from __future__ import *

I don't often post about open jobs at Mochi Media on my blog, but it seems that most of the awesome people we have here found out about Mochi Media from me so I might as well ;)

Web development at Mochi Media happens primarily in Python and Pylons with Genshi templates. We're currently using mostly MochiKit for the JavaScript heavy lifting and we talk to all of our backend services (which are either Python or Erlang) via JSON. We're using a bunch of other cool technologies such as memcached, nginx, PostgreSQL, etc. We also often contribute a lot of what we do back to the open source community (e.g. MochiKit, MochiWeb, simplejson, etc.) and would love adding some more team members that were interested in helping out with our open source efforts too! We don't require experience with all of these frameworks and tools, we just need smart people that have a really solid understanding of web development in Python.

Mochi Media runs MochiAds, a monetization platform for Flash games, and MochiBot, an analytics service for Flash content... so we've got tons and tons of data to work with and very interesting scale problems to address. Our primary service, MochiAds, is a monetization platform for Flash games... so part of the responsibilities of being a Mochi employee is to approve all the latest in Flash games for paid advertisements from our network ;) There's even an internal competition to see who approves the most games each week! You can check some of them out at http://www.mochiads.com/games/

Mochi Media was founded in 2005 by Jameson Hsu and myself, and we're backed by Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. We've got a great team and are always looking to add the best people we can find. If you kick ass at Python and love building cool apps for the web, talk to us!

This position is full-time and on-site in San Francisco, CA. We're very easily accessible by BART and Caltrain in SOMA, at 2nd st. and Mission st. More evidence that Mochi Media is a cool place to work can be found on the mochimedia Flickr photostream: http://flickr.com/photos/mochimedia

More info and application instructions are here: http://www.mochimedia.com/about/careers/#webengineer

Since the svnsync tool in Subversion 1.4 still lacks documentation, here's a quick example to get you started with it:

$ svnadmin create svn.mochikit.com
$ echo '#!/bin/sh' > svn.mochikit.com/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ chmod +x svn.mochikit.com/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ svnsync init file://$PWD/svn.mochikit.com http://svn.mochikit.com/
$ svnsync sync file://$PWD/svn.mochikit.com

The example performs the following tasks:

• Creates a new local repository named svn.mochikit.com
• Adds a trivial pre-revprop-change hook to the repository (required for svnsync)
• Initializes the svn.mochikit.com repository to be a mirror of http://svn.mochikit.com/
• Synchronizes the svn.mochikit.com repository with its initialized source

Note that this is point-in-time synchronization. To keep an up to date mirror you'll have to run svnsync sync on a regular basis (e.g. by cron job or post-commit hook).

If you're looking for an especially easy to install set of svn binaries for Mac OS X, I recommend Martin Ott's (of SubEthaEdit fame) build. I've been using it on all of my Macs for quite some time with no issues. Much less hassle than building it myself or using MacPorts (previously known as DarwinPorts).

Mirroring of Subversion repositories isn't very well supported at this point. It seems that the only way to do it without filesystem access to the server is with a perl package, SVN::Mirror.

Installing SVN::Mirror was a bit troublesome. Basically you need to:

• Install Subversion >= 1.0.4
• Install the Subversion Perl bindings (make install-swig-pl)
• Install SVN::Simple from CPAN (an unlisted dependency)
• Install SVN::Mirror from CPAN (say no if it asks you about VCP)

After that, you should have a svm utility, which you can mirror your repository with. There is a documentation bug in the current version where it says that that init takes a skip_to argument. It does not. sync does, however.

In order to get the mirror going, you need to do something like this

$ setenv SVMREPOS ~/svm
$ svm init mirror/bob http://svn.red-bean.com/bob
$ svm sync mirror/bob 2

The 2 is important, because it's the skip_to argument that allows your mirror's revisions to match your repository. Don't ask. In an earlier version of svm, this number used to be 3.

To check it out, you do:

$ svn co file://$SVMREPOS/mirror/bob bob

And to update the mirror:

$ svm sync mirror/bob

Trac is a "minimal" Subversion Frontend/Wiki/Issue Tracker/Task Manager/etc. written in Python that revolves around a Subversion repository and a SQLite database. I've taken a quick glance (at the website and source code), and here are my thoughts:

Pros:

• Verison Control!
• Far, far, far less ugly than almost all of the others
• It's not sitting on top of some monster like Zope/Plone/etc.

Cons:

• The source code mixes tabs and spaces (what the hell are they thinking)?
• Lots of inline SQL code, no abstraction on top of SQLite.
• It is based on CGIs, with no fcgi/asyncore/Twisted/etc integration that I can see, so it's not likely to scale and may have database locking issues (either corruption, or not scaling because the database is locked per-process).
• The Wiki engine is based on MoinMoin syntax not reStructuredText, and it has no hooks to docutils.
• When they say minimal, they were probably comparing themselves with Plone. It certainly doesn't sound minimal from the description!

That said, I think something like this is sorely needed, but it doesn't sound appealing enough just yet to compell me to dump roundup, MoinMoin, viewsvn, etc.