timjdavey

First steps for secretlondon

Londoners!

So here’s the deal: I love this city and who doesn’t love secrets… so when I got the chance to help out, I was like “Hell yes!”. I’ve got a couple of years experience building this sort of thing - however if we’re going to make secretlondon amazing - I’m going to need some help. So I’d welcome all the feedback and technical know-how you can muster.

Technical info for the geeks out there: For starters I’m going to be cracking this out using django. I’ll throw the project up on github asap, so you can all have a look and a play. Then it’ll be coupled with the usual - Apache & wsgi for serving the app and nginx for serving static files & cached pages.

Where I’m really worried though is scalability and speed of getting this bad boy to market. So, I’m going to be using our old friend amazon. I’ve got a decent AMI kicking about with most of this already pre-configured. But I have no idea what kind of loads we’ll be getting. So, for a db server I’m toying with the idea of using RDS to try and reduce the management hassle (we can always pull it back from here at a later point). Then just for kicks use ELB as a Load Balancer. I realize this is all a bit Amazon-tastic, but the aim here is go quickly (and I love it).

I know this update is vague so I’m looking forward to hearing what people think.

Tim

— orignally posted on our blog

• #secretcities
• #community
• #tech