– It started part time but now it’s full time

– Motivation for using Python and Django mainly came down to confidence

– It’s pretty close to a monolith with a few Django apps

– Reasons for using a custom video player (looping, mirroring, etc.)

– Videos are uploaded directly to S3 with pre-signed URLs and no transcoding (yet)

– Using the Django RQ library for doing asynchronous work

– Having fun using React to write the custom video player

– Creating a first pass chat feature so students can ask questions

– Using Vagrant in development, with Ansible on a single $5 / mo DigitalOcean server

– For a web server they’re using gunicorn, nginx and Let’s Encrypt for SSL

– Using Stripe to handle payments has been a nice dev experience so far

– Using Mailgun for transactional emails and Mailchimp for email campaigns

– Mixing in jQuery as needed has been a pleasure to use, along with Webpack

– The deployment process from development to production

– S3 is trusted for video backups and database backups are done on every deploy

– Best tips? Keep learning but pick things you’re familiar with

– Check out their platform at https://goskillwell.com/ and they are on Instagram too