Better Local Settings — January 5, 2010

A common convention I've seen in the Django community is to place code like the following at the bottom of your settings file: # ``settings.py`` # Lots of typical settings here. # ... then ... try: from local_settings ... [Read More]

Django Dash Factoids

Posted by Daniel on June 10, 2008.

I like statistics. Even though the saying goes "There are lies, damned lies and statistics", I still think they are fun. So, as promised (though slightly late), here are some interesting facts about the Django Dash competition:


  • Most Unique Visitors In A Day: 749

  • People Interested Pre-Dash: 113

  • Teams That Signed Up For The Dash: 52

  • People That Signed Up For The Dash: 69

  • Teams That Competed In The Dash: 11

  • People That Competed In The Dash: 17

  • Original Length Of The Dash: 48 hours

  • Actual Length Of The Dash: 96 hours

  • Time During Original Length Dash Server Was Up: 17 hours

  • Total Time Dash Server Was Up: 36 hours

  • Prizes Given Away: 24

  • Max Place That Won Prizes: 8th

  • Number Of Winning Teams With 2 Members: 5 (1st - 5th)

  • Number Of Winners Using Gmail: 10 (76%)

  • Estimate Total Value Of Prizes: $6,692

  • Time Required To Judge The Competition: 12 hours total

  • Beers Consumed During Judging: 4 total

Overall, I'm really impressed. I'm glad people stuck with it during the downtime and that we had as good of a turnout as we did. I'm planning on running this again next year as the feedback was overall very positive.

On the topic of judging, the single most critical factor was if we (myself & the judges) could get the apps up and working. Only one team provided a README, which was very helpful. Meanwhile, 2 of the teams that competed couldn't even be gotten up and running, which hurt them badly (can't judge much but the code itself).

I had a lot of fun, despite the downtime, and I hope the teams that competed did too.

3 Comments

*groan* I guess I'm one of those teams...

I tried to deploy my app on my server, but as I've got a webfaction host I was also affected by the downtime. Only found out after the deadline that my django-register module, which was a symbolic-linked SVN download, was in fact not checked in. I'd done some minor modifications to it (one line), so I guess it would be completely impossible to get running.

Thanks for hosting this, it was a nice kick in the bum to get something running :)
Posted by Bjorn on June 11, 2008 at 4:26 p.m..
Hey, I'm (very) new to Django. I came from Rails, and I never got to participate in Railsday, but really wanted to. You should definitely host this again next year, I really want to do it :)
Posted by Mike on July 9, 2008 at 2:33 p.m..
It's in the plans to run the competition again next year, with some modifications as to how it will be run. More as that develops.
Posted by Daniel on August 31, 2008 at 1:39 a.m..

Sorry, comments have been closed on this post.