Djangy

» see djangy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Heroku had shown that you could make deployment disappear. You committed your code and pushed to a remote, and the application came up somewhere with a URL on it. It worked for Ruby, and in 2010 a reasonable number of people looked at that and thought the same thing about Python. Djangy was Dave Paola and Sameer Sundresh's version, founded in August 2010 and introduced to Hacker News that November.

The homepage was direct about the pain it was selling against. Instant deployment and scaling for your Django applications, it said at the top, and underneath, never configure apache. Pricing was five cents an hour for every running instance past the first, so your first one was free and you paid at the end of the month for whatever you had actually used. There was a Django Pony Powered badge in the footer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ never configure apache ~

In 2011 nothing around me got deployed this way. You rented a VPS or took shared hosting from a Turkish provider. Then you configured Apache, because configuring Apache was the job. Paying an American startup by the instance-hour to avoid it assumed a dollar-denominated budget and a tolerance for your production environment living inside somebody's private beta.

That second condition applied to everyone, wherever they lived. On 7 February 2011, three weeks before the end, the front page of djangy.com offered a box for your email address so they could send you an invitation soon. The product had been public for two and a half months and was still gating access.

~ the final newsletter ~

On 27 February 2011 they published a post titled the final Djangy newsletter. Dave Paola submitted it to Hacker News himself just after midnight UTC on the 28th, and it finished at 148 points.

The reasons that came out in the thread were unglamorous and sounded true. They did not have enough money to keep paying themselves. The space was crowded with people building a Heroku for Django, and the work ahead looked like years of it. Somebody in the comments pushed back and asked what actually went wrong, since the post read as though they were walking away from a real opportunity rather than a failing one, and the honest answer seemed to be that this was exactly what had happened. Another commenter was warmer about it, saying it was respectable to know what you wanted and make the hard call.

The sentence that stays with me is from a user who said he had been signed up for an invite for what seemed like years, and never got one, and was sorry about it because he had been looking forward to the thing for a long time. Djangy died with its waiting list intact.

~ the invite that never came ~

The platform went up on GitHub under Dave Paola's own account on 8 April 2011, six weeks after the final newsletter, and the final commit went in on 2 December that year. It is still readable, still unarchived, sitting at 123 stars and untouched since. The domain went soon after, and djangy.com today is a HugeDomains sales page. What stands out about this one is how ordinary it is. Two competent engineers built a real product and then counted the twenty other people building it, and they said so out loud after seven months rather than raising a round and grinding for four more years.

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