In this episode of Running in Production, Sean Parsons goes over building an e-commerce video course marketplace to sell Confectionery goods with Django and Python. It’s been running in production since December 2019 and it’s hosted on AWS.

The app has roughly ~100k lines of code and was solo developed part time over about 3 months before shipping an MVP.

Topics Include

• 3:00 – Modifying an existing e-commerce library called Seleor
• 7:20 – Figuring out how to pay out instructors fairly based on activity
• 10:04 – Picking Django, avoiding burnout and splitting the code into ~15 Django apps
• 20:49 – Celery is being used extensively, along with Celery Beat
• 25:10 – Stripe as a payment gateway was a natural fit given their subscription model
• 29:44 – It is a server rendered site with Django templates, except for the video player
• 35:26 – Turns out using Amazon’s video encoding service is expensive, so Sean uses ffmpeg
• 38:48 – High level overview about the rest of the tech stack
• 42:21 – Using Fabric to deploy to a single EC2 instance
• 45:00 – Going over the deploy process from development to production
• 50:08 – Benefits of switching to a compute optimized C5n.large EC2 instance
• 1:00:46 – Handling disasters and unexpected events
• 1:04:39 – Best tips? Pick the tool you’re the most productive with and ship something
• 1:07:03 – They’re on Instagram with a new account name of ZenVur

Links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confectionery
• https://transferwise.com/us
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hY6DSSVvYw (Etsy talk on deployment)

• django →
• python →
• aws →
• cloudfront →
• cloudwatch →
• docker →
• elasticache →
• postgres →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• statuscake →
• stripe →
• supervisor →
• ubuntu →

• https://github.com/mirumee/saleor
• https://github.com/deschler/django-modeltranslation
• https://github.com/celery/celery
• https://flower.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• https://videojs.com/
• https://gunicorn.org/
• https://www.fabfile.org/
• https://github.com/antonagestam/collectfast

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.

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