[Warning: The following blog post is for nerds only. Here is the short version.]In honor of this occasion (or at least we thought it was a convenient segue), we just pushed out a new version of reddit to our git repository. Our codebase has been a bit of a moving target for the last few months, so rather than inundate our dev list with every little tweak (or screw up) we've made in that time, we've opted to switch to a "major release" system where we deploy changes in bulk. We also want to return to greater transparency in our code repository.
You might remember from jedberg's IAMA and post that we recently moved to amazon's EC2 to improve our ability to scale. But, to take full advantage of EC2's flexibility and to accommodate our rampant traffic growth of late, some overhauls were necessary. The most prominent change is that we've replaced our postgres-centric query queue with one that is centered around AMQP (specifically RabbitMQ), for much cleaner handling of asynchronous tasks.
Also in this release is the code for handling and handing out awards, for setting default subscriptions, for the "best" comment sort, and a simple library for generating CSS sprites.
Besides dealing with maintaining (and hopefully improving) the site, we've also added self-serve sponsored links to help (ahem) defer the cost of all of those shiny new computers in the cloud. These additions, including a python library for interacting with authorize.net and our bidding/auction code, are included in this release.
tldr: Congrats to the python community! We've been spending all of our time scaling, making the site faster, and adding some ways to make money to pay for the first two.
