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Pursue Your Wife

I’m excited to release my first Django-powered website: Pursue Your Wife . The idea is pretty simple: semi-weekly reminders to do something special for your wife. It began one night in a church small group when a handful of husbands all confessed that pursuing our spouses while dating was much easier than while married. The site aggregates ideas for “pursuits” and keeps a history of what you’ve done.

While I’ve enjoyed learning Django, I must admit it’s pretty complex. And it let’s you do such powerful things that it’s easy to dream of far too many features. My original concept of the site was Stackoverflow-ish with voting and editing and the like. But those features are tricky and I’m just one person! Finally, I had to do one of the most painful things as a developer: I deleted code. Lot’s of it. I just needed to get something out the door.

I welcome feedback. But be gentle! I’m too sheepish to share the code right now but eventually I will.

The technology stack is mostly Django but a few supporting packages make it work: psycopg2 and uwsgi .

I’m a bit sad to say that the site is mostly a glorified email system. A cleverly designed Google calendar reminder would’ve gotten me 90% of the way there. I’m learning to be lean but I have a long way to go. Hopefully the repository of “pursuits” will one day make the site really valuable. The weekly reminders are a clever way to continue engagement. And eventually monetizing the site with offers and advertising is probably possible. I have so many ideas but so much to learn.

Python is a wonderful language to program. It’s really amazing how much more efficient I am in it than in C++ or even C#. Though I like the compilation and JIT nature of C#, the syntax of Python is better. I was resistant the idea of white-space enforcement initially but it really helps code from different authors look similar. Diving into Django source was really pretty painless. There’s some features I don’t understand yet but there’s no macro-obfuscation.