ralpress.org

Absolutely hilarious. Cal Henderson (head of engineering at flickr.com and author of O’Reilly’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”) gave a talk at DjangoCon 2008, titled, provocatively enough, “Why I hate Django”. I saw the slides shortly after the talk and even without the accompanying narrative I was laughing out loud. I made a mental note to check YouTube at regular intervals in order to watch for a video of the talk, and sure enough here it is: Why I hate Django

Cal is the chief architect for a site that is built primarily using PHP and that during peak hours serves up to 35,000 photos per second, really, over 2 million per minute! It’s probably reasonable to conclude that he knows a thing or two about scalability. Prior to his talk Cal had apparently been “building a blog in Django” (you’ll understand the quote marks when you watch the video and the talk is based upon his experiences doing that, as well as his involvement with Django-powered Pownce.

It’s good natured stuff, and very funny.

Why I hate Django.

EDIT: I meant to add that I think it’s very cool the Django folks got Cal to do this talk. It seems to be a sign that they don’t take themselves or their framework *too* seriously, which can only be a good thing, IMO.  On a more serious note, the talk also serves as a pretty good introduction to advanced web database issues.