An E-commerce Site That Lets Folks Buy Online Courses

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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
📄 References
⚙️ Tech Stack

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

  • Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.
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Questions

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Oct 05, 2020

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