Exploring Django format localization settings

Django supports many languages and locales out of the box. An important aspect of locale-aware applications is number formatting and Django provides quite a few knobs and switches, but using them isn’t entirely straightforward.

Custom Vagrant box for jump-starting Django projects using Cookiecutter

Being able to effortlessly bootstrap new Django projects and quickly flesh out ideas is very important. It minimizes the effort spent on configuration minutiae, enabling us to focus on the actual task at hand. Haven’t we all felt drained after a long tooling troubleshooting session, wanting to hit the sack instead of writing beautiful code? Let’s see how to streamline things.

Cloud backups with Duplicity and Amazon S3

If you’ve never been hit by catastrophe it’s easy to dismiss taking regular backups as a nice-to-have instead of the absolute necessity it is. We need to fix this. We’ll use Duplicity to instrument our backups, which will be encrypted on the server and subsequently pushed to Amazon S3.

Simple automation for web developers, using Grunt

Grunt, the JavaScript task runner, is an excellent tool to automate boring, repetitive stuff. With a plethora of plugins, and a thriving community around it, you’ll find it’s a great weapon for your webdev arsenal. I’d go as far as saying that it’s invaluable for any moderately complex web project. Once you spend a bit of time on it, you’ll be able to compile your LESS, concatenate, compress and optimize your CSS, minify and combine your JavaScript files, keep separate builds for production and development, deploy your kids to school after they have breakfast and even more!

Modern Perl toolchain for Git managed web apps

Separation of concerns has always been a key issue for me as a developer, often going to great lengths for compartmentalization and clearly defined boundaries. A macro example of this is using VMs for development; it has improved my productivity immensely because the host OS is decoupled from the dependencies of the projects I am working on.

Packer: In 10 minutes, from zero to bootable VirtualBox Ubuntu 12.04

Trying to build a simple VirtualBox Ubuntu image was not without digging around, even though the documentation at Packer would lead you to believe everything is quite straightforward. If you were looking for a concrete example of creating a VirtualBox Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image with Packer, this should be a straightforward guide to get you up and running fast. (Updated for packer v0.10.1)