After a year and five months, Jessi and I are car free once again! Yup, yesterday we sold our '06 Mazda 3 that we bought in '07 and re-entered the ranks of the urban carless. This is the second time we've been without a car, the first was right after I moved to Boston from California and sold my Camaro. That lasted for about 6 months before Jessi got a new job that was not accessible by public transit.

This time, with my new job at Discovery Creative, and Jessi working from home, a car has become an unnecessary expense. A very large unnecessary expense, as a matter of fact: before taking into account gas an maintenance, owning the car was costing us around $500 per month! That's a lot of extra money that's now going to be sitting in our bank account! Of course some of it will go to Zipcar rentals for the few times when we actually do need a car, and some will probably go to getting our groceries delivered by either Peapod/Giant or Safeway, but even still those added expenses should be far less than what we're saving by having no car.

Discovery Creative has a lot of web sites and apps out there. And quite a few of them need to send email in one form or another. Previously that has meant that every single one of those sites/apps needed to implement it's own mechanism for sending email. This is obviously a bit of a pain, not to mention a potential security risk, and a blatant violation of the DRY principle. So I was tasked with building a better mousetrap, as it were.

One of the cool new things I had heard about at DjangoCon 2009 (which I really should have written about...) was Piston, a framework built in Django for building RESTful APIs by the bitbucket guys. I'd never actually built any sort of API before, but it seems to be the thing to do, so I decided to take django-piston for a whirl and how it works. As it turns out, it works extremely well. So well, in fact, that when coupled with some of the fun tools that Django provides (such as ModelForms) you can easily build a RESTful API in no time at all.

Thanks to django-piston I was able to create a simple API that will allow us, moving forward, to use a single, centralized email solution for all our web apps. In fact anything that can send an HTTP POST request (including curl, which is what I've been using for testing) can send email using the API I created so long as it can also handle HTTP authentication (which django-piston easily handles against django.contrib.auth). I'm hoping, after a little more work and refinement, to open-source our API so that other can benefit from it (and, hopefully, contribute back to it!), but for now you'll have to make do with a sample project that I threw together for the most recent django-district meeting this past Thursday: Django-Piston Presentation. It's a bitbucket repository that includes all the code for a simple RESTful API that allows you to create, fetch, and delete objects from a simple Django object. This particular project was designed to be extremely flexible, and all one needs to do is add or remove fields from the model (or point it at a different model) to adapt it to just about anything. Hopefully it will serve as a pretty good instructional example to anyone who wants to create their own API with django-piston. The project also contains my notes on how to build and test it in an Emacs org-mode file.

Next up: Git, Mercurial, and moving on from Subversion.

I will get around to actually writing something soon, I swear! But for now you'll all just have to make do with another announcement of a project going live. This time it's actually up on Discovery Channel site. It's a Flash and Django based app promoting one of Discovery's new shows The Colony, about survival in a post-apocalyptic LA. I've actually been looking forward to this show, can't wait to watch it!

I'm actually a bit late on this one, but I've been so busy with my next Discovery Creative project that I just haven't had time for much else. Anyway, from June 15 through 22 AFI, in partnership with the Discovery Channel will be putting on their Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival. Check out the website for more details on the festival and the films they'll be showing, not to mention an example of how awesome my (and the rest of Discovery Creative, I guess) work is.

I've now been living in Maryland and working at Discovery Creative for a whole month, so I think it's about time I started writing again! My first couple weeks I was here alone while Jessi finished things up in Boston I had little motivation to do much outside of work, so I found myself going in to work early and home (I was staying with my aunt and uncle who graciously offered me a place to stay at their home in Bethesda during the limbo time between moving out of the condo in Somerville and into the apartment in Silver Spring) late. That left me pretty exhausted at the end of the day so relaxing, eating, and sleeping were much higher on my to do list than writing. Since Jessi got down here my time outside work has been dedicated to unpacking boxes and transmitting what little I know of the area to her and her sister Becky who flew out to help with the move. Now, however, we're unpacked—if not completely then at least enough to be comfortable—with most of our furniture in place and awaiting delivery on the few remaining items that we've purchased. So time to start looking towards the future again.

My experience here thus far suggests that there's a lot of interesting work ahead. I've got a few Django projects already going on, including working with some new stuff like OpenID, OpenCalais, Clickpass, Twitter, and many other things. I'll probably be starting work on a project using Google App Engine in the near future, and I've already begun learning about and starting to work on iPhone apps as well. So I should have lots of good fodder for technical posts in the coming months!

On top of that there's a whole new city to explore, and nearly the entirety of my family spend time with. Before we knew we were going to be moving, Jessi and I had been planning on getting kayaks this summer so we could spend some time on the Charles and Mystic rivers, maybe the Harbor Islands, and hopefully take them up to the Adirondacks to explore the lakes up there. That plan certainly hasn't changed as now we've got the Potomac and other bodies of water to play with. Plus we're now so close to Shenandoah that it would be a crime not to get in some camping and backpacking. (And after the missed opportunity last winter, I'm definitely planning on some winter backpacking in the Senandoah back country this year!)

So with any luck I should be doing a lot of writing on a lot of different topics in the future. At the very least I need to do some work on this site as I want to integrate my portfolio into the personal site and phase out the business one. And working on this site always seems to give my something to write about.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you'll likely have seen my big news: I have a new job! That's right, I've been hired on as a web developer for Discovery Communications (the parent company of the Discovery Channel). More specifically, I'll be working at Discovery Creative, the subset of Discovery Networks that works on things like web sites (duh) and advertising. It's a pretty awesome job, and I can't wait to get started.

But, true to form, the transition to this next stage in my life is not as simple as that. The job is not here in Boston, rather it's down in Silver Spring, Maryland (just outside the northern tip of DC). So just three short years after moving to Boston, we're moving to Maryland! This is a little less crazy than it might sound. Nearly all of my family is down there, within about 10 miles of Silver Spring. The next largest concentration of my family members (which consists of just my grandmother and an aunt) is in South Jersey, about a 3 hours drive away. Other than that, there's no single place in the coutry where I could live near more than a single blood relation of mine (although there are a number of other places we could go to be overrun with members of Jessi's much larger family). On top of that, Jessi's sister and her daughter (our niece) are moving to Virginia this summer, about an hour away, and my sister is going to be in DC for at least the summer after her graduation in May. Strangely enough, DC actually seems to make a lot more sense for us logistically. The only real complication is what to do with our condo. Fortunately it's about four blocks away from Harvard Law School, basically on the campus of Lesley University, and within walking distance of Tufts University. So we're pretty confident that we'll be able to get it rented pretty quickly, and after some consulting on our mortgage (Best thing about the current economy? We can refinance and knock a good 2% off our interest rate!) it seems as though it should work out pretty well financially too.

So yet again this blog will turn into the chronical of a move. A much shorter move than last time (thankfully; as much as I enjoy driving cross-country, I really am not in the mood to do it again right now), but one that will, I think, prove quite interesting.

Oh, and the best thing about this new job? They have a dinosaur in the lobby!

How cool is that?

[Edit: Corrected a mistake. The parent company of the Discovery Channel is Discovery Communications, not Discovery Networks! Thanks Matt!]