– It’s a weeknights / weekend project and dealing with 100k+ email spikes

– Motivation for using Django, choosing “boring tech” and email validation

– It’s a monolithic app in a mono repo but broken up into ~8 Django apps

– It used to be mostly a DRF API back-end with Vue on the front-end

– Storybook is a tool for developing UI components

– Useful Python / Django libraries that were helpful for this project

– Spending an innovation token on using websockets for link checking

– rq is a powerhouse for scheduling and sending emails in the background

– Dealing with issues and errors when sending emails out at scale

– Sentry and Datadog make for a great duo of services

– Using Stripe and avoiding dark patterns around subscription pausing

– A few strategies to prevent bad actors from sending email spam

– Reasons for going with Heroku to host most things (roughly 12 dynos)

– A few Heroku add-ons and plugins that are being used

– The deployment process from development to production

– Dealing with database and front-end changes with zero down time deploys

– Performing database backups and backing up other user uploads

– Getting notified of errors if something goes wrong

– Best tips? Framing out when and where to record things (ie. events, etc.)

– Using Notion to track bugs, roadmaps and collect user feature requests

– Justin has a personal site and check out Buttondown