An E-commerce Site That Lets Folks Buy Online Courses
with Nick Janetakis and Dalton Polhill
Running in Production · Nick Janetakis
October 5, 20201h 3m
Show Notes
In this episode of Running in Production, Dalton Polhill goes over building a text based course platform with Django and Python. It’s running on a single EC2 instance and was up and running after 2.5 months of development time.
Dalton talks about doing contract work for a client, how the Django admin was a big help, happily using SQLite, the value in using web frameworks and more.
Topics Include
- 2:46 – Motivation for using Django and Python
- 5:01 – The Django admin helped a lot for building this app
- 7:47 – Fleshing out what this application does (features, models, etc.)
- 13:18 – Going from internal testing to live testing for payments is stressful
- 18:15 – Mostly Django templates with sprinkles of JavaScript
- 20:41 – Building the core of the app first while learning how it all fits together
- 23:21 – SQLite is being used as the primary database
- 29:40 – Not using Docker caused a few hiccups along the way
- 35:32 – Identifying AWS services by name is hard, and the site is hosted on EC2
- 41:49 – The EC2 instance is running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and was set up manually
- 44:28 – DNS can be confusing at times
- 46:25 – An old school way of deploying code from development to production
- 51:46 – Database backups aren’t automated yet
- 56:08 – Emails are sent out using SES and being aware of delivery limits
- 59:27 – Best tips? Learn one or more web frameworks
- 1:02:41 – You can find Dalton on GitHub