A Platform to Buy Gift Cards for Eco-Friendly Products
with Nick Janetakis and Antonin Grêlé
Running in Production · Nick Janetakis
September 7, 20201h 1m
Show Notes
In this episode of Running in Production, Antonin Grêlé talks about using Django to build a gift card purchasing site for eco-friendly products. It’s hosted on PythonAnywhere and has been up and running since fall 2019.
Antonin developed it himself in a few months and covers tying together services using Zapier, what it’s like to manage gift card logic, the value in getting something up quickly and more.
Topics Include
- 2:10 – Launching an MVP after a few months of dev time as a solo developer
- 5:10 – Motivation for using Django and Python
- 7:39 – Batteries (mostly) included, using the Django Admin and Django REST Framework
- 10:51 – Using Stripe to build a single checkout page to buy gift cards
- 15:57 – It’s a monolithic app but it uses services like Airtable and Zapier
- 23:58 – Managing gift card funds and logic is the core of the business
- 30:34 – Tech stack includes SQLite and using PythonAnywhere for a host
- 39:50 – Cloudflare is mainly used for serving static files
- 42:59 – The process from development to production and secret management
- 49:10 – Performing hourly DB backups and using UptimeRobot for downtime notifications
- 54:19 – The new SCA compliant Stripe APIs are being used
- 58:33 – Best tips? Get your product out ASAP and be mindful of what happens if you leave
- 1:01:05 – Check out https://www.ethikdo.co and Antonin is also on Twitter