The Lads Weekender competition is over, with the lucky winners being flown off for their epic weekends. Look out for other games and competitions from Ladbrokes and Mohawk hitting Facebook over the next few months!

django-watson 1.1.2 has just landed! Key features include Python 3.3 compatibility and a more memory-efficient buildwatson command.

Surveys can now be configured to send an automated email on completion, supporting the full range of Django template system for per-user customisation.

Additional security settings for per-origin access control and the specification of access token expiry have also been added.

A new bulk mailing system has been added, allowing email newsletters to be created, scheduled, and dispatched to high-volume mailing lists. The system is designed to handle millions of emails per month, at a rate of 100K emails per hour.

The system makes heavy use of RabbitMQ and Celery to parallelize sends amongst a large number of background workers, and is horizontally scalable should future volumes increase.

Other key technologies contributing to the send performance include PostgreSQL full text indexing and Amazon Elasticache.