Django

My presentation from PGCon 2012, PostgreSQL on AWS with Reduced Tears, is now up.

Pickup trucks are great.

No, really. They are great vehicles. You can use them for all sorts of really useful things: Bringing your tools out to a construction gig. Delivering refrigerators. Helping your friend move a sofa. Carting away a reasonable amount of construction debris.

But if you need to deliver 75,000 pounds of steel beams to a

I’ll be speaking at the following conferences through July:

• PGCon, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, May 17-18.
• DjangoCon Europe, Zurich, Switzerland, June 4-6.
• Southwest LinuxFest, Charlotte, North Carolina, June 8-10.
• EuroPython, Florence, Italy, July 2-8.
• OSCON, Portland, Oregon, USA, July 16-20.

Instagram has been in the news lately. In this really great post on Tumblr, Instagram talks about its technology stack.

I have some acquaintance with the Instagram people, and they are among the smartest technologists I’ve met. Really nice, too. (Of course, they mention this blog in the post, so I’m biased.)

As noted before, Django has a lot of facilities for handling transactions, and it’s not at all clear how to use them. In an attempt to cut through the confusion, here’s a recipe for handling transactions sensibly in Django applications on PostgreSQL.

The goals are:

• Database operations that do not modify the database aren’t wrapped in

My tutorial at OSCON 2011, Unbreaking Your Django Application, is now available for download.

The slides from my talk at PGCon 2011 are now available.

DjangoCon Europe and the Apple WWDC are at the exact same time. This is going to be a tough call.

Update: Well, that was quick. WWDC sold out in 10 hours, while I was dithering.

I’ll be giving a full day tutorial about developing Django applications using PostgreSQL. If you are just getting started with Django, this is a great introduction; it is intended for developers who are just getting into serious Django/PG development.

It’ll cover general development in Django, with a lot of PostgreSQL-specific details.

And, of course, the whole conference will

A fun and interesting article about a sudden burst in traffic at Pinboard when Yahoo! announced they were shutting down Delicious. Relevant to app and DB designers everywhere.