Django contractor? secretlondon needs you!

We’re expanding fast and need an experienced contractor with strong expertise in Django, JQuery and CSS to help us build http://secretcities.com/london. You’ll be working with a small passionate team in EC1 (London, UK). Initial period of 1 month, starting right now!

Email jobs@secretcities.com with your CV, day rate and links to your blog & project work.
Cheers!

Weekend learnings

Musings.

1. Websites are hard to build – even with lots of help and bagels.
2. Websites are fun to build – even when everything dies minutes before you get techcrunched.
3. Caffeine and sugar really can allow you to code for well over 56hrs straight.
4. Coding for more than 55hrs straight will cause you to have a mental breakdown.

On a more techie note.

1. RDS… total let down
   Only available in Virginia (US-east region) and only available with MySQL5.1 (not 5.0). Which considering we’re primarily London based traffic (for now) and 3rd party software support for 5.1 is still low, I recommend against it. At least until the support increases. Servers are one of those things you can’t really afford to go with an unknown player.
2. CSS… the fat kid
   Who invited them to the party? I’ve been a designer for years, I keep up with CSS and its changes, but its only hit me now how totally inefficient a language it is. Front-end designers are clearly vastly under-valued and under-paid. They’re stuck with slow moving and antiquated technology, both in terms of the language and browsers that run them. There are other technologies out there, but no-one knows how to use them and to be honest they’ll never get into the main stream. Which means you won’t be able to recruit anyone for open projects or hire them for your company. So learning is – suck it up but way over budget for front-end and UX treatment.

Github project

Ok the github project is up! Check it out, git://github.com/timjdavey/secretapp.git, get “watching” and get involved!

First steps for the Tech

Londoners!

So here’s the deal: I love this city and who doesn’t love secrets… so when I got the chance to help out, I was like “Hell yes!”. I’ve got a couple of years experience building this sort of thing – however if we’re going to make secretlondon amazing – I’m going to need some help. So I’d welcome all the feedback and technical know-how you can muster.

Technical info for the geeks out there: For starters I’m going to be cracking this out using django. I’ll throw the project up on github asap, so you can all have a look and a play. Then it’ll be coupled with the usual – Apache & wsgi for serving the app and nginx for serving static files & cached pages.
Where I’m really worried though is scalability and speed of getting this bad boy to market. So, I’m going to be using our old friend amazon. I’ve got a decent AMI kicking about with most of this already pre-configured. But I have no idea what kind of loads we’ll be getting. So, for a db server I’m toying with the idea of using RDS to try and reduce the management hassle (we can always pull it back from here at a later point). Then just for kicks use ELB as a Load Balancer. I realize this is all a bit Amazon-tastic, but the aim here is go quickly (and I love it).

I know this update is vague so I’m looking forward to hearing what people think.
Tim