Following up on the The Onion's announcement that they're using Django comes this priceless discussion of the technical challenges of doing so with several members of The Onion's technical team. They were using Drupal before.

Among the things I discovered:

  * [Grappelli](http://code.google.com/p/django-grappelli/), a customizable theme for the Django admin
  * [uWSGI](http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/), a high-performance WSGI container separated from Apache,
  * [HaProxy](http://haproxy.1wt.eu/), a viable open-source TCP/IP Load Balancer.

I'm constantly reminded, when I work on IndieFlix, "You're not YouTube. Don't code like you are ever going to be YouTube." And they're right. If I ever reach that level of technical difficulty, I'll deal with it then. But we very well could have traffic issues similar to The Onion's, and that's not a bad target to aim for.

Also not to be missed in this conversation: The Onion cut 66% of their bandwidth by upstream caching 404s