Hello

I'm David Winterbottom, a programming polyglot living in London.

I work at Tangent Labs, a digital agency, writing applications in python, django and friends.

I spend most of my free time hacking. I run commandlinefu.com and am the author of the e-commerce framework django-oscar amongst other things.

I used to be a mathematician; I have a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham and an associated interest in cryptic crosswords, chess and playing devil's advocate.

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Writing

Thursday, 2 February 2012
Solving MySQL connection problems caused by a dead name server

MySQL's DNS lookups can cause serious problems

Monday, 23 January 2012
Friday, 13 January 2012
Introducing unittest-xml: testing XML in Python

A simple module for making XPath assertions

Friday, 6 January 2012
Rewriting codeinthehole.com

Yet another RST blog

Thursday, 5 January 2012
How to set-up MySQL for Python on Ubuntu

This doesn't stick in my head

All writing »

Thinking

1 day, 14 hours ago
Coffee-shops should have whiteboards.
2 days, 15 hours ago
Going to start using pyhamcrest - looks good: https://t.co/fFvzeU9E
3 days, 3 hours ago
Important resource for non-technical agency people: http://t.co/VVDThM8V
4 days, 4 hours ago
Thanks to some awesome work from @tangentone in Melbourne, django-oscar now has a cool homepage.
4 days, 12 hours ago
Nano-milestone: django-oscar now has more than 100 watchers.
1 week ago
Oh dear - it seems tesco.co.uk stores your password in plain text
1 week ago
High-quality mix-tapes from Blundetto: http://t.co/pHkIxbNn
1 week, 1 day ago
Interesting - ham against poshness is a normal distribution: http://t.co/ZiBTmf37
1 week, 1 day ago
I wish you could namespace Django's management commands
1 week, 2 days ago
@codeinthehole »

Selected projects

A few spare-time projects I've worked on:

  • commandlinefu.com - a mildly popular repository site for sharing linux one-liners. Grown men have been known to weep with joy when they discover sudo !!
  • django-oscar - an e-commerce framework built for Django. This was written to solve for the day job.
  • django-oscar-datacash - a django app for integrating with the DataCash payment gateway.
  • unittest-xml - a set of additional assertions for unit-testing XML documents with python's unittest library.
  • django-rickroll - a comedy django app for rickrolling hacking attempts - useful for when your applications get pen-tested.
  • nurl - a simple URL library for node.js