SQLAlchemy Deferred Column Loading

We have a small monitoring Flask web app using SQLAlchemy that we use to keep an eye on the status of some jobs in our processing pipeline. Yesterday we noticed that our DB was getting nailed everytime we refreshed the main status screen, which does NOT show the stack trace (which can be VERY large for big jobs). We needed a way to only pull those fields when they were displayed, but at the same time I didn’t want to have a seperate model just to use on the main status screen. Read On →

MonsterMash: Flask, ZeroMQ, and EchoNest Remix

Off and on for the past couple of months I’ve been working on a side project using flask, zeromq, and the remix api by echo nest. If you take a look online, there are a lot of excellent guides to introduce you to flask, but not many that dive into something more complex or closer to something that an engineer in more distributed services would need to put together. I’ve seen some great guides on organizing larger applications, but not so much commentary about how the experience was. Read On →

A Preview of My Silly Little Python Mash Up Generator...

So I’ve been working on a little side project web app to get familiar with both flask (a python web microframework) and zeromq (the socket library that acts as a concurrency framework), along with remix from echonest. There was this exchange with Brad from devmynd tonight on twitter. Coupled with the promise of tons of rain from our friendly neighborhood meteorologist, I was inspired to create this unholy amalgamation of mash up nonsense. Read On →

Problem With Running an MVC3 Project on IIS After Opening and Building in Visual Studio 2012

I was having trouble running a .NET 4.0, MVC3 web application locally on IIS after building in VS2012. The unit tests would pass, all projects would build successfully, and it would even run from Cassini, but something was just not working properly on IIS. This project SPECIFICALLY references MVC3 assemblies that are included in a packages folder in the project, so I didn’t think it was MVC, but all signs were pointing to that. Read On →

Top 10 Albums of 2012

These, in my opinion, are the best 10 records I heard from 2012. It was pretty easy this year. Here we go. 10.) Torche - Harmonicraft I didn’t listen to this record (and, to be quite honest, never listened to anything of theirs) until a couple weeks ago. I stumbled upon this one after looking through all the releases of 2012. I’m really glad I did. These guys fit in well in my library, and Harmonicraft was an awesome record. Read On →