The November Blog-A-Thon

Clearly, I'm already a day behind on the whole "blog every day in November" thing. But since I haven't actually posted in ... almost a year (not since the last PyCon, in fact), I still consider this a step in the right direction.

The thing is, to blog about Django, I'd actually have to be working in Django. And as everyone who knows me personally knows all too well, I work in a PHP shop.

And before you ask, no, I don't enjoy it, and yes, I'm frustrated. I spent most of my time at sprints at the last DjangoCon working on changes to our framework. There's not much more embarrassing than having the laptop open, having Russell Keith-Magee come up behind you to ask how things are going and what you're working on, only to have to come up with a hasty explanation about the urgent call that had come in from my office that morning.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bastispicks/3911029099/

My attempts to bring Django in through the back door have been thwarted at almost every turn. I do use it for two internal tools - a contest management interface, and a marketing report generator. Neither is particularly groundbreaking. And earlier in the year, I had high hopes that we'd be able to bring it in to help replace our current creaky, outmoded CMS. But we manage more than a hundred domains, each with its own legacy db, and even with model inheritance as a workaround for all the schema inconsistencies, multi-tenancy was the real showstopper.

So. Right. Thwarted.

But for all that, I do use Python quite a bit for everyday problem solving. So my plan for the coming month is to post scripts, or at least snippets of scripts, to show what I do use Python for on a day to day basis. And maybe I'll get some feedback, some suggestions for improving what I do, and just maybe I'll be able to help someone else solve a problem of their own. But at the very least, I'll be documenting some of what I do for my own future reference later, which is really the purpose that this blog was intended to serve in the first place.