A super informal talk about the history of Read the Docs.

1. Thought Stuff.
In the cloud!
Eric Holscher
http://ericholscher.com
PDX Python
Feb. 8 2011

2. What this talk is
» Talk about the history of Read the
Docs
» Technology Involved
» Interesting outcomes of openness

3. Why I’m here
» Feedback
» Ideas
» Hopefully you’ll learn something too!
» Shameless self-promotion

5. The story

6. 2010 Django Dash

7. Charles Leifer
Bobby Grace (Design)
Me

8. Doc Hosting Sucks
» packages.python.org
» Github Pages
» Your own janky shit with cronjobs

10. Had a workable site in 48
hours

11. Fully Open Source

12. Fully Open Source
» github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org
» github.com/ericholscher/chef-
django-example
» ericholscher.com/tag/chef-series/

14. What makes it tick

15. Features

16. Git, Hg, Bzr, Svn

17. Post commit hooks

18. Custom Themes

19. Full-text search

20. Tags & Branches

21. PDF Generation

22. Tech

23. Subdomains

24. CNAME Support

25. Haystack/Solr

26. Varnish

27. Chef

28. Multiple Servers

29. Nagios & Munin

30. Nginx/Gunicorn

31. Upstart

32. Lessons

33. Think about your URLs.
Really hard.

34. Lay your project out sanely

35. Write tests!

36. Promote

37. Find a designer!

38. Open Source Outcomes

39. Patches

40. Arbitrary Code Execution

41. Known architecture
information

42. Trust

43. People Writing Docs

44. DEMO

45. Questions?
» readthedocs.org / rtfd.org
» eric@ericholscher.com
» twitter.com/ericholscher