A quick announcement: as a bit of an experiment, I’ve moved this site to Google Cloud Run. Please let me know if anything seems broken.

I may in the future write a bit about Cloud Run: there’s a lot to like, and also some definite here-be-dragons things. In the meantime, though, my capsule review:

And here’s the code changes I made, including some yak shaving, for your perusal.

Do you have a growing engineering organization that needs help hiring effectively? I can help! I have consulting availability over the next few months to help organizations hire better.

I can design your hiring process, write interview questions, teach staff how to interview successfully, or even run your hiring rounds. Read on more for details, or if you’re interested, hit me up: [email protected].

What I can do for you

In a nutshell: I will help you hire more effectively. If you’re having issues at any step of your engineering hiring processes, chances are I can help you improve. Some of the things I can do for you:

Adrian broke the news: today, he and I are retiring as BDFLs, transitioning to a truly community-run project.

Adrian wrote a bit about the history of the BDFL term and our roles wearing that hat. Go check out his writing for that, and for some of his personal thoughts. Here, I’ll just add a few things of my own:

For me, this has been a long time coming – I’ve been thinking about this for at least a year. In many ways, I this is a similar to a lot of the changes we’ve made over the years: it’s a formalization, and a naming, of what’s already happened. It’s clear to me I don’t have the sort of day-to-day involvement that I once had, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to make the sort of dictatorial decisions that the title implies.

I’ve joined Heroku as their Director of Security.

(Cross-posted from the Revsys blog; I think folks here might be interested, too.)

Next month I’ll be teaching two new one-day classes, both of which evolved from common questions we get at Revsys. Each class is going to be offered twice, once in LA and once in Boston.

For the impatient here are some links and quick info:

• Django Deployment Workshop - Los Angeles - December 6, 2010.
• Django Deployment Workshop - Boston - December 10, 2010.
• The Best of the Django Ecosystem - Los Angeles - December 7, 2010.
• The Best of the Django Ecosystem - Boston - December 9, 2010.

For more details on each class, read on…

Early registration ends Friday for the March Advanced Django Class I’m teaching, so if you’re planning on coming, you should sign up soon!

I’m really excited about this class: we’ll get to dive really deep into the good parts of Django. We’ll cover all sorts of advanced usage of Django’s APIs, spend a bunch of time playing with all the cool stuff out there in the Django ecosystem, and actually spend a whole day setting up and configuring a real-world deployment stack.

A quick reminder: if you’re thinking of coming to me week-long Django course in Kansas City next month, today’s the last day to sign up at early-bird pricing. The price goes up by $500 tomorrow.

It’s shaping up to be a blast – why not join us?

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be teaching a week-long introductory Django course in Kansas City, September 21st - 25th.

Teaching’s folks how to use Django is one of my favorite things to do – in fact, I’m in San Jose right now gearing up for a tutorial at OSCON tomorrow – so it seemed a natural thing to make it an aspect of my business.

So, if you need to learn Django, why not come spend a week in Kansas City with me? It’ll be a blast.

It’s the era of change, I suppose…

Starting today I’m joining Frank Wiles – a good friend and fellow Lawrencian – at his consulting firm, Revolution Systems, LLC. I’m really excited to be working with Frank: he’s a great guy, and a crazy-smart developer and sysadmin.

Together, we’re going to be offering professional Django support to companies who need a Django expert on staff, but can’t afford someone full-time.

The Django community is terrific; those who are comfortable with the IRC/mailing list support venue can get great assistance that way. That said, volunteers aren’t always available in an emergency, and for large sites short downtimes can translate into huge losses. Indeed, some companies are a lot more comfortable with open source when it comes with professional support. And sometimes you just need an expert.

I’ve been working on redoing my website for at least the last year or so… and finally got it done.

I drew obvious inspiration from the minimalism trend (c.f. Bennett, Tomayko, Pilgrim); the simplicity of those sites are quite refreshing. As I was putting the finishing touches on the site, I ran across a roundup of minimalist designs that I think does a great job summing up my attraction to minimalist designs, the article’s first three points describe perfectly what I’m trying to do here:

Almost four years ago, Adrian posted about a job opening at this little newspaper in the middle of the country. He wrote that

World Online is […] one of the most innovative online-news operations in the world. Our main sites […] have garnered an impressive batch of industry awards – and tremendous industry attention – over the past few years.

[…]

We strive for innovation, nimble development and the use of best practices. We have a near-religious focus on doing things the right way – clean URLs, CSS, separation of content from presentation, accessibility, solid application design, etc.

Well, now.

I hear that there’s this thing all the cool kids are doing. Something about a web stick, or a web tree or something…

Web Log, that’s it.

(Hear that? It’s me running after the bandwagon as fast as my lazy ass can take me.)

Of course, this whole site is now powered by Django — including some neat little tricks I’ll try to share later on.