the making of
the carbon account
tom dyson

History:
About Torchbox
Al Gore
Carbon Trading

Demonstration...

The Team

Natalie Downe

Simon Willison

Jamie Andrews

Olly Willans

Nick Burch

Helen Warren

Sally Edgington

Nick Lee

Andrew Godwin

System Design:
Fuel types
Emissions
Predictions
Suppliers
Houses

Interface Design

Choices

Back-end:
Django
PostgreSQL
SQLAlchemy

Django:
ORM
URL routing
Template language
Admin interface
Testing

Django v Rails v
PHP v Java

PostgreSQL v MySQL

Django ORM v
SQLAlchemy

“SQL databases behave less and
less like object collections the
more size and performance start
to matter; object collections
behave less and less like tables
and rows the more abstraction
starts to matter. SQLAlchemy
aims to accommodate both of
these principles.”

Flash v Graphication

v

OpenID

System Design

MonsterID

Development
Environment:
Any platform
Virtual machines
Subversion

Development
Environment:
Any platform
Virtual machines
Subversion

Agile-ish

Managing the project:
Meetings
Timekeeping
Trac

System Design

System Design

System Design

System Design

System Design

System Design

System Design

Deployment:
Apache 2.2
mod_python
PostgreSQL 8
Static content

Sysadmin:
Low-power box
Munin
Nagios
Releases via svn

Mistakes #1:
Rationing is too radical
Not a client
Trademark
No Screencast

Mistakes #2:
SQLAlchemy?
Preditions?
Multiple house support
Lightbox

The Future:
Scaling
Smart meters
Carbon cards
Facebook etc.

the making of
the carbon account
tom dyson