Blogs on Alex Gaynor

It’s November again, and that means National Blog Post Month (or NAMBLA), and it’s also the second anniversary of me having a blog.

When you work on something as large and multi-faceted as Django you need a way to prioritize what you work on, without a system how do I decide if I should work on a new feature for the template system, a bugfix in the ORM, a performance improvement to the

Cui bono is Latin, meaning “to whose benefit”.

Since the 2001 US and allied invasion of Afghanistan one of the major international efforts has been to reduce the output of opium from Afghanistan.

Since the US began military operations in Afghanistan in 2001 Pakistan has been a crucial ally.

Though the first foreign policy promulgated by the United States was that of non-interventionism, George Washington’s warning to avoid foreign entanglements.

Lately I’ve seen the sentiment, “Why do all teachers need to prepare their own lesson plans” in a few different places, and it strikes me as representative of a particular mindset about education and teaching.

Over the course of the last nine years the United States has attempted to implement a number of policies to combat terrorism, and to engage in a counter insurgency, the formal on a global scale, and the latter primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s been a long time coming, since taggit 0.8 was released in June, however 0.9 is finally here, and it brings a ton of cool bug fixes, improvements, and cleanups.

The following is in response to an Associated Press article today.

For the vast majority of human history religion has been a centerpiece of any government, the notion of a separation between church and state is a relatively recent notion, by and large dating back to Thomas Jefferson (ignoring Jesus of Nazareth’s dictum…

This semester I am taking a course titled, “War in Afghanistan”.

Throughout the second millennium one of the defining realities of international relations was colonialism.

DjangoCon 2010 was a total blast this year, and deserves a full recap, however for now I only have the time to post the slides from my talk on “Rethinking the Reusable Application Paradigm”, the video has also been uploaded.

This past weekend I attended a symposium on authentic learning, in Santa Barbara, California.

I’ve (finally) uploaded the slides from my PyOhio talk (I gave a similar talk at ChiPy).

Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do some test-driven development with Django, which a) is awesome, I love testing, and b) means I’ve been working up a box full of testing utilities, and I figured I’d share them.

Every once and a while the topic of multimethods (also known as generic dispatch) comes up in the Python world (see here, and here, here too, and finally here, and probably others).

While doing some work today I realized that generating fixtures in Django is way too much of a pain in the ass, and I suspect it’s a pain in the ass for a lot of other people as well.

I just finished giving my talk at DjangoCon.eu on Django and NoSQL (also the topic of my Google Summer of Code project).

Currently the most common implementation of Python is known as CPython, and it’s the version of Python you get at python.org, probably 99.9% of Python developers are using it.

In a previous post I talked about a cool new customization API that django-taggit has.

This semester I’ve been taking a course in ethics, and while it hasn’t changed my perspective on any issues, it has allowed me to form some opinions about ethical systems.

A little while ago I wrote about some of the issues with the reusable application paradigm in Django.

If you track Django’s commits aggressivly (ok so just me…), you may have noticed that there have been a number of commits to improve the compatibility of Django and PyPy in the last couple of days.

Lately I’ve been working with quite a few designers so I’ve been thinking about what exactly constitutes the ideal working relationship.

Django’s application paradigm (and the accompanying reusable application environment) have served it exceptionally well, however there are a few well known problems with it.

Everyone knows languages don’t have speeds, implementations do.

As I said in my last post PyCon was completely and utterly awesome, but it was also a bit of a blur.

This year’s PyCon was completely and utterly awesome, to the point where anything I point in writing won’t do it justice.

During this year’s PyCon I became a committer on both PyPy and Unladen Swallow, in addition I’ve been a contributer to Django for quite a long time (as well as having commit privileges to my branch during the Google Summer of Code).

This morning Facebook announced, as had been rumored for several weeks, a new, faster, implementation of PHP.

Open source works for a lot of reasons, but there is one that stands out.

I read a blog post the other day titled “I Have No Talent”, and I found it to be pretty interesting, and what the author says probably resonates with a lot of people.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Dive into Python 3 from Apress.

For a long time it’s been possible to deploy a Django project under a WSGI server, and in the run up to Django’s 1.0 release a number of bugs were fixed to make Django’s WSGI handler as compliant to the standard as possible.

Welcome to the new home of my blog!

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot about education, both my own and in general.

I’ve now been blogging for 30 days in a row, so tonight is just going to be a simple post to finish the month of.

Recently I had a bit of an interesting problem, I needed to define a way to represent a C++ API in Python.

Following yesterday’s post another hotly requested topic was testing in Django.

Today I’m starting off doing some of the posts people want to see, and the number one item on that list is Django and Python 3.

Recently Russell Keith-Magee and I decided that the Meta.using option needed to be removed from the multiple-db work on Django, and so we did.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an interesting, contentful post today.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of the book.

I read just about every single ticket that’s filed in Django’s trac, and at this point I’e gotten a pretty good sense of what (subjectively) makes a useful ticket.

Over the past week or so I’ve been struggling with attempting to write my own parser (or parser generator) by hand.

PyPy recently posted some interesting benchmarks from the computer language shootout, and in my last post about Unladen Swallow I described a patch that would hopefully be landing soon.

A while ago Eric Holscher blogged about things he didn’t learn in college.

This is just a quick post because it’s already past midnight here.