Niall's Weblog

MasterSlaveConnection: Works in Pymongo 1.6 In my previous article Python, MongoDB and Pylons – Connection handles and all that lark I described the code and configuration we use at Snaptic for working with Pylons and MongoDB. We use the MasterSlaveConnection class to automatically handle read/write splitting, because we expect to be running a single master/multiple [...]

I’ve been doing a bunch of hacking with Pylons and MongoDB recently for some backend stuff at Snaptic. Right now we are using Paster as the webserver and the Pymongo driver. This all works fine and is pretty straightforward to set up – but there are a couple of subtleties. MongoDB vs SQLAlchemy If you’ve [...]

Over at Snaptic we just announced our Move Your App! developer challenge. The Challenge The idea is simple: write an Android app which inspires people to move around. 3 Reasons to Enter 1. Actually benefit society Obesity is a huge problem – 64% of adults and 25% of children and teenagers are overweight or obese [...]

This week I bought the Google Nexus One phone. I’ve been very impressed with the device so far. Here are some of my thoughts. Keep in mind that this is a hacker’s perspective and I’m not nearly so interested in eye candy and user experience as many people might be. On the hardware What impressed [...]

Recently I needed to implement my own autocomplete for a project on snagmachine.com. We had a large database of products and wanted to ease data entry by hinting to the user via autocomplete when possible. In future, we can probably just use Freebase Suggest but right now we needed our own solution. The Pieces Autocomplete [...]