One our highest priorities is to enable developers to get started with Opbeat as quickly as possible. We want to provide the tools that you - and your team - need to operate web applications, so you can get to back to what’s really important: Building awesome stuff.

As we remember from elementary algebra, ab+ac = a(b+c). This is called factoring. We can break out the common factor a from both terms, so that we only need to mention it once, simplifying the expression and reducing the number of operations needed to compute it.

When coding we talk of refactoring, one of the central themes of which is breaking out code that exists in multiple places, doing essentially the same thing: Don’t repeat yourself! This is also known as the abstraction principle and is about facilitating code reuse.

It’s always interesting to meet hackers with common interests, and to try to engage in the community that helped us get to where we are. Sometimes, that community can need a little help getting organized. This is what we learned from arranging our first local meetup.

When you’ve got an idea, and a team, and you’re raring to get started on hacking for a potential startup, a question that often comes up is, “well, what technology should we use?” (hopefully you’ve answered the necessary, “what problem are we solving and how are going to solve it” questions first).

The key issue is balancing newer components that might make you move more quickly, versus tried-and-true components that have more predictable performance and reliability. Here are a few things to consider when picking components:

I’ll be working out of the lovely General Assembly East office from April 9th to May 19th. Ping me!

At Opbeat, we use Django extensively. With the new ALLOWED_HOSTS setting, you need to make sure ALLOWED_HOSTS cover all the domains you will be serving from your Django application.

We’ve learned a ton during the Alpha period and have been working hard on our next major release: The totally redesigned Opbeat Private Beta. We’re pleased to announce that we’re launching Opbeat Private Beta this Monday, March 4th at 11:00am PT (17:00 CET).

Here’s what you need to do: Please re-install Opbeat after the above release date. The module/gem you’re currently using will not work with the Beta release. We’re not migrating data from the Alpha to the Beta. This will be the first and last time your data will be deleted from Opbeat.

The Opbeat Beta is huge step forward and we hope you’ll like it. Feedback is, as always, much appreciated!

Where is your backup? In a datacenter? What happens if that datacenter burns down? How fast can you have a new database up and running if your current one dies? Could be hours? Days? Backups of your database are absolutely essential and with Amazon Web Services it’s easy to do the right thing.

At Opbeat we absolutely love PostgreSQL. Its versatility and robustness is second to none, and frankly, I wouldn’t trust my data with many other. Thus, this article is aimed at PostgreSQL users. In this post I will show you how to set up a good backup scheme. In the next post I will go deeper in to the considerations you make to ensure your backup strategy meets your business goals.

We’ll be in SF Dec 2nd to Dec 12th. Let’s do coffee!

Opbeat is built in Django and we use pip with a requirements.txt file to make sure we keep track of our dependencies. This is a pretty standard way to do it and it works very well, considering it is such a simple mechanism.