A Platform to Buy Gift Cards for Eco-Friendly Products

In this episode of Running in Production, Antonin Grêlé talks about using Django to build a gift card purchasing site for eco-friendly products. It’s hosted on PythonAnywhere and has been up and running since fall 2019.

Antonin developed it himself in a few months and covers tying together services using Zapier, what it’s like to manage gift card logic, the value in getting something up quickly and more.

Topics Include

• 2:10 – Launching an MVP after a few months of dev time as a solo developer
• 5:10 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 7:39 – Batteries (mostly) included, using the Django Admin and Django REST Framework
• 10:51 – Using Stripe to build a single checkout page to buy gift cards
• 15:57 – It’s a monolithic app but it uses services like Airtable and Zapier
• 23:58 – Managing gift card funds and logic is the core of the business
• 30:34 – Tech stack includes SQLite and using PythonAnywhere for a host
• 39:50 – Cloudflare is mainly used for serving static files
• 42:59 – The process from development to production and secret management
• 49:10 – Performing hourly DB backups and using UptimeRobot for downtime notifications
• 54:19 – The new SCA compliant Stripe APIs are being used
• 58:33 – Best tips? Get your product out ASAP and be mindful of what happens if you leave
• 1:01:05 – Check out https://www.ethikdo.co and Antonin is also on Twitter

Links ⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• airtable →
• bootstrap →
• cloudflare →
• discord →
• mailchimp →
• mailjet →
• python-anywhere →
• sqlite →
• stripe →
• uptime-robot →
• vue →