Latest Blog Posts

There has been a good deal of progress made towards getting boto's documentation up to snuff. We've been working on cleaning up what is there, and have even added some new content (like the new DynamoDB tutorial). However, there is much left to be done.

We would greatly appreciate some outside eyes on this. We'd love to see what you think we could do to improve the boto documentation. Please feel free to visit the boto issue tracker and fire away. If you mention @gtaylor in the body of your issue, I'll be sure to get it, and can label and route it.

For the ambitious

If you're feeling particularly motivated, we'd love to ...

On a post in the Amazon Web Services blog yesterday, AWS has announced that it has brought Mitch Garnaat (maintainer of the excellent Boto) on board:

[...] Building on this model, Mitch Garnaat has also joined the team. Mitch has been a member of the AWS community for over 6 years and has made over 2,000 posts to the AWS Developer Forums. He is also the author of boto, the most popular third-party library for accessing AWS, and of the Python and AWS Cookbook.

Great news, but what are they going to do with Mitch, and what will his involvement with Boto be?

Boto will continue to exist as an open source project and we will be making official contributions ...

A recent backwards-incompatible change to the PayPal Adaptive API led to our web application being unable to accept new users for about five days a while back. We were getting a very vague "Session has expired" error, and PayPal support couldn't figure out what was wrong. Nothing in that section of the codebase had changed for months, the breakage randomly started.

It ended up being that a recent PayPal API update had made a previously optional field required, and they only updated their PDF documentation (I use their HTML docs). There was no communication of the change in requirements leading up to the breakage, and we were alerted to the issue by frustrated customers calling support (instead of PayPal ...

I've been playing EVE Online since the summer of 2008, and have kept a close eye on the state of things from time to time. CCP releases a free "expansion" every six months with lots of goodies in them. The latest, Crucible, is the first that I can remember to be a pure refinement-of-existing-concepts release.

There's a great short list of the major points on the Crucible features page, and a much longer, blow-by-blow changelog that drills down into individual changes.

What makes Crucible so tasty?

CCP took a step back, listened to player feedback, and delivered... bigtime. This release was almost entirely devoted to addressing design warps, imbalances, and player-requested things. A few of my favorite hilights ...

I recently re-vamped my site to use Twitter's Bootstrap CSS. This ended up being pretty easy to switch to, and I had to tweak the styles very little. My designer sensibilities are pretty terrible, so stuff like this is a real treat. If you haven't already, consider checking Bootstrap out.