Developing Upwards

When I complained about the problem, I promptly outlined some ideas about solving it, vaguely. Now, I want to narrow that outline into systems I actually use. I do most of my work with Django, some hobby time is spent with App Engine and Twisted, and I enjoy Amazon Web Services, so I'm thinking from these perspectives when I approach this. Parts one and two were broad, but some of this might only apply to fewer of you. Either ignore those or adapt to whatever you use. Django's cache layer sucks. Simply stated and simply true. Any time I decide I can cache something, I should ask myself if I could have built it before I even had the request in the first place. Doing that with the template caches simply isn't possible. It should be possible and it should be the first path you take, instead of forcing us to go out of our way to do the better thing. Anything I might want to cache, I also might want to be sure I'm not doing in more place than once, and forcing them inline i...

I did my best to outline the problem in Part 1. Now I have to stand up and propose some kind of solution. Otherwise, I'm just complaining and contributing nothing of real value. Our frameworks make certain things easier. They don't provide tools to help us with other things. For some other set of activities, they may actually prohibit. The problem here is a combination. Django makes it easy to query your database and wrap functionality up into re-usable template tags. While I'm thankful for that, I am also realizing that ease of one thing can prohibit another. When one path is made easier it creates the perception of greater difficulty in other paths. I think this is why, when our web frameworks give us all these tools to response to a web request, we completely lack in everything we could do aside from that request. How can we make it easier to work outside the web request? We need some idea of what working outside the web request means. We also need to define these in ter...

Something is bothering me this past week. I've been taking some stabs at reducing the maximum render time of a site, when the caches are all empty. I cache certain components and queries, but when the caches are primed the render time is under 500ms and I think that's pretty good. That worst case senario, however, is just not acceptable. Worse than a couple seconds. That isn't time that should be taken. I dug in and found a really bad pattern. It isn't hard to make a page faster, but the default is to be as slow as possible. We have to understand this pattern. I am looking at this in relation to Django, but I have a feeling there are similar patterns other places. The common tagging application is a good example. It makes it really easy to tag objects, count them, query by them, and build those clever little clouds. You're given lots of new wrappers for all the common tag-related queries you'd need to do. This may be a source of the problem. We've gotten...