What a Difference a Year Makes
by Corey Oordt • Published 6 Jan 2010
The end of the year makes me reminisce about all that happened in the past 12 months. Web development at The Washington Times has changed dramatically, both in technology and process. Here are just a few things that have changed:
From | To |
---|---|
Django 0.91 | Django 1.1 |
mod_python | mod_wsgi |
No virtualenv usage | using virtualenv |
One site | 8+ internal/external sites |
5-6 content servers | 1 content server + Varnish (and a backup for each and without hardware upgrades) |
Just servers | Heavy usage of virtual machines |
Painful and manual deployment process | Quick deployment process with Fabric |
Tightly integrated apps and a monolithic site | More modular site with apps in separate repositories |
One private svn repository | 50+ public and private svn and git repositories |
Five team members | Six team members |
PostgreSQL 8.1 | PostgreSQL 8.3 |
Subversion | Git |
Python 2.3 | Python 2.6 |
There were also some new improvements:
Created a new framework for starting and deploying sites and creating apps
Dramatically improved the monitoring of our infrastructure
Released 30 apps under an open source license
Began mirroring our public repositories on Git Hub
Created a web site for our department with a blog and showing our open sourced projects
Increased our focus on tests and documentation
Converted an external PHP website to internal Django site, in one week (after it was hacked).
Converted overpriced Windows XP box to overpriced Ubuntu server/coffee table
Took over our own internal VPN and load balancing
Created a source repository management system
Personally, I am incredibly proud to be working with the people on our team. We have continued to evolve and grow as a team and everyone has grown his skills. I only see this process continuing this year. Here are a few of my goals for the upcoming year:
Convert everything to Django 1.2
Convert our existing infrastructure to a virtualized cloud (if we can somehow get a SAN)
Use Google Wave for something
Migrate all Subversion repositories to Git and implement a tighter change management system
Deploy our skunk-works project code named Calcutta
Use a non-SQL-based storage for something
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