Technical Trivia

SKILLSHELVES started as a submission to O'Reilly's “Wirtable API Competition”. To be able to announce my participation in the contest in style and document all the technical decisions, I finally set up that personal blog and threw my hat in the ring. In my usual no-last-minute-panic-no-fun approach I had an acceptable first version of Skillshelv.es up and running on Sunday April 17 23:59 PST and have been refining things since then.

I posted an in-depth writeup of all the upfront design decisions over on my blog. You can read it there or get the gist in a list:

• skillshelv.es stores almost all its data in Fluidinfo's data store
• everything here is written in Python
• accordingly this site uses the extremly handy Python library for fluidinfo
• skillshelv.es runs on Google App Engine
• setting up a custom domain for Google App Engine took two days of hard work
• some functionality had to reluctantly be implemented in Javascript (I'll link to a blog post about this as soon as it's written)
• other parts of the project were implemented in Javascript using jQuery by choice
• just under 2500 O'Reilly books were manually tagged with topics by me (at an average rate of approx 250 per hour)
• the total man hour count spent making the initial release of this site approximately 96 (not counting said two days of making the domain work with Google App Engine)

Something missing? Get in touch to find out about any other technical details you are interested in.