A short talk given at PyATL on the use of Django at the AJC. Video available at http://blip.tv/file/2805912/

1. Django at the AJC
Evil for Awesome™

2. Who am I?
Zellyn Hunter
Sr. Web Developer
“zellyn” on almost every internet site (I forgot my aol
password, so I’m zellynhunter there)

3. Make you totally badass!

4. Make you totally badass!
…like a fluffy pink pony…

5. Make you totally badass!

6. Make you totally badass:
- Add our architecture to your repertoire so you
can serve one billion pageviews a year!†

7. Make you totally badass:
- Add our architecture to your repertoire so you
can serve one billion pageviews a year!†
- See what we’ve done with Django, so you
know what’s possible

8. Make you totally badass:
- Add our architecture to your repertoire so you
can serve one billion pageviews a year!†
- See what we’ve done with Django, so you
know what’s possible
- Learn from our struggles and know the tricky
areas ahead of time

9. Who are we?

10. Who are we?
The “Online Development Group”

11. Who are we?
The “Online Development Group”
- 1 manager, 4 developers
- shared: 1 DBA, 1 sysadmin, 1 tester
- occasional: 1 VM ninja

12. What do we do?

13. What do we do?
Everything except:

14. What do we do?
Everything except:
main CMS - big, corporate, Java

15. What do we do?
Everything except:
main CMS - big, corporate, Java
“classifieds” - ruby on rails
(we’ll discuss this later)

17. SearchWeather
Buzz (interesting news)
Slider
Twitter
Videos
Most viewed
stories/galleries
Feedback
Stocks

18. What do we do?
Interactive applications.

19. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute,

20. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute, breaking-news,

21. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute, breaking-news, quick-turnaround,

22. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute, breaking-news, quick-turnaround,
crazy deadlines,

23. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute, breaking-news, quick-turnaround,
crazy deadlines,
NO!

24. What do we do?
Interactive applications.
Last-minute, breaking-news, quick-turnaround,
crazy deadlines,
NO!
Reusable
^

25. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Periodic use:
- Election Results
- Peachtree Road Race Results
- Predict-the-outcome (Oscars)
- Executive Pay
- Victims database

26. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Data-only Updates:
- Home sales report
- Georgia Baby Names

27. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Tools for the newsroom:
- Maps - Slider
- Contests - Buzz
- Alerts - Promotions in sidebar
- Quizzes - Twitter
- Hot-or-not - “CMS Lite”

28. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Constant use:
- Galleries
- Vent
- Recipes

29. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Third-party content:
- Destinations (Frommers)
- Topic Pages

30. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Lots of Plumbing:
- Caching - Search
- Broken links log - Stocks
- User feedback - Weather
- Auto-linking - User registration
- Support tickets - Work queues
- Feeds (transforming, caching)

31. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Blogs:
- Wordpress MU

32. What do we do?
Interactive applications:
Blogs:
- Wordpress MU (sorry)

33. What do we do?
All told, we serve ¼ to ⅓ of site traffic.

34. What people outside our group think we
do:

35. What people outside our group think we
do:
Galleries

36. What people outside our group think we
do:
Galleries
(60% of our group’s traffic)

37. What the Rails folks do
“Classifieds Development Group”
- AJC Exchange
- Homefinder
(neighborhood profiles, school guide,
periodically updated home sales data)
- Vacation rentals
- User Registration backend (Merb)

38. Architecture
- Three python servers: Apache/WSGI/Django
- Two static media servers
- Two MySQL servers (one read-only, replicated)
- Two NFS cluster servers
- Two memcached servers
- Two rails servers
- Three PHP servers
- Akamai

39. We Brad Fitzpatrick
We’re currently running:
- Memcached
- Perlbal
- Gearman
- MogileFS
Not yet:
- DJabberd

40. Tools
- IRC
- Basecamp
- Buildbot
- Capistrano
- Subversion (git? hg?)

41. Troubles
Authentication:
Builtin django.contrib.auth has fixed ideas:
- username-based
- sharing email addresses is possible
The Ruby guys beat us to the punch:
- external system of record for user registration

42. Wins
• Built-in admin views for everything
• RSS all over the place
• Caching, caching, caching

43. Questions?

44. Questions?