• Amazon Web Services
  • webservers – 2 large instances running Apache, Django, Python
  • load balancer – 1 large instance running HAProxy and Stunnel
  • asynchronous workers – 3 x-large instances running several hundred Celery workers each
  • reverse geocoding & districts – 3 x-large instances running what we call politicoder
  • elastic search for voters – 2 High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large instance running elastic search with entire corpus of voters loaded into memory (verify 50-75 people/second)
  • error reporting – 1 large instance running a sentry server
  • utility server – 1 large instance used for various opsy operations
  • db-misc server – 1 large instance running redis, memcached, and RabbitMQ
  • admin server – 1 large instance used for managing deployment and monitoring site, runs CruiseControl (for deployment) and Nagios (for monitoring)
• Puppet\Chef - We were previously using Puppet to manage server configurations in our admin repository, but are in the process of moving to Chef, as our new ops person prefers Chef. Both are Ruby-based tools, but are more mature than any comparable Python solution
• Python - We write almost all our code in Python 2.6, because Python gives you wings
• Django - This is one of the most fully-baked Python web frameworks and we have 2 core contributors on our team. Version 1.4 was just released, but we are still running on 1.3
• Redis - We use redis mostly to handle caching of large lists of ids, because it has really good set/list operations built into it.
• Celery - We have to do a log of user processing after they sign up and even when they sign in: fetch contacts on your social network, find your contacts districts and see if they are voters, find your districts and see if you are a voter
• RabbitMQ - The default message queue used by Celery, and also just a good queuing system. We only use it for celery.
• Memcached - Cache whatever you can, whenever you can. Django has good memcached support and we try to take advantage of it as much as possible.

We have unit testing and continuous integration, there’s no staging environment, everything goes straight to production. We have feature flagging now to limit development features to staff.

We’re looking to move to Vagrant so the development and production environments can be nearly identical.

I wrote an article in the spirit of YCombinator’s ‘s Request for Startup series.

It was inspired by the PyCon 2012 keynote by Paul Graham of YCombinator.
The talk is covered in the article Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.

• Heroku & Facebook App integration which gives a ready made FlaskApp with Facebook Graph API

• Using Python HeapQ to implement a priority queue, used it to access TEDx videos on Youtube, see parse_tedxvid.py on github.com

• Nothing in particular

• Python on Quora & Python on Stackoverflow. Will likely change.

• At the top is more public projects on github & else where.
• Let doing (public projects) decide what I learn
• SQLAlChemy

• Would like to see Python 3 support for Werkzeug, Flask, Django & MySQL-python. Update: It will take a while, Flask Creator Armin’s Thoughts on Python 3

Tarek started this series with these instructions:

• copy-paste the questions and answer to them in your blog
• tweet it with the #2012pythonmeme hashtag

TEDxTokyo,24

TEDxBuenosAires,18

TEDxCairo,17

TEDxParis,17

TEDxDubai,14

TEDxCaltech,12

TEDxNYED,10

TEDxEast,7

TEDxLahore,7

TEDxTaipei,7

I wrote couple of Python (programming language) scripts that used YouTube API. The approach, find TEDx conference with a larger number of high quality talks, the quality measured by view count.

Some additional notes:
-A check in top 200, brings in TEDxBerlin, TEDxCMU, TEDxNASA & TEDxToronto
-A check in top 1000 brings in TEDxSF, TEDxAmsterdam & TEDxAcademy
-The code is bunch of small Python scripts and is in github at https://github.com/amitch/ytube-tedx

bold are done since 2011 and underlined are worth a try in the future.

2. Slept under the stars

5. Watched a meteor shower

11. Bungee jumped

12. Visited Paris

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty

22. Hitch hiked

27. Run a Marathon

28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice

29. Seen a total eclipse

32. Been on a cruise

37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied

43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling

53. Played in the mud

57. Started a business

58. Taken a martial arts class

60. Served at a soup kitchen

65. Gone sky diving

68. Flown in a helicopter

74. Toured the Everglades

86. Visited the White House

89. Saved someone’s life

Summary:

Done: 4/26

Worth doing someday: 18/26

If you prefer to listen to it, you can download an mp3 from CharityFocus or as a part of an audio book called A Knock at Midnight.

It is sign of a great teacher that he took a verse from Bible to this Sermon.

Some parts specially touched me and I thought of sharing them here. See the complete sermon to find what touches you.

• Civil war within us

And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on. It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life.  And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate.  [...] There’s a tension at the heart of human nature.  And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.

• Total bent of our lives

In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right.  Salvation isn’t reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it’s being in the process and on the right road.

• Trying

And the question I want to raise this morning with you: is your heart right?  If your heart isn’t right, fix it up today.  Get somebody to be able to say about you, “He may not have reached the highest height, he may not have realized all of his dreams, but he tried.”  Isn’t that a wonderful thing for somebody to say about you? “He tried to be a good man.  He tried to be a just man. He tried to be an honest man.  His heart was in the right place.”  And I can hear a voice saying, crying out through the eternities, “I accept you. You are a recipient of my grace because it was in your heart.  And it is so well that it was within thine heart.”

This research is based on a survey of 549 company founders in a variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, computer and electronics, health care,
and services.

Entrepreneurs Obstacles from their past, Time and effort required, capital/financing, and experience in running a business
We asked company founders to rank the challenges they faced in starting their businesses.

• 61 percent said amount of time and effort required was a challenge

• 52 percent said lack of available capital/financing was a challenge

• 52 percent said lack of prior experience in running a business was a challenge

Entrepreneurs Obstacles for others, Lack of willingness to take risks, Time and effort required, Raising capital, Business management skills and Family or financial pressure

• The factor most commonly ranked as important—by 98 percent—was lack of willingness or of ability to take risks, with 50 percent believing this to be an extremely important barrier to entrepreneurship. This clearly indicates that these company founders considered entrepreneurship to be a risky endeavor.

• 93 percent said that the amount of time and effort required was an important barrier.

• 91 percent said that difficulty in raising capital was an important inhibitor.

• 89 percent said business management skills, 84 percent said knowledge of how to start a business, and 83 percent said knowledge about the industry and markets were important issues.

• 73 percent believed that family or financial pressures to keep a traditional, steady job were issues.

Experience, Management, and Luck: The Keys to Success 

• 96 percent ranked prior work experience as an important success factor

Professional Networks, Education, Funding, Personal Networks: Important

• 73 percent said professional networks were important to the success of their current businesses.

Location, Investor Advice, Alumni Networks, and Regional Assistance: Not so Important 

• Entrepreneurs were almost evenly divided about the importance of the location of their businesses. 50 percent said location was important.

Using Personal Savings is the Norm, Venture Capital Comes to the Experienced, and Friends and Family are Always There

• The most significant source of funding for all businesses was company founders’ personal savings: 70 percent said they had used personal savings as a main source of funding for their first business, more than four times the number chiefly financed by any other type of funding.

For this project, we surveyed 549 company founders in a variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, computer and electronics, health care, and
services.

Company founders tend to be middle-aged and well-educated, and did better in high school than in college

• The average and median age of company founders in our sample when they started their current companies was 40.

• 75 percent ranked their academic performance among the top 30 percent of the high school class, with a majority (52.4 percent) ranking their performance among the top 10 percent.

These entrepreneurs tend to come from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds, and were better educated and more entrepreneurial than their parents 

• 71.5 percent of respondents came from middle-class backgrounds (34.6 percent upper-middle class and
36.9 percent lower-middle class). Additionally, 21.8 percent said they came from upper-lower-class families (blue-collar workers in some form of
manual labor).

Most entrepreneurs are married and have children 

• 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or
widowed.

• 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more
children.

• 52 percent of respondents had some interest in becoming an entrepreneur when they were in college, but 34.7 percent didn’t even think about it,
and 13.3 percent had little or no interest.

Motivations for becoming entrepreneurs: building wealth, owning a company, startup culture, and capitalizing on a business idea

Most had significant industry experience when starting their companies
• The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies. Nearly half (47.9 percent) launched their first companies with more than ten years of work experience.

• Software Engineering Radio

This is one of my current favorites, topics tend to be general programming and at other times on Scalability, Architecture or New trends. Note: iTunes does not show all episodes due to an issue they are working on. Some episodes:

Episode 165: NoSQL and MongoDB with Dwight Merriman

Episode 162: Project Voldemort with Jay Kreps

Episode 160: AspectJ and Spring AOP with Ramnivas Laddad

• Pragmatic Podcasts
  

Covers a wide range of topics, many from their authors. Some episodes:

Jonathan Rasmusson Interview

Michael J Mangino on Facebook Applications

Michael Nygard Interview

• JavaWorld’s Java Technology Insider

Not updated for an year, but still good one, topics tend to be Java focused. Some episodes:

High scalability and Javawith Todd Hoff

Grails 1.1: A conversation with Graeme Rocher

• Java Posse

A Java focused podcast, more of panel discussion on current Java topics. Regularly updated.

• Stack OverFlow

The creators are from Windows background, the topics vary, the episodes are mix of discussion, news & interviews, and there are at times some good indepth interviews.

Podcast #59 had Damien Katz on CouchDB & Erlang.

More Podcasts:

• The Ruby on Rails Podcast. On Rails
  

• Herding Code. Windows Focus

• FLOSS. All about Free Libre Open Source Software

• Teach Me to Code (was RailsCoach)

A similar list, Accidental Technologist: My Updated Developer Podcast List.