A talk I held at Djangoconfi '12. Beginner level. This talk mainly shows the whole process and stack used.

1. bongaus.fi
Spotting Service
Powered by
Django
Juho Vepsäläinen

2. Who?
● Jukka Raimovaara (Mentalhouse Oy),
○ Perl-guru, hosting
● Juho Vepsäläinen (Koodilehto co-op),
○ Python, JavaScript
○ @bebraw (Twitter)
○ nixtu.blogspot.com

3. What?
● bongaus.fi - Spotting information in one
place
● Target (QR) -> url -> Info
● Examine info later
● Competitions (who spotted most? ...)
● Analytics after event

4. Why?
● Initiated by Jyväskylä Design Week
(contract work)
● Extended on need basis (AgileJkl pivot)
● On longer term we might want to get
some bucks out of it

5. Evolution

13. http://autiomaa.galleria.fi/kuvat/2012/agilejkl/20120418-IMG_8483.jpg

14. http://autiomaa.galleria.fi/kuvat/2012/agilejkl/20120418-IMG_8530.jpg

15. http://autiomaa.galleria.fi/kuvat/2012/agilejkl/20120418-IMG_8522.jpg

16. Development Notes
● Instanssi demo: working Minimum Viable
Product (MVP) with a few users
● Design Week: no notable use, bottleneck
in content production
● AgileJkl pivot: success, around half
(~100) of the attendees participated

17. Technology

18. http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/10320/django/wallpaper/magic-pony-django-wallpaper.png

19. Why Django?
● Challenge: team of two, tight schedule
● Familiar already. Could've used Node or
something else but Django felt like a safe
bet
● Admin UI big bonus on retrospect

20. http://www.flickr.com/photos/12142259@N00/4084706293/ PixelPlacebo CC BY-NC

21. Why Bootstrap?
● Creating a good and responsive CSS
layout is tough
● Bootstrap helps quite a bit!
● Provides column layout and lots of other
goodies
● http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

22. Architecture
gunicorn
Bootstrap
Django 1.3
(markdown, sorl-thumbnail, qrcode, auth Luova paja
jsonrpclib, django-simplegravatar)
MySQL + South

23. In Addition
● pip
● virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper
● git
● Adobe InDesign (generated cards)
● Adobe Illustrator (logo)
● jQuery (Slimbox 2, Masonry, Rating)

24. Data Model
● Modeled Events, Targets, Spotting and a
couple of more
● Defined some business logic there
instead of views (good idea in this case)
● Could go further in this by using
Managers and some meta-hackery. See
http://dabapps.com/blog/higher-level-
query-api-django-orm/

25. Lessons Learned

26. South
● Definitely worth using
● Worked mostly fine
● Had to dump it once and build own
custom migration (SQLite to rescue)
● South's development (lack of it) worrying

27. http://www.flickr.com/photos/9049083@N04/2332755401/ aldoaldoz CC BY-NC-SA

28. Migration Migraine
1. Decided to do some drastic changes to
schema
2. Dumped South
3. Wrote migration manually
4. Migrate data using SQLite
5. dumpdata -> JSON
6. loaddata -> MySQL
7. Use South again

29. http://www.flickr.com/photos/68907151@N00/45751138/ Kevin Severud BY-SA

30. Database
● SQLite ok for dev
● Made it difficult to spot certain issues,
though due to loose constraints
● MySQL in production (be careful with
conf! UTF-8, engine)
● Maintained demo fixtures for a while
(good idea)

31. http://www.flickr.com/photos/92079962@N00/165513002/ Esther17 BY-NC-ND

32. Authentication + Authorization
● Django's native auth in dev
● Custom solution (ext. auth.) in production
● Ext. auth hooks into Django User, though
● Some custom code for authorization (ie.
target ownership)

33. On External Auth
● Part of Luova paja that runs on a CMS
● Provides registration + login (FB, regular)
● Effectively performs redirects and uses
JSON-RPC
● Utilizes checksums (secret keys) and user
info exchange

34. http://www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00/338474903/ Stuck in Customs BY-NC-SA

35. Testing
● Unit tests for core logic
● Eased development somewhat (harder to
break)
● Probably should've tested views and urls
too
● Acceptance tests that describe the user's
flow might have been handy too to have
(Selenium, zombie?)

36. http://www.flickr.com/photos/75654019@N00/100230432/ luxuryluke CC BY-NC-ND

37. Bootstrap
● Somewhat useful without customizations
even
● Use vanilla version till you need to
optimize (request size, amount etc.)
● Customizable using LESS (colors, etc.)

38. http://www.flickr.com/photos/25489182@N04/5022825091/ Philipp Lücke BY-NC

39. Development Speed
● Developing a MVP was a good idea
(Instanssi demo)
● The rest grew around that
● Pivots affect velocity (new, possibly
conflicting logic)
● Tests are essential due to this (easier to
spot goof ups)

40. "Perfect is the enemy of good"

41. Summary

42. Summary
● bongaus.fi provides a way to store
spotting information in one place
● Might grow into a business of some sort
● MVPs are valuable!
● Django+Bootstrap was a good combo

43. ?
? ?