Whether you’re soliciting programming advice on a mailing list, providing technical support over IRC, or saving a useful snippet of code for later, GitHub’s Gist is an indispensable tool. I’ve been writing more and more code in Go recently, and something struck me about the Go community: they don’t...
RVM has long been an essential tool in the Rubyist’s toolbox. It was a huge leap forwards, but it has been increasingly falling out of favour. Recently, a large chunk of the Ruby community moved to rbenv. Touted as the nimble successor to RVM, rbenv has a much...
Yesterday, Amazon announced their Simple Email Service (SES). Sending emails from EC2 instances has been a well-known problem for some time, due to the likelihood that messages coming from there will often be marked as spam (supposedly Hotmail blacklist all EC2 IPs). The announcement of SES appears to be the...
The long-awaited version 0.4 of MongoEngine has now been released. This is a major update, bringing a solid set of new features, optimisations and bug fixes. I’ll outline some of the main changes, and link to the documentation where relevant. Completely re-written Q-object implementation that no longer uses Javascript....
Here I’ll present a simple full text search engine, that uses MongoDB as its backend. It’s implemented using MongoEngine, and is intended as more of a proof-of-concept than a viable alternative to “real” search engines such as Solr, Sphinx, etc. What will the search engine...
I just released version 0.3 of MongoEngine, here’s a quick breakdown of some of the main changes. MapReduce Support Thanks to the great work by Matt Dennewitz, we now have support for MapReduce. Here’s an example to show how it works, in which we generate frequencies of tags over...
MongoEngine is a Document-Object Mapper (think ORM, but for document databases) for working with MongoDB from Python. It uses a simple declarative API, similar to that of the Django ORM. So what does it do? Here’s a brief run-down of some of the main features...
I like to do most of my Python development inside virtualenvs. I also create a Git repository for any project that matters or that will have any kind of continued development. Constantly switching between the different virtualenvs to work on different projects used to be tedious, but this issue...