Patrick Altman

This year has been an incredible one and I wanted to take some time today to reflect on all that has happened.

So it's been far too long since I have posted anything to this blog. I have been better at times about consistently posting and when I do subsequent posts become easier to write. I have posted a bit over on the Eldarion blog, but even there I haven't gotten into a good rhythm yet.

Yesterday, I blogged about one of our new open source Django apps, django-sendgrid- events. It's a small app, in terms of lines of code and/or complexity, but I think it opens up a ton of potential in things you can do for users of your site.

Earlier today I blogged over on Eldarion's site about how you can easily add Stripe payments to your website with a new app that we have developed and open-sourced under the BSD license.

I have recently taken up golf and am loving the opportunity to get outside and away from my computer. I work a lot so it's a good way to force me to disconnect for a bit and focus on something else. Most importantly though it has become something that I can do and enjoy with my son as he has taken to the sport as well.

The other day I had started a ThoughtStream on this topic in response to reading an older article by Paul Graham entitled Writing, Briefly.

How often do you use print statements to display output in your manage.py runserver process to help debug something?

In web apps where users are doing various activities in your site, things can get complicated in a hurry that can make troubleshooting both customer support issues as well as exceptions very tricky. Tracking the flow of user activity is critical to understanding what happened and is not always easy to decipher at granular levels through analytics services such as Google Analytics. As a compliment to these services, Eldarion wrote eventlog. It’s a simple pluggable app that you add to your site and then log events throughout your code.

I saw this on the Internet today and thought it was too good not to share here as well.

When I first started contributing to Pinax, one of the most exciting things to me was this idea of starter projects where you could be up and running with a certain type of a site literally within minutes. It was even more exciting to be able to shed having to build and maintain a lot of the infrastructure code around supporting project templates when Django started supporting the \--template flag on django-admin.py startproject.

As a long time web developer who has struggled with being comfortable with doing front-end development, having Twitter Bootstrap available is nothing short of transformative. The aspect that I am most enamored with is how much the bar has been lowered for guys like me to make relatively large UI changes without the need to segment work out to UI experts.

Referrals are a popular and very effective way to generate quality traffic while allowing users that love your site to become promoters. We built anafero because we were increasingly wanting to deploy referral systems on more of our sites as well as sites for some of our clients.

Yesterday, I posted about how I was having fun with redactorjs and promised to follow up with how to hook up the ability to upload and embed images. Well, I am pleased to be able to show you how with a few lines of Python and Django.

I have been having a blast with redactorjs and will soon be buying a developer license.

We are really big on open source at Eldarion and were excited to see Julythonannounced the other day on Twitter. However, we struggle with the problem of too many repositories to manage webhooks by hand.

In addition to managing engineering efforts at a startup, I have also worked with a number of different startups helping them to go from idea to launch, faster.

Execute. Ship. Deliver.

Fellow small-government conservatives, fellow Christians, I must ask you all some questions.

I recently started learning more about backbone.js as a way to create richer app-like experiences on the web without the kludge that results from creating DOM elements in jQuery. I bought all three PeepCodes on the topic and have watched them all now a few times (they are densely packed with good material).

Yesterday, I posted a fairly popular post (for my blog anyway) dealing with how I write reusable Django apps. There were a couple of comments on Hacker News asking for some more details about some of thing suggestions mentioned in my post. Therefore, I'd like to start by digging into the use of signals to provide better site level integration.