Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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2024 Django Software Foundation board nomination
My self-nomination statement for the 2024 Django Software Foundation (DSF) board of directors elections -
Django News - Django 5.0 release candidate 1 released and Python 3.13.0 alpha 2 - Nov 24th 2023
News Django 5.0 release candidate 1 released Django 5.0 release candidate 1 is the final opportunity for you to try out a deluge of exciting new features before Django 5.0 is released. djangoproject.com Python 3.13.0 alpha 2 is now available Python 3.13.0a2 is the second of seven planned alpha releases. blogspot.com Updates to Django Last week we had 17 pull requests merged into Django by 11 different contributors - including 4 first time contributors! Congratulations to Andrew Cordery, jed212, William Hayes and Giannis Terzopoulos for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board! Some key updates from last week: Python 3.12 support has been added to Django 4.2.8 (release scheduled for December 4th). From Django 5.1, the HTML attribute aria-describedby is available on form fieldsets - enabling screen readers to associate fieldsets with their help text. The Django accessibility team has publicly stated their targeted assistive technology support for the Django admin. If you are a user of any of these, we'd love for you to introduce yourself to the team in the Django Discord #accessibility channel 💚 The accessibility team is also looking for feedback on their guidelines for Django contributors. Both “general sentiment” comments and … -
Database generated columns⁽²⁾: Django & PostgreSQL
An introduction to database generated columns, using PostgreSQL and the new GeneratedField added in Django 5.0. -
Three Years at Kraken Tech
A summary of the past year as I finish my third year working for Kraken Tech, an Octopus Energy Group subsidiary. Note: As I write this I'm recovering from a sprained shoulder I received in a bicycle accident that makes it hard to type. I'm mostly using voice-to-text, so the text might not be in my normal "writing voice". I changed roles I transitioned from leading the tech team for Kraken Tech USA to being an individual contributor for the global team. I do this periodically, cycling between writing code to leading teams, and back again. It is never easy to transition between roles but this time in particular it was particularly hard. The US Kraken Tech team is a group of talented, diverse, and passionate people. I'm so honored I had the chance to work with them. I'm constantly amazed by what they have accomplished and what they continue to do. In my new role I'm on the "Developer Foundations" team, exploring ways to improve the coding experience at the company. I've enjoyed writing code full-time again, there's a clarity of purpose that's been fun to embrace. Mostly that's been working in Python with a bit of Django, with … -
Web Security - Mackenzie Jackson
GitGuardianThe Security Repo PodcastConpagoWhy ChatGPT is a Security Concerndjango-two-factor-authPyCon Italia: Exploiting Leaked Credentials - How python code is leaking millions of secretsGitHub Events APISupport the ShowLearnDjango.comButtonDjango News newsletter -
Professionalism: No Yelling
It’s never acceptable to yell at work. The norms of professional behavior call for a cool demeanor. It’s normal to have emotions at work, but there’s a limit to how strongly you can express those emotions, particularly anger. -
Django-related Deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023
Here are some Django-related deals for this year’s Black Friday (24th Nov) and Cyber Monday (27th Nov), including my own. I’ll keep updating this post as I learn about more deals. If you are also a creator, email me with details of your offer and I’ll add it here. My books My three books have a 50% discount, for both individual and team licenses, until the end of Cyber Monday (27th Nov). This deal stacks with the purchasing power parity discount for those in lower-income countries. Buy now: Boost Your Django DX - $19.50 instead of $39 Boost Your Git DX - $19.50 instead of $39 (released in October!) Speed Up Your Django Tests - $24.50 instead of $49 Aidas Bendoraitis’ GDPR Cookie Consent Package Aidas Bendoraitis of djangotricks.com created this paid third-party app for Django. The package takes the pain out of setting up and customizing legally mandated GDPR Cookie Consent screens. Compared to commercial “one size fits all” solutions, it’s much simpler to use this third-party app to host and tweak your project’s cookie consent screen. Use the discount code BLACKFRIDAY2023 for 20% off, from €150 to €120, until the end of November. Buy it on Gumroad Michael … -
Performance Is Contextual
Managers often talk about performance as a static thing. We say that someone is a “high performer” or “low performer”, as if performance is a fixed attribute of their personality. This fixed mindset is a mistake. Performance is contextual: how well you perform your job is deeply dependent on the conditions around you. -
Django: Stop a backgrounded runserver with lsof
If you start runserver but your terminal session gets closed, the server can continue running in the background. For example, this can happen when your IDE crashes. This situation is annoying because you can’t stop the backgrounded runserver with Ctrl-C. You can find and stop the server with your operating system’s process list tool, such as Windows Task Manager or macOS’ Activity Monitor. But this is manual and slow. It’s faster to use this shell one-liner, for Bash or Zsh, on macOS or Linux: lsof -i :8000 -t | xargs -t kill Replace “8000” with the port the server is running on. lsof is pre-installed on macOS but you may need to install it on Linux. xargs is pre-installed everywhere. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s going on: lsof is a tool for listing processes and the files they have open. Since operating systems treat internet addresses as files, lsof has the -i option to select processes by the internet addresses they have open. -i :8000 selects processes bound to port 8000: $ lsof -i :8000 COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME python3.1 43282 adamjohnson 9u IPv4 0xe72dc161b280a8a9 0t0 TCP localhost:irdmi (LISTEN) Adding -t makes lsof outputs … -
Django News - 206 Partial Content - Django Sprints Proposal - Nov 17th 2023
News Paolo Melchiorre - My Django active developers Sprints proposal 🌅 The story of how the proposal to organize sprints on the Django active developers was born and how I proposed it during the past DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego to various components of the Django community. paulox.net PyPI has completed its first security audit The results of PyPI's very first external security audit. The first post in a three-part series. pypi.org Updates to Django Last week we had 6 pull requests merged into Django by 6 different contributors - including 1 first time contributor! Congratulations to Prakhar Parashari for having their first commit merged into Django - welcome on board! The main priority is resolving release blockers for Django 5.0, as the release candidate is planned for November 20th! DjangoCon Africa was also last week and it looked AMAZING! Congratulations to the incredible folks who make such a wonderful conference. "Django is not a framework, it's a community" 💯💜 Django Newsletter Wagtail CMS Wagtail 5.2.1 Wagtail 5.2.1 is a bugfix release that addresses over a dozen fixes. github.com Looking for sponsorship – Accessibility checks for site administrators We’re building state-of-the-art accessibility checks within the CMS, replacing expensive monitoring … -
A Battle of Async Titans: Django ORM Async vs. SQLAlchemy Async
When you enter the world of Python, you will hear that many developers love Django ORM, and others love SQLAlchemy. Each of those groups will tell you to your face why you have to choose their loved library, and if we add the async part of the programming, they will brag about the capacity of […] The post A Battle of Async Titans: Django ORM Async vs. SQLAlchemy Async appeared first on Distillery. -
A Battle of Async Titans: Django ORM Async vs. SQLAlchemy Async
When you enter the world of Python, you will hear that many developers love Django ORM, and others love SQLAlchemy. Each of those groups will tell you to your face why you have to choose their loved library, and if we add the async part of the programming, they will brag about the capacity of […] The post A Battle of Async Titans: Django ORM Async vs. SQLAlchemy Async appeared first on Distillery. -
Parse Inbound Email - Building SaaS #175
In this episode, we switched to the inbound side and parsed an email to transform it into a journal entry. This caused us to look into the dateutil library and look at Python’s standard email module to use EmailMessage. -
How to Build Trust
What are the major management behaviors that can help build trust? Management books often cover the importance of trust, but abstractly. There’s precious little writing about the nuts and bolts, the day-to-day tasks of trust-building. That’s the gap I’d like to try to fill with this article. -
Does someone need to be a good manager to give good management advice?
In a management Slack I’m in, someone responded to a list of commonly-recommended management books by asking, “are these people good managers though?” It’s a fair question! But it’s not quite so simple. -
Parse Inbound Email - Building SaaS with Python and Django #175
In this episode, we switched to the inbound side and parsed an email to transform it into a journal entry. This caused us to look into the dateutil library and look at Python’s standard email module to use EmailMessage. -
Amersfoort (NL) python meetup
The first "pyutrecht" meetup in Amersfoort in the Netherlands. (Amersfoort is not the city of Utrecht, but it is in the similarly named province of Utrecht). I gave a talk myself about being more of a proper programmer to your own laptop setup. Have a git repo with a README explaining which programs you installed. An install script or makefile for installing certain tools. "Dotfiles" for storing your config in git. Etc. I haven't made a summary of my own talk. Here are the other three: An introduction to web scraping - William Lacerda William works at deliverect, the host of the meeting. Webscraping means extracting data from a website and parsing it into a more useful format. Like translating a list of restaurants on a There's a difference with web crawling: that is following links and trying to download all the pages on a website. Important: robots.txt. As a crawler or scraper you're supposed to read it as it tells you which user agents are allowed and which areas of the website are off-limits (or not useful). Another useful file that is often available: /sitemap.xml. A list of URLs in the site that the site thinks are useful for … -
Why is Django's (Unofficial) Mascot a Pony?
Officially, the [Django logo](https://www.djangoproject.com/community/logos/) is a text-only combination of green and white. But unofficially, the Django mascot is … -
Django-related Deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023
Here are some Django-related deals for this year’s Black Friday (24th Nov) and Cyber Monday (27th Nov), including my own. I’ll keep updating this post as I learn about more deals. If you are also a creator, email me with details of your offer and I’ll add it here. My books My three books have a 50% discount, for both individual and team licenses, until the end of Cyber Monday (27th Nov). This deal stacks with the purchasing power parity discount for those in lower-income countries. Buy now: Boost Your Django DX - $19.50 instead of $39 Boost Your Git DX - $19.50 instead of $39 (released in October!) Speed Up Your Django Tests - $24.50 instead of $49 Aidas Bendoraitis’ GDPR Cookie Consent Package Aidas Bendoraitis of djangotricks.com created this paid third-party app for Django. The package takes the pain out of setting up and customizing legally mandated GDPR Cookie Consent screens. Compared to commercial “one size fits all” solutions, it’s much simpler to use this third-party app to host and tweak your project’s cookie consent screen. Use the discount code BLACKFRIDAY2023 for 20% off, from €150 to €120, until the end of November. Buy it on Gumroad Michael … -
Django News - 205 Reset Content - Nov 10th 2023
News Python Developers Survey 2023 The annual Python developers survey is out. Please take a moment to share your Python practices as the results do have a big impact on the organizations and maintainers in our community. alchemer.com Takahē: Life-Critical Side Projects Andrew Godwin, the developer of Takahē, is looking for new maintainers who want to help out in exchange for mentorship. aeracode.org Updates to Django Last week we had 14 pull requests merged into Django by 9 different contributors - including 2 first time contributors! Congratulations to chenow and Patrick Rauscher for having their first commit merged into Django - welcome on board! Some interesting things from last week... Django 5.1 increased support for window frames. Specifically, RowRange and ValueRange now accept an exclusion argument. We had some security releases issued: 4.2.7, 4.1.13, and 3.2.23 There was an interesting forum discussion around updating the DEP process. Do you speak Português or हिंदी? We will soon have a translation string freeze for the 5.0 release, so this is a good time to join a translation team! You can see the languages Django supports on transifex as well as the ones missing translations. Perhaps you can help translate Django and make … -
aiGrunn: thinking outside the chat box - JP van Oosten
(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL). Getting chatgpt to output valid json can be a chore: > extract xxxx, output as json > extract xxxx, output as json list > extract xxxx, output as json with this schema > extract xxxx, output as json, aargh JSON I BEG YOU Apparently they solved the json problem last monday. But he had the same problem when trying to get chatgpt to output only English and not Dutch. So the underlying problem is still there: you have to beg it to output in a certain way and hope it listens. Some other problems are hallucinations: chatgpt telling you something with complete confidence, even though being wrong. And biases. And it is not really a chatbot, as it doesn't ask questions. Unparseable output. Lack of explainability. Privacy issues as you're sending data to servers in the USA. And... what are the data sources chatgpt used? We don't know. They're called "openAI", but they're definitively not open. When to use LLMs and when not to use them. Some good use cases: Zero/few shot learning. A quick way to get a simple minimum viable product or proof of … -
aiGrunn: fighting cancer with AI - Hylke Donker
(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL). What is cancer? According to wikipedia: abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. That is what you can observe. Medically, there are several aspects of cancer: It prevents the cell from dying. It can grab more than usual resources. No sensitivity to the regular anti-growth signals. Etc. AI starts getting used in clinics. For instance for proton therapy: where to best apply the proton radiation. And in radiology: letting AI look at images to detect cancer. A good AI can out-perform doctors. Analysis of blood samples, trying to detect cancer based on the DNA samples in there. DNA mutations can also be detected, which is what he focuses on. Cancer is basically a "desease of the genome". DNA is made up of T, C, G and A sequences. Technically, it is perfectly feasable to "read" DNA. How do mutations occur? Exposure can leave "scars" in DNA. Damage can occur due to sunlight or smoking for instance. Specific sources result in specific kinds of damage: smoking has a "preference" for changing specific letters. With analysis, you can thus … -
aiGrunn: learntail, turn anything into a quiz using AI - Arjan Egges
(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL). Arjan is known for his programming videos. Alternative title: "the dark side of integrating a LLM (large language model) in your software". You run into several challenges. He illustrates it with https://www.learntail.com/ , something he helped build. It creates quizes from text to make the reader more active. What he used was the python library langchain to connect his app with a LLM. A handy trick: you can have it send extra format instructions to chatgpt based on a pydantic model. If it works, it works. But if you don't get proper json back, it crashes. Some more challenges: There is a limit on prompt length. If it gets too long, the LLM won't fully understand it anymore and ignore some of the instructions. A LLM is no human being. So "hard" or "easy" don't mean anything. You have to be more machine-explicit, like "quiz without jargon". The longest answer it provides is often the correct one. Because the data it has been trained on often has the longest one as the correct answer... Limits are hard to predict. The token limit is input + output, … -
aiGrunn: small and practical AI models for CO2 reduction in buildings - Bram de Wit
(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL). LLM models can be huge. Mind-boggling huge. But... we can also have fun with small models. He works a company that regulates climate installations in buildings (HVAC, heating, ventilation, air conditioning) via the cloud. Buildings use 30% of all energy worldwide. So improving how the HVAC installation is used has a big impact. A use case: normally you pre-heat rooms so that it is comfy when you arrive. But sometimes the sun quickly warms the room anyway shortly afterwards. Can you not conserve some energy without sacrificing too much comfort? You could calculate an optimal solution, but "just" measuring every individual room in combination with an AI. Technical setup: An "edge device" inside the building. An external API. The API stores the data in mysql (the room metadata) and influxdb (the timeseries). A user selects a room and a machine learning model type and a training data set (from historical data). The software creates a dataset from influxdb, trains the model (pytorch). The trained neural network goes to ONNX (open neural network exchange). The output is stored in minio (S3-compatible object store). Note: all this is … -
aiGrunn: be a better developer with AI - Henry Bol
(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL). "Everybody" uses stackoverflow. Now lots of people use chatgpt (or chatgpt plus). Stackoverflow traffic has dropped by 50% in the last 1.5 year. So chatgpt can be your coding buddy. He really likes it for quickly getting something working (MVP). Like writing something that talks to a magento API (a webshop system). It would take him ages to figure it all out. Or he could ask chatgpt. He also thinks you don't need docstrings anymore: you can just ask chatgpt to explain a snippet of code for you. (Something I myself don't agree with, btw). (He demoed some chatgpt code generation of a sample website). What he learned: Good briefing and interaction is key. First tell it what you want before you start to code. Chatgpt sometimes loses track if the interaction goes on for too long. Read what it gives you, otherwise you won't know what it build for you. Watch out for the "cut-off time" of the chatgpt training set: perhaps newer versions of libraries don't work anymore with the generated code. Some dangers: You get lazy. You can get frustrated if you don't …
