JJ Geewax

Dealing with metadata in Google Compute Engine

For my projects, I like to have a single "boot script" that runs at start-up time. That script then looks at some metadata in order to decide "what to do next". This has some cool side-effects, but the biggest "

Copyright in Jamaica

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a lawyer. Get your legal advice from someone smarter. If you're interested in this topic, pick up a copy of Cyber Law in Jamaica. TL;DR The Paymaster v GKRS case should be a reminder to all of us that

Python

Safe deployment on App Engine

In a previous article I wrote about the need to update your Datastore indexes on App Engine before deploying code that relies on them. To simplify the deployment process, I put together a script that waits for your indexes to be built before deploying

IP

Protecting your idea

TL;DR: Requiring someone to sign an NDA just to hear your idea is unreasonable. Every so often, I get an e-mail asking me for feedback on an idea, with a generic NDA attached that I'm asked to sign before I can hear what

Python

Python dictionary comprehensions

I’m a little embarrassed to say that I haven’t yet used these in my own code -- they seem so obvious now that I look back on it. >>> d = {'a': 1, 'b': 2', 'c': 3} >>> keys

Getting started with tmux

As a long-time user of GNU screen, I knew it would be difficult to switch, but I’ve made the move and am so far pretty happy. tmux does all the same things that screen does and was a lot easier to customize. I

Testing

Task Queue support in App Engine's ext.Testbed

A while back I wrote some (now deprecated) code that allowed you to easily test your Python App Engine applications and their interaction with the App Engine APIs. When we got acquired by Google, I started working with some of the awesome App Engine

Login required should be the default

If you're building a web-app in Python that requires people to sign in, you are probably pretty familiar with the concept of a @login_required decorator. For those that might not be, it's pretty straight forward: the decorator wraps a handler method with a

Friendly URL routing in App Engine with webapp2

I used to do crazy things like hard-code URLs in my templates: <a href="/accounts/create/">Create your account</a> or <a href="/accounts/view/?id={{ the_id }}">View account {{ the_id }}</a&