I've been meaning to post, but there's been a lot going on, both at home and work.

At work, we have been slowly moving all of our code over to SqlAlchemy 0.5, using the declarative layer. Because of our legacy database there have been some interesting cases to deal with, one being the fact that we have a bunch of tables with different names, but the same schema. Hopefully I can eventually share some of the tricks that we came up with to deal with these edge cases. Also, I've been working on using the django templating and mailing functions to transition us to high volume mailing on python. More to come on things I've learned through that.

On the home front, my fiancé and I are in the middle of purchasing a home. It's been a quick and somewhat interesting process with the inspection, the loan application and the negotiating. Pictures to come soon.

Here is a list of thinks i am looking at currently:

• RabbitMQ
• CouchDB
• Erlang
• WSGI
• Iphone SDK

Hopefully, as I work on these, I will be able to post more about them.

Dirty writing to the database
So if you do updates on a django model, currently all properties of that model are updated in the update statement that is run. In this day and age we shouldn't be doing that. If I update one attribute on a model, it should only update that column in the table.

Primary Composite Keys
I know that they are coming, but this is something that is really important to those of us that have already existing schemas. There are certain places I can't use the django orm because it doesn't support my join tables.

First things first. Yes, this is yet another django blog. Yes, I thought about using a preexisting set of reusable apps. No, I am not a glutton for punishment.

The simple fact is that every person has a slightly different set of goals when running a blog/personal site. What someone else might need is something that I have no desire to host. So I wrote my own.

There's also the advantage of having a piece of software that I can use to mess around with some of the latest django features. At work, we use django; but only a certain subset of features. If I want to use and see some of the other features I'm not using at work, i need to do it at home.

Lastly, I knew that if I wrote this software, I would be much more likely to write here instead of letting yet another blog die.