As part of continuous Cybersecurity updates, we decided to alert the Ops team on any successful or unsuccessful attempts to login into the AWS Console. read more...

Having gained some insights into OpenTelemetry through previous experiments, we planned to forward 50x nginx log records to an aggregator through OpenTelemetry. read more...

As Web traffic has spiked other the summer, the engineering team is looking to upgrade the logging infrastructure to have better visibility into "soft errors" - i.e. 502, 503, 504 and the like. The team has been more and more relying on a self-hosted GitLab instance for day-to-day activity, and has seen many new features around Monitoring coming out of GitLab. Soon the idea of shipping OpenTelemetry events to GitLab started to look good. read more...

Over time we ran production workloads on Fedora, CentOS7, Amazon Linux 2, and now Amazon Linux 2023 (which means we are back on Fedora I guess). This post is about the quirks we encountered migrating from Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023. read more...

We have been using Zendesk for 5 years now. They have made changes recently that makes it more difficult to respond to tickets quickly and effectively to the point we decided to look at alternative solutions. read more...

The team has embarked on producing a series of video tutorials. Since none of the team members is a native English speaker and we have been eager to test some new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, we decided to experiment with Text-to-Speech technologies - Open Source ones of course. read more...

In this post we will delegate user authentication for a Djaoapp-powered Software-as-Service (SaaS) product to a SAML provider hosted by AzureAD. read more...

Either because you sold the business, or a critical operation engineer is promoted and/or leaves the company, changes in ownership are inevitable. To be prepared for it, you should create a business continuity plan and review it regularly. read more...

I have never quite understood why Python (or Ruby) packages are delivered through their own manager (pip, gem) instead of the local system package manager (apt, yum, etc). It might make sense for pure language packages but it becomes borderline insane when dealing with bindings to native libraries. read more...

So far the fast path to notify developers when a logic error (500) appears in production relies on text files and logrotate. Here we will see how to forward Docker logs through journald to syslog. read more...

We are interested here to log messages from a gunicorn application to journald, eventually forwarding the messages to syslog-ng. read more...

A long time ago, around 1999, someone put a few HTML pages together glued with some logic code; had success with it; wrote a book about it; had more success; and the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was born. read more...

Where there used to be a few large SaaS market, we now see hundred of different micro-markets and micro-SaaS products to address those micro-markets. Why is that? read more...

Some of the largest and fastest growing software development markets are within the Vertical SaaS market. It is a fragmented market that addresses over 100 different submarkets. read more...

We have an application written in Django that we want to piece-wise migrate to a Vue and API architecture. This post explores how we managed to combine Vue development inside a Django project, and all the frustrating dead-end along the way. Hopefully saving you time in your own process. read more...

In spite of the coronavirus crisis, it is the time of year where accountants close the books for last year, and for the DjaoDjin team to reflect on what we did well, what can be improved, and where to take the product forward over the next months. read more...

In the early days of the Internet, you added your .css and .js files in a static/ folder under your Django project and you were done. Things have evolved. Getting the User Interface static assets to a browser is a lot more complex now. read more...

It is straightforward to add translations to a Django project with built in Django templates. However, if you are using other template engines like Jinja2, it might take more effort to make those work together. Things can get tricky if you want to manage translations for both the frontend and the backend using the same Django tools. I'm not going to cover the basics of i18n in Django hereas there is already a great deal of information on the Django website, but instead talk about the out of the box stuff that is not integrated. read more...

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning in 2019. read more...

Adding a thousand users in one day, many of them working across the spectrum of fortune 500s companies is a strong incentive to build a professional customer support organization. The first step being to sign up for Zendesk. Here was we learned in the first couple weeks. read more...

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning. read more...

The full tests workflow is presented in the diagram below. We presented the steps to build a Docker container and upload it to ECR in another post. Here we will focus on generating Python coverage results and getting the files to be presented into Jenkins. read more...

(This post was updated for running Docker on Fedora 25) Since Docker was released as open-source, it has spread like wildfire. Both Amazon and Google have been quick to support Docker on their respective cloud. read more...

Enterprise-ready SaaS: The term suggest feature-rich, scalable, and secure -- qualities at the core of any cloud-based service for enterprise customers. But the bar is trending higher, and developers now have greater expectations to meet as they set their roadmap for enterprise-ready SaaS. read more...

Charge receipts are an essential part of payments online, both for selling physical goods (e-commnerce) and subscriptions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). A good receipt will help customers build trust in your business as well as avoid chargebacks. In this post, let's review the elements needed for a good receipt. read more...

We define a boutique Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a business from one to fifty people, which primarily sells a software product through an online subscription service. We were curious to find out the technology stacks behind those businesses, as well as the usage of administrative features (User profiles, Billing, etc.) that need to be built up as part of running a Software-as-a-Service but which are not core to the service delivered. read more...

Sometimes you underestimated the disk size required to setup and run a service on AWS. The quickest way to keep moving forward is to resize the EBS storage associated with the EC2 instance. read more...

Today we are going to push the rotated logs to a S3 bucket, the download those logs and process them with awstats. read more...

As we are getting ready for a Django 1.10 upgrade, it is time to take care of one of the most baffling warning in the code base RemovedInDjango110Warning: SubfieldBase has been deprecated. This lead to a long journey through code, documentation, and release notes. read more...

Is it time for you to create your own company? Are you ready to begin the amazing adventure which is entrepreneurship? Today we are having a guest post from Aurélie Pérez, Advisor about Happiness At Work on the mental preparation you will need to become a CEO. read more...

Jan 1st 2016, we survived. Bigger fishes didn't make it. Two customers are going live with their product next week. Three deals were signed. The quota for January was met. Time to look at what lies ahead. read more...

Getting the perfect pricing will make a huge difference on a business, from sales velocity (how fast do you sign customers) to free cash flow (how much can be re-invested quickly into growth). Every market, product and situation is different. It will take trials and errors to get it right. Let's just remember rule #1. read more...

The first and easiest thing to do to start a business on the Internet is to register a domain name. There are a few gotchas to be aware of before you select a DNS provider and hand over the domain name to your technical team. This post is a little bit more technical than usual but reading through it will avoid a lot of headaches and frustration later on. read more...

When dealing with large files (2Gb+), we would prefer nginx to serve those files directly. The trick is we want nginx to serve those files solely to authenticated users. We will see in this post how to have nginx serve the files directly, yet keep the authorized access logic inside our web application. read more...

Dealing with large files over HTTP has always been challenging, Doing so in the context of access control and user authentication even more so. Once faced with that first (too) big file, you will most likely search for Nginx direct file upload without passing them through backend or if you rely on AWS, look into S3 direct upload from browser. We will see in this post how to do the latest. read more...

Time for an upgrade of the Jenkins machine. This time we are setting up Jenkins with Jetty 9 on Fedora 21 to continuously run CasperJS tests against the Django web application. read more...

Amazon announced new T2 instances in July 2014. A little later it became clear that AWS free tier for StartUps was only for T2 instances. The free tier offer did not extend to the previous T1 generation (We found out on the first bill). read more...

In this post I will describe how we organize DjaoDjin Ansible playbooks for deployment on AWS as well as the rationale that lead to it. read more...

So far we had run the mail server with static hash files. As we add contributors and machines in the mix, it is about time to introduce a central account service (i.e. OpenLDAP). Since Rackspace and Amazon deprecated their first generation instances, re-building the mail infrastructure from scratch on a new system seemed appropriate - plus, it is fun! read more...

Happy New Year to You! Happy New Year to all those who entrust DjaoDjin with the technical challenges of running their boutique services online. Happy New Year to all those who support DjaoDjin with their time and money. read more...

A first generation Greek-American born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Vasilios Pavlounis graduated with a business degree from Dalhousie University in 1986. His life changed course, however, when he saw an ad for a computer consultant job three years later. As he recalls, “I literally had to look it up. Once I did, I said ‘I think this computer stuff is the future.’ ” read more...

Ansible is a great piece of software to write IT automation scripts. The fact that Ansible is written in Python makes it even sweeter for us. read more...

For the past months, we have been using a workflow to communicate layout changes on the site that includes an in-browser screen capture, followed by a screenshot annotate step and concluded by a todo item in the backend database. read more...

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman read more...

There are only two kinds of people, those who encrypt and those who wish they encrypted. The way EC2 instances boot, it is almost impossible to do full disk encryption. Here we will store the postgres database files on a separate encrypted EBS volume, and thus tweak the default postgres installation along the way. read more...

Database schema migration is a fact of life and South has imposed itself as the de facto solution within the Django community (at least until Django 1.7). The south docs are explicit, yet it is good to read the excellent south-explained post before diving in. read more...

To wrap up, we recently came across some articles providing very insightful angles to running a SaaS business. read more...

Short list updated weekly of articles and papers we read and found worth mentioning in 2014. read more...

We will see how we can easily validate a multiple step form thanks to jQuery and jQuery validation plugin. The aim is to validate each step of the form one by one and post a clean form. read more...

In the popular series on how technical decisions are made, we will see Today why DjaoDjin picked django-jenkins, phantomjs, casperjs and django-casper to build its continuous integration infrastructure on. read more...

There are a lot of sports metaphors thrown around in business. I have already written about technology for the sports fan. Most prevalent in the startup world is the home run hit. Baseball is a popular sport, and since the San Francisco Giants are at the top of their game, it is quite understandable that baseball gets thrown around a lot around in the bay area tech circles. read more...

[UPDATED] A physical person is made of limbs and organs each with a dedicated function. Amonst them, the heart, by pulsing blood through the body at regular intervals, defines life and death. In a shortcut analogy, bussiness law organize companies as moral entities with roles and procedures and, if anything, financial statements and taxes give the pulse of a company. read more...

I had the pleasure of attending Joel Gascoigne’s presentation on Buffer at a recent San Francisco Financial Startup Meetup. Joel cited some interesting numbers:

• 400,000+ registered users
• 1.7% conversion rate
• $10/month membership

I decided today to bring a new web stack consisting of nginx, gunicorn and django on a fedora 17 system. We are also throwing django-registration in the mix since the service requires authentication. read more...

Between all the overly hyped articles covering launch events, plancast postmortem is a refreshing must read. read more...

Happy New Year! Big resolutions for 2012? If you haven't picked yours yet, these lists of rules to live by are always a lot of inspiration. Enjoy! read more...

I setup redmine recently run through thin behind a nginx on a rackspace cloud machine. The interface is great and it seems like a very useful application if it was not so slow to respond. Simple http requests take forever even on a machine that experiences only minor traffic. read more...

Modx is a CMS system written in PHP. As a result, unless you install the not-yet-released PHP 5.4, you will need a PHP-enabled front web server. If you planned to use nginx you will have to do so through FastCGI (remember no built-in http server before PHP 5.4) which if, out-of-luck, you are running a PHP version below 5.3 will require a patch in the PHP source tree. Modx supports mysql as a database backend but there are no mention of postgresql. As a result, I have sticked with a "traditional" LAMP stack for now. read more...

In the most part I followed the ubuntu 11.04 openldap tutorial. The wikipedia article is also useful to understand some of the basics. I later stumbled upon LDAP for Rocket Scientists which definitely helped clarify some. read more...

I picked-up "Here Comes Everybody" from Clay Shirky. It is a very interesting and entertaining read. read more...

Jenkins is another continuous integration server written as a java webapp just like cruisecontrol. Jenkins seems to be the most popular continuous integration package today. There is extensive documentation to install it on many different operating systems and it comes with lots of plugins. read more...

It is kind of fun to look through your application logs and find traces of a hacker trying to break in. It might even be intellectually stimulating to play this game of hide and seek with another human being. Unfortunately most malicious attempts hitting your server will come from bots. Those don't get discouraged. Those don't change tactics. They keep trying to brute force passwords, even when you only allow private key login in your ssh daemon. They keep trying to access PHP scripts, even when you do not have any PHP stack running on your web server. Worse, if you allow people to leave comments on your web site, you are almost guarantee to attract spam bots that will waste precious bandwidth and mess up statistics you use to learn about your audience. read more...

September is here again. The summer is almost over and as usual the cold and foggy days have given ways to the warm season here in San Francisco. It is a good time to compile a list of the articles and books I have read through the last months that have held my thoughts. read more...

Coming up with innovative technology is an art. Building an actual product out of that technology is an art. Making money out of that product is an art. In every case, there are plenty of opportunities to screw-up along the way but as the saying goes: "Smithing makes the smith. Sailing makes the sailor. Cooking makes the cook. Tailoring makes the tailor". At some point you need to jump in the unknown and start doing; practical experience will come with the years. Nonetheless, failing because "we did not know" is not an excuse. The ones that succeed are always the ones that can draw on the experience of others. When given a situation, they will obtain the technical advantage from their accumulated knowledge. Experience is a guide, not a master. read more...