About

My name is Dougal Matthews, this is my website. However, if you didn't get that by now your probably a robot. When I'm not coding I like to get out and about and particularly keen on travelling. I recently returned from travelling in South America. You can see the route I travelled here.

Conferences are awesome

I like to attend as many conferences as I can. Not only do they help you hone your skills but you also get to network and meet like minded people and discuss epic ideas. So far I've been going to EuroDjangoCon, EuroPython, CloudCamp Scotland, School for Startups and I hope to go to PyCon and DjangoCon in 2010 or 2011.

How I work

I believe in using the best tools for the job. For my web and serverside development I like to write in Python and use the Django web framework and all of its pony magic. When coding I like to manage my code with Git (and Github for many of my projects). On most of my machines I am currently running Ubuntu desktop or server editions. I currently have four machines set-up in my local network between them having 14 CPU cores and 12.5 GB of ram.

When I'm coding Python if its not in a virtualenv or being setup by pip something is wrong. I do most of my development with pyDev due to its powerful debugging features.

I really enjoy Ajax development and think JavaScript is generally a great language but made much better with the addition of jQuery.

I generally use Apache2 for my web server but I'm known to use lighty on occasions.

My database is either mySQL or postgresql if my data is relational, I enjoy both but have slightly more experience with mySQL. For a documented oriented database I use chouchdb or more recently I've been checking out redis.

My Presence

I guess you could say I get around. You can find me on; Twitter, GitHub, BitBucket, Facebook, DjangoPeople, LinkedIn