About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Colophon

This runs on Django, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

The Book

Book cover I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley in October 2008, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well. Click on the book title above to learn more.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 45544 pieces of comment spam killed since January 12th, mostly via Akismet.

Framework de-flummoxing

Eric Meyer recently wrote a post titled "Flummoxed by Frameworks" that received a lot of commentary. I belatedly added my own two cents. I have a feeling that this isn't the last time the subject will come up; I'm copying my own response here (along with the link to Eric's post) mostly so that I can find it later when I want to explain this to somebody else!

Eric, you mention that you wrote all of An Event Aparts registration stuff using PHP and MySQL. I take this to mean that you did it once. Imagine if you did it three times, or five times, or fifty times for different clients, with minor variations. Imagine how sick youd be of re-implementing the same core features over and over. Your approach would change a little bit with each job, as you discovered better ways to implement certain features. Imagine the nightmare of trying to support all those clients each one using a slightly different snapshot of your learning process.

Now imagine how much youd appreciate pre-written software that took care of the common pieces for you, allowing you to focus on the variations. Thats what frameworks are about.

Friday, May 19th, 2006
web development + web frameworks