roam's comments

roam | 3 months ago | on: A first look at Django's new background tasks

With regards to args and kwargs? None. Your callable is basically replaced with a Task instance that’s not callable. You need to invoke its enqueue(*args, **kwargs) method and yeah… that’s of course not typed.

roam | 13 years ago | on: The inverse of IoC is Control

Don't use IoC if you don't need it, but I'll explain why we need it in our case: some customers require different implementations.

That's where the DI part comes from -- to enable us to load a different dependency based on the customer. Now, you could provide a different bootstrapper class per customer or start building a mega class with a lot of ifs-and-buts(elses), or you specify this kind of stuff in a configuration file.

We opt for configuration files. We opt for IDEs that can interpret Spring configuration files which means typos or incorrect dependencies do show up. This allows us to swap out implementations in case shit goes down without having to recompile, connect over a VPN to a remote desktop and hop through a few more hoops to get our class file on the other side. If you're not running your own apps on infrastructure you control (we should be so lucky), you have to take this sort of stuff into account. I'd love to be able to say "This is how stuff's set up. Deal with it."

(And when shit goes down, it is usually not at the place you were expecting it to happen, which means all kinds of configuration options for your bootstrapper would probably still fall short.)

roam | 13 years ago | on: Engage by Mixpanel

Off-topic, but a heads up to the Mixpanel team: your announcement email sucked. A single big image containing all text? Come on. You guys can do better than that.

roam | 13 years ago | on: Apple promises maps app will 'improve'

Seriously? Nine out of ten companies will turn "make it suck less" into "make it even better". Apple dropped the ball, Apple does some very questionable things, but please stop this idiotic bashing, whether it's targeting Apple, Microsoft, Google or even RIM. Just stop it.

roam | 13 years ago | on: Django Best Practices — Updated for 1.4

I imagine most of those icky suggestions are coming from people who used to run php on hosts with a lot of restrictions. You're right, this should definitely be a part of a best practices guide.

roam | 13 years ago | on: Django Best Practices — Updated for 1.4

What's confusing you? (I'm trying to help, not being snarky)

If you want to invoke some Django-based logic at regular intervals without having to install Celery (and monitoring and a decent queue) you'll opt for a management command. The link you posted should help you out here. Invoking the script yourself or telling cron to invoke it for you shouldn't be hard if you know about cron.

With regards to Celery: I think the tutorial and docs are pretty clear on how to use it and how to set it up.

roam | 14 years ago | on: Create a blog in 30 mins with Django 1.3 (Screencast)

The reason you have to start looking in settings.py and urls.py is because you used "django-admin.py startproject". Why would you do that? Probably because it provides a nice and common layout with some sensible default configuration.

But you don't have to use "startproject". Here's an example: http://olifante.blogs.com/covil/2010/04/minimal-django.html

No, I don't recommend you to do that. Use Flask, Bottle or any other lightweight framework/library you want to use. Just don't get hung up on how the Django docs suggests you structure your project. It's all still Python.

roam | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you promote an app in the Android marketplace?

Please proofread the copy of your website. The titles on the site make zero sense to me unless I take a moment to parse them again and again. I mean, "Sparse Rss Pro Best Android Full Text New Reader Application" just screams spam to me. :)

roam | 14 years ago | on: SaaS Fatigue

Key part: "to any web app". You'll need some kind of OAuth provider on top so people can just plug it in right next to their Google, Twitter or Facebook providers.

roam | 14 years ago | on: SaaS Fatigue

Build something that can expose any LDAP to any web app safely and you'd probably make millions.

roam | 14 years ago | on: Django Production Deployment and Development Using Git

I... don't understand your problem. Is it a PITA to split settings files every single time you start a new project? Yes, sure. Does it take more than five minutes to do so? No.

Really, Flask's config options are better, but they aren't that different from Django. Use the default settings, tell Django which settings to use from the commandline or specify an environment variable pointing at the settings to use. Where you put those settings is completely up to you - nobody's saying they absolutely positively must be part of your repo.

When you're working with multiple environments you'll have to specify which configuration to use one way or another so I'd prefer it to use the least amount of abstraction.

roam | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Design tools and software. What can I buy?

Look, noahc is absolutely right. If you think Notepad++ is holding you back when coding HTML and CSS, you're wrong. You need practice. So practice.

Have a look at PatternTap (http://patterntap.com/) to find inspiration for specific bits of the UI. Find out how you would create your own in Photoshop/Gimp/Illustrator/Pixelmator/Paint. Maybe add a texture, find a better color scheme or change around the font.

Then build it with HTML/CSS/JS. Use Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Vim, Notepad++ or, hell, even regular Notepad. It does not matter.

Great designers use the tools they are comfortable with. Most use a tool such as Photoshop to build something tangible (a PNG, PSD or, if you're management-material, PPT). That let's them define the way the website should look under ideal circumstances without getting to hung up on the correct HTML and CSS. Then they cut that up and code it in HTML and CSS to create something useful.

That's what you need to practice. And if you're worried your designs look too "Web 1.0", you need to focus on the first part of that process: defining what it should look like, before opening up your editor of choice.

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