Django User Group London Meeting

I attended yesterday’s DJUGL meeting, held at the Guardian in London. The evening consisted of three presentations with gaps for discussions and consumption of free beer and pizza. Entry was free and open to all with an interest in making Django better, though registration was strongly advised as the venue was almost full. The best way to find out more about upcoming meetings is probably through the London Django User Group Google newsgroup or the London Python Twitter stream.

The talks were quite inspiring. Nicholas Tollervey’s FluidDB talk had quite an interesting concept, though the company seemed to be at an early start-up phase and I will probably wait to see how it progresses before making my apps feed data to them. Toby White’s Solr talk was an insight into the techniques used by companies that have masses of data the wrangle into searchable formats. The Celery/RabbitMQ talk by Mat Clayton was the most familiar subject to me as I’d read articles on Celery before. It included some practical tips and lessons from their infrastructure experience. I can definately see how implementing a queuing system like this would be beneficial for parts of my apps that have to send emails and communicate with public web APIs.

Introducing: Another Blog

I set-up this blog a few months ago and it’s just been kicking ’round doing nothing. So, here we go–my first blog post.

I am a 3rd year undergraduate student studying Computer Science at Essex University. This blog will hopefully allow me to document my thoughts and provoke discussions on matters that are relevant. I have a small web design business that has been running for a few years now, and a wiki which I add to whenever I solve a problem–It’s mainly so I don’t forget, but you may also find it useful. Things that interest me and will be covered in this blog are:

• Web development (CSS, XHTML, server-side scripting)
• Graphic design (print and 3D–notably Blender)
• Linux (FOSS, community, Gentoo, Ubuntu)
• Servers (Web, email, SQL, backups)
• Programming languages (PHP, Java, C, C++, Ruby, Python etc.)
• Recreation (Snowboarding, Jazz–Saxophone, cars–Minis)

Anyway, thanks for reading so far and hope you have a use for this blog.