Interview with Daniel Lindsley, creator of Haystack & Tastypie - Appsembler
A screenshot of the Tastypie site

Interview with Daniel Lindsley, Creator of Haystack and Tastypie

Sometimes you create the best software when you are frustrated with the status quo and have an itch to scratch. Daniel Lindsley’s  Haystack and Tastypie are classic examples of scratching your own itch. He had a problem to solve and none of the existing solutions were good enough, so he built his own, and in doing so, came up with a solution that solves other people’s problems too.

Those of you who have been attending the Django Boston meetup events may remember that we had Daniel come and speak at the Django Boston meetup in February 2012. I was unable to attend that meetup, but at the DjangoCon 2012 sprint in September, I got the chance to sit down with him, and talk with him about how he came to build Haystack and Tastypie, two of the most popular add-ons for Django. Check out Haystack and Tastypie on crate.io to see their activity.

Here is the full-length video from that interview:

https://youtu.be/IsMV4ZegGBc

In this interview, we talk about:

  • How Daniel got started building Haystack and Tastypie – what was the impetus?
  • What is the best use of Haystack?  (NASA uses it for a couple of their sites)
  • How are people using Tastypie? (lots of mobile, crate.io has one consistent API that serves both public as well as site itself)
  • What are the challenges of maintaining an open source project?  (Expectations for commercial grade support, availability, etc.)
  • What do you like about the Django sprints? (Camaraderie and dedicated time to fix things. Getting in person time with people you don’t usually get to work with)
My favorite quote from the interview:
“I produce open source software (OSS) because my life has been possible because of OSS. These tools affect my every day life. I’ve gotten so much from open source, it feels like the only right thing to do is give back to OSS.”
-Daniel Lindsley

Want more?

Also check out Daniel’s excellent talk from DjangoCon 2012 on API Design Tips and watch the video recording of his talk on Youtube.
He also gave a recent talk Avoiding the Search Hall of Shame (video) at PyCon Canada 2012. See more of his slides on Speakerdeck, and watch more of his talks on PyVideo or Lanyrd.
If you like Daniel’s work, consider funding Daniel on Gittip to make it possible for him to continue maintaining Haystack and Tastypie and developing more amazing open source software.