bakery — Where cookies are made!

It has been some time since my last blog post. So here’s an update. This is about a great event I participated in last weekend, the djangodash 2013.

The djangodash is a coding contest where teams have 48 hours time to start and sprint a project. As this dash is called djangodash, the Django must be used. Furthermore the teams are limited to at most 3 members and a couple of other rules.

So, what project were my friend and I working on? It’s called bakery. You can find it on github as well as a live version at djangodash2013.webshox.org. But what does bakery actually do and what is it? In simplified terms bakery is an index for cookiecutter templates. In longer terms, bakery offers an API to create, find, modify, update and share cookiecutter templates at a central point to clear up the mess with manually updated readme files providing an incomplete list of templates. Additionally bakery offers some neat features such as forking a template to your own github account or voting a template up. We are working on many more planned features, e.g. automatically updating the index, directly editing the cookiecutter.json file on the index.

So, what are these cookiecutter templates and what is cookiecutter? cookiecutter itself is a tool that, given a project template, bootstraps a project with its directory structure and files (including their content) based on a set of context variables. To see what these templates (aka cookiecutters) look like, just have a look at the list of available cookiecutters.