Erik Rose

Elasticsearch provides an easy path to clusterable full-text search, with synonyms, faceting, and geographic math, but there's a paucity of written wisdom beyond its API docs. This talk, part 1 of a 2-part series, surveys its capabilities and shows how its internal data structures and algorithms work. With the groundwork laid, we explore how to choose efficient indexing and the right queries to make your apps go fast.

Django's testrunner gets you started quickly, but you soon hit your head on its limitations as your project grows. By trading it for nose, a testing framework popular in the wider Python community, we can reduce boilerplate, boost performance, and improve testing UI, with only a few lines of setting changes. Re-use your test DBs, integrate with Jenkins, split your suite into pieces, and more.

If you've ever wanted to get started with parsers, here's your chance for a ground-floor introduction. A harebrained spare-time project gives birth to a whirlwind journey from basic algorithms to Python libraries and, at last, to a parser for one of the craziest syntaxes out there: the MediaWiki grammar that drives Wikipedia.

Mozilla's projects have thousands of tests, so we've had to venture beyond vanilla test runners to keep things manageable. Our secret sauce can be used with your project as well. Reach beyond the test facilities that came with your project, harnessing pluggable test frameworks, dynamically reordering tests for speed, exploring various mocking libraries, and profiling your way to testing nirvana.