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by chrisjones 4891 days ago
"3. Make it work for Windows, OSX, and Linux if you can."

This is the reason the VM was introduced. So that no matter what OS the user is running, they can follow along without having to go search for ways to get all this setup and running. The setup is very minimal thanks to Chef and Vagrant.

Kenneth is trying to teach best practices and tools to use. He also explained in the beginning of the video that you should be comfortable with a terminal and text editor that you like. This shouldn't be your first time looking at a terminal.

Heroku is a simple way to get your project out to the public and it's free. Nothing inspired me more as a developer than having others look at my work. I think it adds a little bit of excitement to be able to show your work to others almost immediately. Even if it's something small, it's still something to "show off" and feel good about.
1 comments
hayksaakian 4891 days ago
I feel like that reasoning should be outlined in the tutorial. As a newbie, it seems like a pain to get django running if I have to set up a VM just to do it, and the author provides little explanation.

Coming from rails, its weird to me that he seems to emphasize their 'gem install' equivalent over their bundler equivalent.

Otherwise, a great tutorial.

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tonyarkles 4891 days ago
That's because there isn't really a good "bundler equivalent" that I know of. That was one of the more frustrating parts of Python work for me. Virtualenv is kind of a hybrid between gem and bundler, and it works, but it's nowhere near as elegant.
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huxley 4890 days ago
The jobs are divided a bit differently but the combo of gem/rvm/bundler is matched quite nicely by pip and virtualenv (with virtualenvwrapper adding some nice conveniences)

This article covers some of the equivalent jobs using Ruby and Python:

http://gillesfabio.com/blog/2011/03/01/rvm-for-pythonistas-v...

The article misses covering the freeze command in pip which is great for generating requirements.txt files:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Covered in detail here: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/requirements.html

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hayksaakian 4889 days ago
Requirements.txt is the gemlock equivalent then?
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huxley 4889 days ago
Gemlock sounds more like Yolk:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/yolk/0.4.3

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