Chances are he used django for it. He has blog posts on his new found love for django and his ratings code is in python. According to the Lamson (his project) FAQ, Lamson was influenced by django's features and structure.
What problem is this specifically solving that dozens of other scheduling/task/GTD/Calendar systems haven't solved?. Even the most basic phone now has some kind of alerting feature on it.
Better question, what is the likelihood that a hospital near most residents are busy enough at 2am where wait times are extremely excessive that you need to use a service like this to "schedule" your visit? I would imagine that the likelihood decreases considerably during the "middle of the night" especially when taking into consideration that there are probably more hospitals that are not level 1 trauma centers and/or county run facilities and are often the busiest between 11am and 11pm.
I'm not sure how being a parent provides qualification in assessing the practicality of this startup, but if it does, then I would like to weigh in on this issue as I am a parent of 2. These clinics are typically staffed at least by a nurse practitioner, who can treat and prescribe medications (depending on the state) for almost any reasonable non-urgent condition, including antibiotics. If you live in a state where the nurse practitioner can not prescribe medications, there is usually a physician on staff that works along side the NP to assist in those situations.
These clinics sell themselves as being non-urgent care facilities that are able to treat conditions that otherwise would have required a physician or Emergency room visit. If they could not prescribe medications and treat most of these conditions, I am unsure how successful they would really be.
I would wait until you meet two requirements: 1. Have income where spending $400 isn't a big deal and 2. have projects that take up so much of your time where you need a chair to ease the burden of sitting that long
Just getting out of college doesn't fulfill those 2 requirements. Wait until the amount of work you do demands that you get a chair that costs that much. It seems you would have a lot bigger things to worry about and focus your time on than evaluating chairs.
"However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process."
The public always has the ability to "grow up" as you put it but they do not want to. People are not motivated to take action if there isn't an immediate risk to their own personal well being. Risk has been taken out of many things that we do so now we can make ignorant choices without immediate consequences.
We keep falling off the bike, but instead of scraping our knee and learning not to fall, we have a security net there to save us over and over again.
I don't blame the government for treating us like 5 year olds when that is how a majority of people act.
You are focussing too much on the language and scalability rather than focusing on just building something.
Every major language/framework out there has been used and scaled for large websites. Pick one that you would like to learn, provides you with the flexibility you are looking for, and run with it.
Worrying about how you will scale an app that you have not built yet will be a major drawback. Also keep in mind performance and scalability as you're building the site, but do not spend much time worrying about it before hand. Just take an idea and run with it, tweak the app to scale as you go.
I would assume you would set up a subscription based service where the first month is free and every month after that is a certain fee. This would all be setup with the payment gateway of choice, such as Authorize.net. You would set it up in a manner that would allow the customer to have the first month free, and then Authorize.net would charge their credit card every month for whatever fee you set up. Authorize.net would be responsible for making sure the credit card is valid and processing the payment.