Django community: Community blog posts RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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The Best Animation and Prototyping Tools for Designers in 2019
Prototyping is a great way to showcase your product before embarking on a long development process. It gives you the opportunity to make changes prior to development. It also saves you significant time and money. The post The Best Animation and Prototyping Tools for Designers in 2019 appeared first on Distillery. -
Creating Evscaperoom, part 1
Over the last month (April-May 2019) I have taken part in the Mud Coder's Guild Game Jam "Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon". This year the theme for the jam was One Room.The result was Evscaperoom, an text-based multi-player "escape-room" written in Python using the Evennia MU* creation system. You can play it from that link in your browser or MU*-client of choice. If you are so inclined, you can also vote for it here in the jam (don't forget to check out the other entries while you're at it).This little series of (likely two) dev-blog entries will try to recount the planning and technical aspects of the Evscaperoom. This is also for myself - I'd better write stuff down now while it's still fresh in my mind!Inception When I first heard about the upcoming game-jam's theme of One Room, an 'escape room' was the first thing that came to mind, not the least because I just recently got to solve my my own first real-world escape-room as a gift on my birthday. If you are not familiar with escape-rooms, the premise is simple - you are locked into a room and have to figure out a way to get out of it by solving practical ... -
New features planned for Python 4.0
With the release of Python 3.8 coming soon, the core development team has asked me to summarize our latest discussions on the new features planned for Python 4.0, codename "ouroboros: the snake will eat itself". This will be an exciting release and a significant milestone, many thanks to the hard work of over 100 contributors. After heated debate on the mailing list, the 79-character line limit prescribed by PEP8 will be updated. IDE users all over the world will now be able to take advantage of their 30" ultra-wide 4K monitors, as the recommended line length will be increased to 89.5 characters (this was a compromise with the 100-character lobby, the decision being to split the difference). All new libraries and standard lib modules must include the phrase "for humans" somewhere in their title, and have a splashy documentation page with lots of fonts typography and testimonials. Finally, a new string-type for the masses, Python 4.0 will feature "z-strings": C-style NULL terminated bytestrings. Just prefix your string with z'my string' and Python will automatically ensure it is NULL-terminated. Note: the new z-strings cannot be used with any of the existing APIs that take string arguments - they must first be ... -
<p>django-debug-toolbar 2.0a1 is now <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://pypi.org/project/django-debug-toolbar/2.0a1/">available on PyPI</a>. Please help with testing or with success stori
django-debug-toolbar 2.0a1 is now available on PyPI. Please help with testing or with success stories or with bug reporting & squashing. -
The Price of the Hallway Track
There are many good reasons to not go to every talk possible when attending conferences. However increasingly it became hip to boast with not going to talks at all – encouraging others to follow suit. As a speaker, that rubs me the wrong way and I’ll try to explain why. -
5 Ways Software Outsourcing Helps FinTech Startups Compete and Win
As many FinTech startups have already learned, the right development partner is a massive competitive advantage. Don’t get left behind. Instead, let outsourcing help you accelerate. The post 5 Ways Software Outsourcing Helps FinTech Startups Compete and Win appeared first on Distillery. -
Django + Tailwind CSS = ❤️
If you use Tailwind CSS and want to integrate it easily with Django, check out a package I created about a month ago. Surprisingly it's called Django-Tailwind. You can find it here on GitHub: https://github.com/timonweb/django-tailwind. If you don't know what Tailwind CSS is, then ... Read now -
Django Search Tutorial
Add basic search functionality to any Django website. -
PyGrunn: testing your infrastructure code - Ruben Homs
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). Servers used to be managed by proper wizards. But even wizards can be killed by a balrog. So... what happens when your sysadmin leaves? The point of failure is the sysadmin. Knowledge about infrastructure is centralised. It is non-reproducible. A solution is configuration management. Chef, ansible, saltstack, puppet. Configuration that's in source control instead of information in a sysadmin's head. It is a reproducible way to build your infrastructure. Source code, so everyone can see how a system works. You can even version your infrastructure. He'll use saltstack as an example, that's what they're using in his company. It is a master/minion system. So a central master pushes out commands to the minion systems. For testing, he uses a tool called "kitchen", originally intended for puppet, which can however also be used with saltstack: https://kitchen.saltstack.com/ . He showed a demo where he created a couple of virtualbox machines and automatically ran the salt scripts on them. You can then ssh to those boxes and check if they're OK. But... that's manual work. So he started using testinfra and pytest. Testinfra helps you test infrastructure. There are build-in tests ... -
PyGrunn: a day has only 24 ± 1 hours - Miroslav Šedivý
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). Time zones... If you do datatime.datetime.now() you'll get a date+time without timezone information. You can get different results on your laptop (set to local time) and a server (that might be set to UTC). You can use datetime.datetime.utcnow() that returns UTC time. But... without a timezone attached. Best is to request the time in a specific timezone. There are gotchas regarding time. Check your time only once in a calculation. If you call .utcnow() multiple times, you can get different dates when your code runs around 0:00. Same with time.time(): if the "ntp" daemon adjusts your system clock in the mean time you get weird results. For that, there is time.monotonic(). The original source for all time zone information is the time zone database (tzdata). You can download it and look at all the files per timezone. Interesting reading! Look at Istanbul's timezone. Daylight savings time being delayed by a day in a specific year because of a nationwide school exam. It was anounced a few weeks before. That's all in the time zone database. So if you make a Docker now and still use it in two ... -
PyGrunn: data processing and visualisation of tractor data - Erik-Jan Blanksma
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). He works for Dacom, a firm that writes software to help farmers be more effective. Precision farming is a bit of a buzzword nowadays. You can get public elevation data, you can let someone fly over your fields to take measurements or a cart can do automatic ground samples. This way you can make a "prescription map" where to apply more fertilizer and where less will do. Another source of data is the equipment the farmer uses to drive over his field. As an example, the presentation looks at a potato harvester. Which route did the harvester take through the field? What was the yield (in potatoes per hectare) in all the various spots? Some tools and libraries that they use: Numpy: very efficient numerical processing. Arrays. Pandas: dataseries. Matplotlib: graph plotting library. Postgis: geographical extension to the postgres databases. Pandas is handy for reading in data, from csv for instance. It integrates nicely with matplotlib. With a one-liner you can let it create a histogram from the data. With the .describe() function, you get basic statistics about your data. Another example: a map (actually a graph, but ... -
Django Pony GIF's
I discovered GIFCities recently. It’s a project by the Internet Archive for browsing GIF’s extracted from their Geocities archive. I spent a bit of time searching it for pegasus gifs, to represent the unofficial Django mascot, the Django Pony. Here are the best I found! Running django-admin.py startproject Mentoring a New Django Developer Code Review Code Review Complete Your Pet Project When You Have One View Deploy Goes Perfectly Deploy Goes Bad and Roll Back Maximum Requests Per Second Serving a Slow Admin Page How You Describe Your Project How Your Project Actually Works Fin Enjoy the GIFt, —Adam -
PyGrunn: python as a scientist's playground - Peter Kroon
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). He's a scientist. Quite often, he searches for python packages. If you're writing python packages, you can learn how someone might search for your package. If you don't write python packages, you can learn how to investigate. Scientists try to solve unsolved problems. When doing it with computers, you basically do three things. Perform simulations. Set up simulations. Analyze results. Newton said something about "standing on the shoulders of giants". So basically he predicted the python package index! So much libraries to build upon! A problem is that there is so much software. There are multiple libraries that can handle graphs (directed graphs, not diagrams). He's going to use that as an example. Rule one: PR is important. If you don't know a package exists, it won't come on the list. Google, github discovery, stackoverflow, scientific liberature, friends, pygrunn talks, etc. A README is critical. Without a good readme: forget it. The five he found: graph-tool, networkx, igraph, python-graph scipy.sparse.csgraph. Rule two: documentation is very important. Docs should showcase the capabilities. This goes beyond explaining it, it should show it. I must be able to learn how to ... -
PyGrunn: embedding the python interpreter - Mark Boer
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). Writing scripts inside applications is often hard. Some of them luckily have an embedded version of python, but not all of them. Two important terms: extending and embedding. Lots of scientific software is made available via extending: a python wrapper. Numpy and tensorflow, for instance. The other way around is embedding: you put python inside your application. Useful for plugins, scripting. He doesn't know if jupyter notebooks are a good example of embedding, but in any case, jupyter is doing funny things with the python interpreter. CPython, which is the version of python we're talking about, consists of three parts: Bytecode compiler Python virtual machine (the one running the compiled bytecode). Python's C API, which allows other programs to call python. The C API is the opposite of python: it is hard to read and write :-) Oh, and the error messages are horrendous. But... starting python from C and sending lines to the REPL, that's quite easy. PyRun-SimpleString(). He showed a 10-line C program that reads from stdin and lets python execute it. He then expanded it to run in a separate thread. But soon his program ... -
PyGrunn: advanced pytest - Òscar Vilaplana
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2019 PyGrunn conference). Imagine being a developer being woken up at night because your latest commit broke the website. You fix the issue, run the tests of your part of the code (which passes) and push to github. That runs all the tests and it fails in a completely unrelated piece of the code. But what is happening? Is the test wrong? Is your code wrong? "3 is not 90": what does that mean? What does it mean that this fails? What is the test's promise? If a test you wrote fails, it should fail beautifully. It should tell exactly what's wrong: assert num_something == 2, "The number should match the number of added items" You can use pytest fixtures to at least make the data the test is working with clearer. You can make fixtures that work as context managers: @pytest.fixture def test_with_teardown(): thing = create_something() # setup yield thing thing.destroy() # teardown A tip: have fixtures per subsystem. Assuming you have multiple test directories, one per subsystem. Give every subsystem its own conftest.py. Different subsystems might get different fixtures even though using the same name ("product" for instance). This ... -
Podcast about Evennia
I was interviewed on the (pretty grandiosely named) podcast Titans of Text the other day. In the interview, which are run by people from the MUD Coder's Guild (a great initiative!), I talk a bit about the history of Evennia, the text-based multiplayer game engine I'm working on, and go into some various technical aspects of the engine as well. Check it out and support the podcast!https://www.titansoftext.com/4 -
Pygrunn preparations
Tomorrow (friday 2019-05-10), I'm going to the nice one-day Dutch python (and friends) pygrunn conference in Groningen (NL) again. Sold out, as usual. And rightfully so. Anyway, to be honest, this blog entry is mostly about me testing my blog setup on a new laptop. I've got a linux laptop at work (which has its advantages) and since a few months I've got a second-hand macbook pro at home (because linux also has its disadvantages). But I never got around to setting up my blog software here till now. And I'm taking the macbook to the conference, so high time to get everything working :-) I'm giving a talk myself on cookiecutter, the handy tool to create initial project structures. I'm a big fan of it, so I'm glad to tell the fine folk at pygrunn about the joys and advantages of using it. I gave the talk before at work and at the Amsterdam python meetup, but that was a couple of months ago. So I invested two days to polish and re-order and rehearse the presentation again. And I updated the presentation with some more photos and videos of my model railway... -
Tools I Learnt About at DjangoCon Europe 2019
DjangoCon Europe 2019 was great fun. I loved meeting old and new friends, giving my talk and workshop, and learning in the other talks. The talks are now all on the YouTube Channel. If you want to read about each talk, Tobias Kunze live-blogged his notes on each. I can’t beat Tobias’ summaries. What I can present are the most interesting tools I learnt about. (Interesting to me at least!) structlog PyPI link I learnt about this in Markus Holtermann’s talk Logging Rethought 2: The Actions of Frank Taylor Jr.. Structured logging is great. I’ve previously worked with Fluentd, using it to enforce JSON structured log messages. This included parsing messages from less structured sources, such as Nginx logs, into JSON. structlog supports outputting structured log messages directly from Python, and has a similar interface to the familiar standard library logging. Also it has a cool beaver with braces as its logo. django-webpack-loader PyPI link I learnt about this in Nathan Gaberel’s talk Take the goRe out of a DjangoReact stack. Webpack is the front-end JavaScript bundler du jour. django-webpack-loader provides an easy(ish) integration between Django and Webpack. The talk is worth watching to get an idea how this works. ... -
How Emerging Technologies Are Transforming Travel in 2019
Travel industry businesses are embracing technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and big data not only to provide better services to travelers but also to better understand what travelers really want. The post How Emerging Technologies Are Transforming Travel in 2019 appeared first on Distillery. -
Improving My Technical Writing
I found Mikey Ariel’s talk on documentation at DjangoCon Europe 2019 “Docs or It Didn’t Happen” well timed. I’ve recently been focussing on the lifelong skill of writing, in particular for technical writing such as this blog. I want to make my writing straightforward whilst entertaining. In technology, it’s important to use clear, simple English since it’s a second language for so many of us. Misunderstandings mean bugs! The talk was one more jewel among several other resources I’ve looked at recently. Go watch it, and check out these resources, some of which Mikey mentioned. Documentarian Mikey showed us the Write the Docs definition of a documentarian: A documentarian is someone who cares about documentation and communication in the software industry, regardless of job title. I identify with this. Whilst I love to write code, I’ve come to realize without correct communication it’s useless. Hemingway App Mikey also recommended this and I’ve used it on every blog post since. It’s a style highlighter that marks complicated or unnecessary language. You can then remove it to better imitate famous adventurer-author Ernest Hemingway. (He also pioneered the standing desk.) Hemingway had a “Keep It Super Simple” (KISS) approach. There are a lot ... -
My 5 Favorite Talks at DjangoCon Europe 2019
This year DjangoCon Europe happened in Copenhagen, Denmark, at a very creative and special place AFUK - Academy for Untamed Creativity. Surrounded by artistic souls, we learned more about web technologies, got to know each other at ecologic reusable disposable cups of coffee, enjoyed delicious authentic food, and socialized with Django-branded beverages. As always, there was also a party with people drinking IPA (not to be confused with API). And at the weekend Django developers were solving bugs for Django and related open-source software at the coding sprints. Here I would like to present you with the top 5 talks that I liked most of all. Django and Web Security Headers Adam Johnson (@AdamChainz) was talking about special response headers that tell browsers to treat data of the website more securely and which Django settings are responsible for those headers. Summary by rixx Docs or it didn't Happen! Mikey Ariel (@ThatDocsLady) was talking about the necessity of documentation and what to write there. Summary by rixx Pushing the ORM to its Limits Sigurd Ljødal (@sigurdlj) was talking about advanced Django ORM use cases. Summary by rixx Logging Rethought 2: The Actions of Frank Taylor Jr. Markus Holtermann (@m_holtermann) was talking ... -
Sending real-time push notifications with Django, Celery and Redis
Easily improve communication with your users by delivering timely and relevant information.What’s a push notification?It’s a medium for a mobile app to deliver certain information that requires the user’s attention. Unlike pull notifications, in which the client must request information from a server, push notifications originate from the server. These cover a wide variety of use cases ranging from a flight delay alert to a social network update or a newly released feature from the app, and the list goes on.iOS push notifications. Photo by Jamie Street on UnsplashWhy am I reading this?The objective of the following post is to get a bird’s eye view of what it’s like to implement a Django based solution, using Celery and Redis, to deliver real-time push notifications upon user interaction in a mobile app through Firebase Cloud Messaging(a.k.a. FCM) or Apple Push Notification Service(a.k.a. APNS). Don’t worry, it sounds harder than it looks.Heads upThis article assumes you already have a Django environment already set up and running. If that’s not the case, you’d be better off doing that first. There’s plenty documentation out there to start from scratch.It’s not within the scope of this post to explain the setup of FCM or APNS, ... -
How to Design an Effective Landing Page
Landing pages are effective only if you know exactly what and to whom you wish to sell. And while an awesome landing page will not necessarily turn visitors into buyers, it will help you find buyers among visitors. The post How to Design an Effective Landing Page appeared first on Distillery. -
Getting a Django Application to 100% Coverage
Code coverage is a simple tool for checking which lines of your application code are run by your test suite. 100% coverage is a laudable goal, as it means every line is run at least once. Coverage.py is the Python tool for measuring code coverage. Ned Batchelder has maintained it for an incredible 14 years! I like adding Coverage.py to my Django projects, like fellow Django Software Foundation member Sasha Romijn. Let’s look at how we can integrate it with a Django project, and how to get that golden 100% (even if it means ignoring some lines). Configuring Coverage.py Install coverage with pip install coverage. It includes a C extension for speed-up, it’s worth checking that this installs properly - see the installation docs for information. Then set up a configuration file for your project. The default file name is .coveragerc, but since that’s a hidden file I prefer to use the option to store the configuration in setup.cfg. This INI file was originally used only by setuptools but now many tools have the option to read their configuration from it. For Coverage.py, we put our settings there in sections prefixed with coverage:. The Run Section This is where we ... -
"Create Table As Select" in Django
A discussion recently came up on django-developers mailing list about how to build the SQL query CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT (CTAS) with Django’s ORM. This statement and its cousin INSERT ... SELECT are useful for re-shaping data inside your database, using SELECT queries. They can be useful for building aggregate tables from complicated, slow queries, as a way of imitating materialized views on databases that don’t support them. Django doesn’t support these at current, but I found it’s not hard to implement using some Django ORM internals, and have an example function below. (Support might have changed by the time you’re reading this - check the linked mailing list thread!) Example Use Case For example, you might have a widget_summary table for analytics purposes built with a SELECT from your widget table joined with flimflams. You can then regularly rebuild the table with that CTAS query. We do this in a transaction on databases with transactional DDL (PostgreSQL, SQLite). Start a transaction, drop the table, recreate it with CTAS, and commit. On databases without transactional DDL, we need a temporary table. Create the table with a new name, hot-swap it in place with the atomic RENAME, then drop the ...
