Deployment frustrations!

This week we got started with Pylot, a MVC framework built on Flask. It's pretty lightweight, and basically takes the Flask framework and splits it into the traditional model-view-controller architecture. Essentially all we do is split our Pylot files and link it back together, or compartmentalize our application for scalability/organization. At the end of the week, we started with deploying to Amazon EC2, which brought about its own raft of problems. The most common problem I've experienced thus far is the 502 Bad Gateway thrown by nginx. It's frustrating to follow all the instructions to a T and still get an error. I troubleshooted and was able to deploy by Friday night, but after attempting it again today (Saturday), I got the same error. I'm taking this as a good stopping point (for now) and will try again later. However, this is all a learning experience and repeating the steps multiple times only helps reinforce my understanding of exactly what I'm doing, instead of blindly following a tutorial.

I somewhat doubt the usefulness of the Pylot MVC framework, especially considering that it's made in-house (Coding Dojo developed) and Django is the most popular Python web framework, although there's no denying its ease of use and value for teaching the MVC model. For now, I'll take what I can get, since I haven't mastered Pylot completely yet either.

Monday will be our cohort's Python black belt exam. If I'm to earn a black belt, I need to have mastered deployment and Pylot. Earlier in the week I had planned on getting Pylot and deployment done by Friday, but I've fallen behind schedule and plan to spend the rest of the weekend getting ready for the black belt. I've tempered my expectations from receiving a black belt to at least a red belt (8/10 to 9/10 points on the test, black belt is 9/10+), but we can try as many times as there are tests (so 6 or 7?). The black belt requires a successful deployment. Given everyone else's frustrations, I'm glad I'm not alone, and also glad to finally have encountered a problem that took more than a few hours to solve.