Leveraging Holistic Synergies

Hi, I'm Ben Lopatin, you may remember me from such software newsletters as "Reducing the Bus Factor with Code", "Django Isn't Good Enough", and "When Bourbon and Production Deployment Shouldn't Mix".

As of 2021 I lead technology and product as the CTO at Muster. Previously I was a long time freelance developer and independent consultant as co-founder at Wellfire Interactive. Over more than a decade I designed, developed, and improved a variety of applications with a focus on B2B SaaS apps.

Much of my writing can be found below, as well as slides and a few videos of talks I've given in the past.

I've also authored and/or maintain several published software packages, including Django Organizations, a library for managing multi-user account architectures in Django projects.

Elsewhere on the Internet I often go by bennylope complete with vintage Photoshopped bearded 7th grade portrait.

As per the latest in thought leadership, we must refocus on identifying holistic synergies and productizing them for untapped markets. Specifically, synergies which can be strategically leveraged to cross-pollinate innovation across organizational silos. Each silo must own its vertical to allow for unfettered horizontal growth and for the development of streamlined efficiencies by bubbling up organically.

The Zen of Business Jargon

Articles, Newsletters, and Notes

'How' trumps 'hope'

Hope helped both a presidential campaign and a fictional galactic rebellion succeed, with varying degrees of credit. We refer quite…

Restoring Postgres backups for Django projects

Using a copy of or a partial copy of a deployed database (e.g. production or staging, one that is somehow exposed to other people) is a…

Books I Want to See

I’ve made up the titles. While these are books I would find interesting, it’s more the case that I’ve found this to be an excellent exercise…

Read the rest of my articles and posts

Projects

Django Organizations

A Django app for adding multi-user group management.

elasticstack

Django helpers for working with ElasticSearch and Haystack

pygeocodio

Python wrapper for the Geocod.io geocoding and bulk geocoding API

RVA Data

Slow attempt at getting Richmond, VA's city data accessible.

Django Addendum

A Django app for creating editable microcopy anywhere in your site.

Screenshooter

An automation tool for generating cross-browser screenshots (e.g. in a CI build).

pydiscourse

A Python library for the Discourse API; maintained and packaged fork.

SmartyStreets.py

A Python wrapper for the SmartyStreets geocoding and address validation API.

Django Quagga

A maintained fork of the now deprecated Django Zebra with support for newer Django versions.

Talks

This Old Pony: Working with Legacy Django Apps

There are a lot of examples out there for how to start a *new* Django project, but how do you start working on an *old* Django project? This talk from DjangoCon 2016 in Philadelphia provides some answers for how to get started.

Crafting Better API Clients

This was a talk first from PyTennesee in 2015 and reprised at APICraft RVA a few months later.

Finding the Needle: Search and Django

From DjangoCon 2013 in Chicago, this is an intermediate-level talk on how to integrate search functionality into a Django project, with some ElasticSearch biases.