Car free once again
Nov 3rd, 2009

After a year and five months, Jessi and I are car free once again! Yup, yesterday we sold our '06 Mazda 3 that we bought in '07 and re-entered the ranks of the urban carless. This is the second time we've been without a car, the first was right after I moved to Boston from California and sold my Camaro. That lasted for about 6 months before Jessi got a new job that was not accessible by public transit.

This time, with my new job at Discovery Creative, and Jessi working from home, a car has become an unnecessary expense. A very large unnecessary expense, as a matter of fact: before taking into account gas an maintenance, owning the car was costing us around $500 per month! That's a lot of extra money that's now going to be sitting in our bank account! Of course some of it will go to Zipcar rentals for the few times when we actually do need a car, and some will probably go to getting our groceries delivered by either Peapod/Giant or Safeway, but even still those added expenses should be far less than what we're saving by having no car.

Building RESTful APIs with django-piston
Sep 26th, 2009

Discovery Creative has a lot of web sites and apps out there. And quite a few of them need to send email in one form or another. Previously that has meant that every single one of those sites/apps needed to implement it's own mechanism for sending email. This is obviously a bit of a pain, not to mention a potential security risk, and a blatant violation of the DRY principle. So I was tasked with building a better mousetrap, as it were.

One of the cool new things I had heard about at DjangoCon 2009 (which I really should have written about...) was Piston, a framework built in Django for building RESTful APIs by the bitbucket guys. I'd never actually built any sort of API before, but it seems to be the thing to do, so I decided to take django-piston for a whirl and how it works. As it turns out, it works extremely well. So well, in fact, that when coupled with some of the fun tools that Django provides (such as ModelForms) you can easily build a RESTful API in no time at all.

Thanks to django-piston I was able to create a simple API that will allow us, moving forward, to use a single, centralized email solution for all our web apps. In fact anything that can send an HTTP POST request (including curl, which is what I've been using for testing) can send email using the API I created so long as it can also handle HTTP authentication (which django-piston easily handles against django.contrib.auth). I'm hoping, after a little more work and refinement, to open-source our API so that other can benefit from it (and, hopefully, contribute back to it!), but for now you'll have to make do with a sample project that I threw together for the most recent django-district meeting this past Thursday: Django-Piston Presentation. It's a bitbucket repository that includes all the code for a simple RESTful API that allows you to create, fetch, and delete objects from a simple Django object. This particular project was designed to be extremely flexible, and all one needs to do is add or remove fields from the model (or point it at a different model) to adapt it to just about anything. Hopefully it will serve as a pretty good instructional example to anyone who wants to create their own API with django-piston. The project also contains my notes on how to build and test it in an Emacs org-mode file.

Next up: Git, Mercurial, and moving on from Subversion.

The Colony: Another Discovery Creative project goes live!
Jul 9th, 2009

I will get around to actually writing something soon, I swear! But for now you'll all just have to make do with another announcement of a project going live. This time it's actually up on Discovery Channel site. It's a Flash and Django based app promoting one of Discovery's new shows The Colony, about survival in a post-apocalyptic LA. I've actually been looking forward to this show, can't wait to watch it!

Silverdocs.com: My first Discovery Creative project goes live!
Jun 2nd, 2009

I'm actually a bit late on this one, but I've been so busy with my next Discovery Creative project that I just haven't had time for much else. Anyway, from June 15 through 22 AFI, in partnership with the Discovery Channel will be putting on their Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival. Check out the website for more details on the festival and the films they'll be showing, not to mention an example of how awesome my (and the rest of Discovery Creative, I guess) work is.