directly, but she must remember that she will not become a friend to her clients.

In this fifth part of the free font series about the various categories of typefaces, we’ll now be featuring the Monospaced Typefaces. Monospaced fonts, which are fonts whose characters have equal horizontal widths, are suitable for programming because they make source code easier to read.