What We Do

Here at Whiskey Media we build and run a handful of web sites that integrate deep editable product databases and best-in-breed editorial and video coverage with the power and influence of passionate communities. The technology team tries to build the most interesting, fun and empowering sites on the Internet. 

 We relaunched our live chat recently.

Yeah, but what do we really do? Each day is a battle of resources against bugs, hackers and feature requests. Each day, we try to improve every aspect of each site we've launched. Whether its streamlining our chat interface or updating our deployment process, we're always trying improve the experience our user's have on our sites.  

A Brief History

A lot of the original team came over from CNet where we worked on entertainment sites such as GameSpot, TV.com and MP3.com. LAMP was our name and PHP development was our game. It wasn't until we decided that we were going to re-launch Comic Vine in the winter of 2008 that Andy made the tough sell to push us towards a new web framework called Django.   

At first we were hesitant. Here was a young company, making a crucial architectural decision based on (at the time) an unproven framework. I think it was only Andy who would have known that the recommendation to use Django would prove to be one of the most important technological decisions Whiskey Media has ever made.

The Stack

We use a number of different technologies and tools to get our sites up and humming. This post simply outlines our stack. We'll dive deeper into each particular topic in upcoming posts. 

Everyone loves a pony! 

Django: Django is a Python web framework and is at the core of everything we do. We've been using Django since before its 1.0 release and have been lucky enough to have worked with one of its founders in Jacob Kaplan-Moss and count ourselves doubly lucky to have one of its core committers working along side us in Honza Král.

Simply put, Django lets us move fast. If you're trying to set up something as simple as blog, or are looking to build complex service based system, Django is a wonderfully powerful and intuitive framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Amazon:

• S3/CloudFront: All of our media is stored on Amazon's S3 service. Whether its our hour long Endurance Run videos, user uploaded content, or our beautifully crafted javascript and CSS -- its all stored on S3. CloudFront sits on top of S3 distributing our content to edge locations throughout the world. We'll get to how we use S3 and CloudFront in future posts; for now, just know that it is an incredibly functional service and we're happy to be using them.

• EC2: Shortly after Amazon launched S3, they started to build onto their suite of cloud based services. It was only a matter of time until they solved cloud based hosting and from there, it was only a matter of time until we migrated our sites to utilize EC2's power and scalability. Our outstanding ops team will be posting tips and tricks for working with EC2 in future posts.

PostgreSQL: We love relational data, and PostgreSQL stores our bread and butter data.

Solr/Haystack: Our sites tend to have large product databases that need to be indexed and searched quickly and efficiently. Solr is our back-bone when it comes to search and Haystack is an elegant Python library that sits on top of it. We’ll get deeper into how we use both of these technologies in future posts, but for now know that they’re a godsend and life would be much more difficult without them.

jQuery:   Although we started as a MooTools shop, we are slowly and steadily migrating to jQuery. Mike Horn is leading the front-end charge and if you're in San Francisco and interested in getting together to talk shop about all things front-end --- Horn has recently started a meet up at the Whiskey Bar downstairs.

Redis/Mongo/Memcached: We use a handful of no-sql solutions in different situations depending on the specific problem we're dealing with. Although these technologies are relatively new, we fully embrace the power, speed and scalability they provide. 

 Our frontend is a directionally aware woman.

Rabbit/Celery: In order to improve the speed of our sites, we have started to rely heavily on asynchronous processing systems such as RabbitMQ and Celery. These async queueing systems have become an integral part of what we do and we will be writing about how we use them, tune them, etc. in future posts.

Compass/SASS: About a year ago, we started using a CSS framework called Compass. It allows our front-end developers to be more pragmatic with their front-end logic and enables us to launch new features faster. 

Wrap Up

This is just the first of a series of blog posts from our engineering/ops teams. We'll be discussing everything from Redis to Fabric and jQuery to Django. So whether you're interested in keeping tabs on the latest site features or you're a budding developer and find yourself interested on what makes us tick, add us to your RSS reader and stay tuned.