LiesWeTellOurselves

I had a silly idea for a website and decided to code it up in Python to see how I liked programming in Django. I have since put the code up on GitHub, so you can get it here: GitHub - LiesWeTellOurselves

The main concept behind the whole thing was that we all have things we like to tell ourselves that we know aren't true. "How many other people believe these same things?" I wondered. I envisioned a site where you could post the little white lies anonymously and others could come to the site and vote up the ones that they do also and even add their own into the mix. It also had to be very AJAXy. That's very important.

By far my favorite feature of Django is just the absolute ease of testing. The ability to write tests right in the docs of the Model classes and using fixtures and writing full-stack integration tests were just a dream. I worked on this far too long for it's usefulness mainly because it was so damn enjoyable.

I was constantly working to make the code as compact and quick as possible and I remember one challenge really stood out. I was allowing people to vote on the lies as a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I was saving them as individual entries in the database and linked up to the lies table and needed a way to add them all up to give a total. I'm not a fan of duplicating data in my database for any reason and decided that the best way was to loop through all the votes for a lie and sum them. I eventually came up with this:

return reduce(lambda init, item: init + item.value, self.votes.all(), 0)

Move Command Line Script

I'm a programmer that likes to "scratch his own itch", as they say. One of the problems I ran into at an old job was that we had a remote test server we ran all of our development code on. Standard practice was to edit the files on the server and then refresh your browser to see if the changes worked. This process didn't include version control, didn't take into account network drops and didn't scale at all if two people happened to be trying to work on the same thing at once.

The Dude did not abide.

Wanting a better system at least for myself I pulled all the code locally, set up a SVN repository locally and just uploaded the stuff over an SSH client when I wanted to test. This became a bit of a pain since I was mainly working in the command line, or at least an editor with a command line, and hated to constantly switch between the editor, SSH client to upload and then browser to test. So I wrote move.rb:

move.rb is a simple script that takes filenames or directories from the command line and uploads them to the server. The key is setting up a config file at the root of the project called .move and setting the first line to the connection string of the server, like me@myserver.com, and the second line as the corresponding root folder on that server, like /htdocs/project. It's then very simple and easy to just call move.rb put index.html media/ to move index.html and everything changed in /media up to the server or move.rb get portfolio.html to pull portfolio.html from the server down to your local computer (always a good idea when working on a project with no version control and everyone else is editing the files directly on the server, which I don't recommend anyway). And since it uses rsync, which will only transfer files that are different, you can specify a whole directory and not worry that it will take forever if you only changed one file in it.

You can also run the command anywhere in your project tree and the script will move up the tree until it finds an appropriate .move file. So you can actually keep all of your files in one place on your local computer but still have different directories going to different places on the remote server or even completely different servers.

This certainly doesn't replace a good build script, but it can help when doing quick projects or file changes that you need to get out to a server to test.