Running in Production

In this episode of Running in Production, Colin McFaul goes over using Django to build a social hiring platform for the food and beverage industry. It was in development for 9 months before it went live in early 2020. It’s hosted on Heroku.

Colin talks about building 2 separate apps and keeping the web app as a monolithic app with ~42k LOC, but it’s broken up with Django apps. Elasticsearch is used to power an auto-complete search feature. Billing isn’t implemented yet but it’s currently in development with Stripe.

• 3:37 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 5:46 – Breaking down what the 2 apps do (sales tool and the main site)
• 10:34 – The web app is a monolithic app but it’s broken up by Django apps
• 13:24 – There’s ~42k lines of code, and it’s mainly using server rendered templates
• 17:43 – Elasticsearch is being used for full text search and PostgreSQL for the rest
• 20:38 – Redis and Celery are being used for background and periodic tasks
• 24:27 – Billing is half way implemented with Stripe
• 27:32 – Thought process around using Heroku (2x $25 / mo Dynos) to host the site
• 31:39 – Logging (Papertrail), metrics and error reporting (Sentry)
• 33:52 – The deploy process from development to production (it includes Docker)
• 36:32 – Doing a PG dump to backup the DB and user uploaded content is saved on S3
• 38:37 – Best tips? Put in the research before implementing something
• 43:23 – Check out https://www.ndustrylink.com

• django →
• python →
• docker →
• elasticsearch →
• heroku →
• papertrail →
• postgres →
• redis →
• s3 →
• sendgrid →
• sentry →
• stripe →

• https://github.com/pennersr/django-allauth
• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://github.com/yourlabs/django-autocomplete-light
• https://github.com/celery/celery
• https://github.com/joke2k/django-environ

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

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