Confectionery Connect Is an E-commerce Video Course Marketplace
with Nick Janetakis and Sean Parsons
Running in Production · Nick Janetakis
June 8, 20201h 7m
Show Notes
In this episode of Running in Production, Sean Parsons goes over building an e-commerce video course marketplace to sell Confectionery goods with Django and Python. It’s been running in production since December 2019 and it’s hosted on AWS.
The app has roughly ~100k lines of code and was solo developed part time over about 3 months before shipping an MVP.
Topics Include
- 3:00 – Modifying an existing e-commerce library called Seleor
- 7:20 – Figuring out how to pay out instructors fairly based on activity
- 10:04 – Picking Django, avoiding burnout and splitting the code into ~15 Django apps
- 20:49 – Celery is being used extensively, along with Celery Beat
- 25:10 – Stripe as a payment gateway was a natural fit given their subscription model
- 29:44 – It is a server rendered site with Django templates, except for the video player
- 35:26 – Turns out using Amazon’s video encoding service is expensive, so Sean uses ffmpeg
- 38:48 – High level overview about the rest of the tech stack
- 42:21 – Using Fabric to deploy to a single EC2 instance
- 45:00 – Going over the deploy process from development to production
- 50:08 – Benefits of switching to a compute optimized C5n.large EC2 instance
- 1:00:46 – Handling disasters and unexpected events
- 1:04:39 – Best tips? Pick the tool you’re the most productive with and ship something
- 1:07:03 – They’re on Instagram with a new account name of ZenVur
Links
📄 References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confectionery
- https://transferwise.com/us
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hY6DSSVvYw (Etsy talk on deployment)