Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Work Sample Tests: Coding “Homework”
Coding homework is my default work sample test: I use it for all engineering roles unless it’s obvious that another kind of exercise is better. There are good reasons to make homework-style work sample tests the default: they’re relatively easy to construct, they scale reasonably well to large hiring rounds, they’re accurate simulations of real work, and easier than most other kinds of tests to construct in a way that maximizes inclusivity. Here’s how to conduct a coding homework work sample test. -
How Django Got Its Name
Pictured: From left to right, musicians Sebastian Peszko, Francisco Batista, and Filippo Dall'Asta in Berlin, Germany. In early November, my husband and I celebrated a friend’s birthday with dinner and a show. The birthday boy has eclectic tastes and it’s always a treat to be included in his plans. Little did I know, however, that our night out in Berlin, Germany, would be related to my day job with Caktus, which is of course, based in Durham, North Carolina ... As a side note, I’ve been working remotely from Berlin since August 2021. Our group showed up at 800A Bar & Cabaret a bit late, so the music had already started. Onstage were guitarists Filippo Dall'Asta and Francisco Batista, plus Sebastian Peszko on the viola. The music seemed familiar but I couldn’t quite place it until my husband realized it was similar to the original theme from the TV show “Monk”! The musicians were incredibly talented and we had a very enjoyable evening listening to them as well as the jam session later featuring various local artists. Though I was unfamiliar with this style of music, I was familiar with the name Django Reinhardt as I had read a little … -
Django News - 2022 Django Software Foundation Board Nominations - Nov 19th 2021
News 2022 Django Software Foundation Board Nominations Anyone including current Board members, DSF Members, or the public can apply to the Board. It is open to all who wish to participate. Please fill out the application form by November 30th, 2021 AoE (anywhere on earth) to be considered. Once we have our candidates, we will open a week-long voting period. djangoproject.com Nominations for 2021 Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize It is that time of year again when we recognize someone from our community in memory of our friend Malcolm. We will take nominations until Thursday, November 26th, 2021 AoE. djangoproject.com Python 3.9.9 hotfix release is now available Python 3.9.9 is the eighth maintenance release of the legacy 3.9 series. blogspot.com Sponsored Link Using Django with Pants Pants is a cutting-edge build system with strong support for Python. See how Pants can help streamline your Django-based projects, especially when you have multiple services in a single shared codebase. github.io Articles Selecting a programming language can be a form of premature optimization Brett Cannon, a Python Core Developer, shares his thoughts on choosing a programming language for your next project. snarky.ca 17 Django Project Ideas that can Make a Positive Impact around You … -
The Evennia blog has moved to evennia.com!
This dev blog has moved! All past and future posts will now be found here instead on evennia.com. The linked post discusses the move in more detail, including the little custom blog platform I wrote for it.The old posts here on blogspot/bloggly will remain but won't be updated anymore.Cheers,Griatch -
How to Ditch Codecov for Python Projects
Codecov’s unreliability breaking CI on my open source projects has been a constant source of frustration for me for years. I have found a way to enforce coverage over a whole GitHub Actions build matrix that doesn’t rely on third-party services. -
Scheduling Bugs - Building SaaS with Python and Django #120
In this episode, I debugged a deep scheduling bug that was tricky to track down and understand. -
Scheduling Bugs - Building SaaS #120
In this episode, I debugged a deep scheduling bug that was tricky to track down and understand. -
Optimize Tailwind CSS in Django
Optimize Tailwind using PurgeCSS, and make web page auto reload on code change during development -
A Framework for Good Work Sample Tests: Eight Rules for Fair Tests
What makes a work sample test “good” – fair, inclusive, and with high predictive value? Here’s my framework: eight principles that, if followed, give you a great shot at constructing a good work sample test. -
Django News - Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize Nominations - Nov 12th 2021
News Nominations for 2021 Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize The Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize is a monetary prize, awarded annually to the person who best exemplifies the spirit of Malcolm’s work - someone who welcomes, supports, and nurtures newcomers; freely gives feedback and assistance to others, and helps to grow the community. The DSF will take nominations until Thursday, November 26th, 2021, AoE and announce the winner soon after the next DSF Board meeting in December. djangoproject.com Wagtail 2.15.1 Bugfix Release Wagtail 2.15.1 is a bugfix release. github.com Python 3.9.8 and 3.11.0a2 are now available Python 3.9.8 and 3.11.0a2 are now available. blogspot.com Events PyCon US 2022 - Call for Proposals CFPs are open until December 20th. Django is typically underrepresented in PyCon tutorials talks, so please consider submitting one if interested! pycon.org PGConf NYC 2021 PGConf NYC 2021 returns December 2nd and 3rd in New York City. pgconf.nyc Sponsored Link Using Django with Pants Pants is a cutting-edge build system with strong support for Python. See how Pants can help streamline your Django-based projects, especially when you have multiple services in a single shared codebase. github.io Articles How Async Should Have Been A fascinating examination of how async is implemented … -
PyGrunn: setting up new developers for success - Marijke Luttekes
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). Get your house in order first. Before you can start training people, you need to have an onboarding strategy in place. Make sure you've got that beforehand. You also need your communication tools to be ready. Oh, and documentation is important! It is good in general, but there's a specific advantage during onboarding: if you've got it, new developers get an opportunity to be more independent and to look things up for themselves Let us get started guiding new devs. Psychological safety is important: you need to feel safe. Safe to talk about mistakes, safe to make suggestions. If you're the senior: keep in mind your position of power. If you say something, a junior developer might think it is The Law. What you don't want: a clone of yourself! It is good for a company to have diversity. Bring the new developer with you to meetings. And let them speak! (So try to shut up a bit yourself). Success is a team effort - and so is failure. New developers need feedback. Compliment in public, negative feedback in private. Oh, and make an … -
PyGrunn: live blogging with wagtail - Coen van der Kamp
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). Wagtail (https://wagtail.io/) is a nice CMS layer on top of django and python. Wagtail is special in that it doesn't have a build-in user-facing front end. You are invited to build your own that perfectly suits your needs. Wagtail is opinionated in that sense. It does have a nice admin interface for adding content. Through google summer of code, an earlier idea he had on live blogging was added to wagtail. It is intended for live blogging a sports match, for instance. Lots of small messages. It can grab input from slack or telegram. Of course, you can also use the admin interface or a REST api. There is a bit of a workflow mechanism. You perhaps want to format the first line of an incoming message as a title. There are multiple ways to set up the blog-viewing webpage. Interval polling, long polling, websockets. Websockets are the best option, but it takes more setup effort. Interval polling is the easiest option: just plain http. https://wagtaillive.fourdigits.nl/pygrunn/ is where they do some test live blogging of this conference. The project lives at https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail-live -
PyGrunn: large scale python satellite image processing - Ivor Bosloper
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). Satellites. There are almost 3000 satellites orbiting the earth. Some of them have cameras, which are the interesting ones for him. He started Dacom (now CropX), agricultural software. Satellite imagery is interesting for farmers as you can see how well the crops are growing by analyzing the images. He did a live demo. They have a website with all 800.000 fields in the Netherlands. For every field they have image data. They can show it both as a regular image, but also color-coded for amount of greenery. And of course a nice graph throughout the year. You can do all sorts of analysis on it. Look at the variation in crop yields within the field, for instance. You might have to use more fertilizer in the low-yield areas. But you also have to use other data sources, like an elevation map. They started out experimentally with groenmonitor.nl in 2014. In 2015, ESA launched the "Sentinel 2a" satellite (with a twin, "2b", in 2017). The data is free, part of the EU Copernicus project! They started using the data in 2016. The images are huge … -
PyGrunn: don't trust your coverage report - Olga Sentemova
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). How do we know if our code works? Perhaps the requirements you were given were unclear. Perhaps there simply is an error in your code. Perhaps your software is used in the wrong way. There are many sorts of tests. The one she focuses on is unit tests, the one we have the most influence on as programmers. You can use a traceability matrix where you put every individual part of the requirements ("division by zero results in an error") in columns. In the rows you mention the tests that verify the specific requirement. Lots of work, perhaps only needed for medical equipment. You're also restrained by the (in)completeness of the requirements. And it is a manual process... You can also use coverage.py, which checks how many lines of your code are covered/executed by your tests. When you run coverage, you should configure it properly, so that it only reports your python files. You don't want to include the standard library or an external library in your report. Also exclude your test files from the report, as they normally have 100% test coverage and … -
PyGrunn: being a python developer in NL in 2021 - Emiel Kempen
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). He wants to show us some insights from the 2021 offerzen developer survey . (The report is open data, btw, so you can download the data and do your own analysis on it.) Background and education. Junior/senior: after 4 year, you're no longer a junior. Management roles start pick up after 6-10 years. Note: there are differences between countries. Salary: 32k for a junior, 47k intermediate, 60k senior, 73k tech lead/management. The rise in salary is pretty linear with your career progression. Degrees: 57% computer science. A massive amount (44%) is self-taught. 28% at school, 21% at university. People start coding young! 13-18 year is the most prevalent. 75% do some coding for fun outside of their jobs. Skills and learning The most promising industry: AI and cloud computing. (It is a bit weird that they're grouped together, perhaps). Python is the most desired language devs want to work with, followed by typescript and go. The most used languages are javascript, sql and typescript. Python is #4. Frequency of learning a new language: 30% every few months, 32% once a year and 33% every … -
PyGrunn keynote: make it work. fast. - Alexander Solovyov
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). He is the CTO of a big Ukraine fashion marketplace. 10-20k orders per day. So the talk is about them surviving load spikes and so. In 2016 they had a clojure/clojurescript/react single page app. They saw 30% more requests per second, which caused 3x the processor load. Bad news... One of the things he used was clojure.cache and picked the fast memory cache option. After finally reading the documentation, he discovered it was the cause of their problem. A cache call would fail, which would end up in a retry loop which would in effect cause almost an infite loop. Oh, and his son was only two weeks old and he was sleep-deprived. He managed to replace clojure.cache by memcached, which solved the problem. Halloween 2017. Wife in hospital. They started losing TCP packets... The main.js was barely loading which is bad in a single page web application :-) The processor load on the load balancers just kept increasing. One of the problems was the marketing department that recently added a fourth level to the menu structure of the website. Which resulted in a … -
PyGrunn keynote: learn pattern matching by writing a game - Łukasz Langa
(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference). Note: Łukasz Langa is the author of the wonderful black code formatter. Note 2: I made a summary of a different pattern matching talk last month. Łukasz started making a small game to learn about python 3.10's new pattern matching functionality. Actually programming something that you want to finish helps you to really delve into new functionality. You won't cut corners. One of the things he automated in the past was a system to manage his notes, for instance to export notes marked "public" to his weblog. His notes are all in git. Lots of notes. An advice unrelated to the rest of the talk: Keep notes. Own your data. Automate with python. He showed the source code for his simple game. One of the methods was 15 lines of an if/elif with some more nested if/else statements. if isinstance(...) and so. He then showed the same code with the new pattern matching of python 3.10. Matching on types, matching on attribute values. match and case may seem very weird now in the way they are implemented. But he thinks they can become pretty … -
From Beginner to Software Engineering Manager - Raymond Traylor
How to Become a Hacker by Eric RaymondTeach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter NorvigDjango Vanilla ViewsscheduleCrayon.coSupport the ShowThis podcast does not have any ads or sponsors. To support the show, please consider visiting LearnDjango.com, Button, or Django News. -
How to Setup Tailwind CSS with Django (Part 2)
Use python-webpack-boilerplate to jump start frontend project bundled by Webpack, and import Tailwind CSS -
Work Sample Tests: The tradeoff between inclusivity and predictive value
Good hiring processes try to maximize inclusivity and predictive value, but unfortunately, work sample tests bring these goals into conflict. There’s always a tradeoff between predictive value and inclusivity. The guiding principle of work sample tests is: construct a test that balances predictive value and inclusivity. Fair work sample tests will be predictive enough to give you a high degree of confidence that you’re making a good hire, while also being designed to be as accessible to as many candidates as possible. -
17 Django Project Ideas that can Make a Positive Impact around You
For more than a decade, I was focused only on the technical part of website building with Django. In the process, I have built a bunch of interesting cultural websites. But I always felt that those sleepless nights were not worthy of the impact. They say, "Don’t work hard, work smart!" I agree with that phrase, and for me it's not about working less hours. For me, it's working as much as necessary, but on things that matter most. So after years of collecting facts about life, I connected the dots and came up with make-impact.org – a social donation platform, which became one of the most important long-term projects. All my planning goes around this project. And I believe I am not the only programmer who sometimes feels that they want to make a positive impact with their skills. So I brainstormed 17 Django project ideas. You can choose one and realize it as a hobby project, open-source platform, startup, or non-profit organization; alone, with a team of developers, or collaborating with some non-technical people. Idea #1: Low Qualification Job Search The job market is pretty competitive, and not all people can keep up with the train. You could … -
17 Django Project Ideas that can Make a Positive Impact around You
For more than a decade, I was focused only on the technical part of website building with Django. In the process, I have built a bunch of interesting cultural websites. But I always felt that those sleepless nights were not worthy of the impact. They say, "Don’t work hard, work smart!" I agree with that phrase, and for me it's not about working less hours. For me, it's working as much as necessary, but on things that matter most. So after years of collecting facts about life, I connected the dots and came up with make-impact.org – a social donation platform, which became one of the most important long-term projects. All my planning goes around this project. And I believe I am not the only programmer who sometimes feels that they want to make a positive impact with their skills. So I brainstormed 17 Django project ideas. You can choose one and realize it as a hobby project, open-source platform, startup, or non-profit organization; alone, with a team of developers, or collaborating with some non-technical people. Idea #1: Low Qualification Job Search The job market is pretty competitive, and not all people can keep up with the train. You could … -
Work Sample Tests: Introduction to Work Sample Tests
Earlier this year, I wrote a series on interview questions. Good interview questions are one key to hiring well, but they’re not the only key. Today, I’m starting a new series on another critical factor in effective hiring: using work sample tests, aka practical exercises. This is part 1: what are work sample tests, and why do we need them? -
Adventures in Django: Django Unit Testing
This article assumes that you are familiar with the following:Continue reading on Medium » -
How to Use Semantic Versioning for Shared Django Apps
When you are building websites with Django, there is no need to track their software versions. You can just have a stable branch in Git repository and update the production environment whenever it makes sense. However, when you create a Django app or package shared among various websites and maybe with multiple people, it is vital to keep track of the package versions. The Benefits Versioning allows you to identify a specific state of your package and has these benefits: Developers can be aware of which package version works with their websites together flawlessly. You can track which versions had which bugs or certain features when communicating with open-source communities or technical support. In the documentation, you can clearly see which version of the software it is referring to. When fixing bugs of a particular version, developers of the versioned package have a narrower scope of code to check at version control commits. Just from the version number, it's clear if the upgrade will only fix the bugs or if it requires more attention to make your software compatible. When talking to other developers about a particular package, you can clearly state what you are talking about (yes, developers talk …
