Published 2011-01-12

I’m server-side guy – I can’t stand presentation and fiddling with CSS. A good front-end developer is worth their weight in gold. Until I can afford to hire one, I’ll just slog through JQuery and the browser wars. Of course, you may gouge out your eyes when you look at my site.

I did play around way too much thinking about the server-side tech, though. I proto’d in Hunchentoot (Lisp) and considered Yaws (Erlang). In the end, I went with Django (Python). Most of my web-based work has been in Perl with home-grown frameworks, then recently with Catalyst. I wanted to make a break from Perl 5 (Perl 6 I’ll be using as soon as I can), so I moved over to Python/Django. It’s got a great community and it’s a seasoned framework. I don’t find Python especially compelling, but Django’s easy to work with. One of these days I’ll figure out the “why” of __init__.py.

Having spent most of my life using make, I’ve bypassed the Python build mechanisms with a plethora of Makefile‘s. It was a bit stupid and has led to some silliness.

One pleasant surprise is the packaging mechanism in Arch Linux. One configuration file, which is a shell script, and you’re done. Setting up a repository is just an ftp server, modifying a configuration, and a couple easy steps. That takes care of big chunk of deployment. Arch FTW.