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I stumbled across Christophe Pettus‘ fabulous OSCON 2011 slide deck this morning and just had to share it as a must-read for Django app developers. It’s full of great gems on Django best practices by way of using real-world examples of “worst practices” and I defiinitely recognize some of my own forehead-slappers in there. The slides are particularly useful in elucidating the Django ORM and the peculiarities it introduces in the database layer. The author seems to have a great sense of humor to boot and keeps the tone light throughout the presentation.

Cristophe is from a consultancy called PostgreSQL Experts, which probably means he’s usually called in to clean up disasters instead of pre-launch testing when most of these issues should have been resolved. If there’s one thing I got from this slide deck, it’s to make sure to have a reasonable pre-launch staging environment with a test plan that maps to real-world usage numbers — something that’s become immeasurably cheaper and easier with cloud solutions (need to simulate 10,000 simultaneous users? No problem, spin up a few EC2 instances, point them at your app and let them loose!)

As a side note, I really need to investigate PostgreSQL as a database alternative on my next project — the reliable replication in PostgreSQL 9 alone opens up fascinating possibilities.

Yes, that’s a Friends reference. Yes, I know you’re judging me for it.

I don’t think there are that many of you left that haven’t heard that I’ll be leaving GSLIS with a Master’s after this semester but I suppose I should make an official announcement anyhow. And I’m sure some of you have questions about why but have been too polite to ask The short story is, I have a clearer sense of the direction I want my life to take and while my time in grad school has been immensely valuable, I’ve come to a point where finishing the PhD isn’t the best way to achieve those goals (right now.)

The past four years have been amazing-arduous-enlightening-transformative-rewarding and many of you have been right there with me through the craziness. I’m a very different person today than I was when I started the program and many of the reasons why I started aren’t valid anymore. When I began, I thought I wanted to be a professor, to teach and to conduct research. While I enjoy both to an extent, I’ve found that the tenure track doesn’t seem to be a good fit for me, particularly at this point in my life and the non-tenure track positions that a doctorate in LIS would open up weren’t appealing either. This past year, my assistantship has me programming regularly again for the first time a while and I realized that I missed building things. Furthermore, teaching the entrepreneurial design class last spring plunged me back into the startup milieu and I saw the ways people like me and my undergrad classmates (sometimes literally my classmates) were changing the world for the better using their tech skills.

My immediate next steps aren’t set yet (yes, I’m on the job market and am open to interesting opportunities everywhere!) but I do know that in the larger scope I want my life to meaningfully and maximally contribute towards a more just and sustainable world. There are many people doing work in academic departments that are accomplishing that with their research and teaching. For myself, though, at the current moment in my life and in this particular moment in history, I think I can make more of an impact as an engineer than as an academic. I’m certainly not precluding the chance that I’ll decide I want a doctorate at a later point in my life but for now, it’s a very exciting time to be a developer and I’m joining the party — fashionably late, as usual

I’ve been sitting on this domain for several years now and procrastinated on putting up a real site because I was going to write my own blog engine of awesomeness. I’ve finally caved and installed WordPress. Sometimes, it’s okay to do it the easy way.

I miss crafting a paragraph for the pure joy of stringing words together. As much as people laugh when I joke that English is my second language, there’s a dash of truth in the jest. I vividly remember the frustration of being unable to communicate in class when I first came to the States — the effort it took to construct a sentence in my head and repeat it to myself several times before timidly voicing it to my teacher. Being able to use this language deftly as a palette has special significance for me.

I love the process of cutting a sentence down to its bare essentials. Cut, slice, recast til you’re left with tight, lean prose, evoking a thousand images with a single line. Delving deep for the perfect word with that exact connotation, that tinge of meaning to convey the correct timbre. So right. So write.