Caktus Blog

I ask a lot of questions as a developer. Some of them have been more basic, like ‘How do I import a Python function from one file into another?’, and some more complex, like ‘How should we take an API request and return a dynamically-generated PDF as a response?’

Digging Into Django QuerySets

Object-relational mappers (or ORMs for short), such as the one that comes built-in with Django, make it easy for even new developers to become productive without needing to have a large body of knowledge about how to make use of relational databases. They abstract away the details of database access, replacing tables with declarative model classes and queries with chains of method calls. Since this is all done in standard Python developers can build on top of it further, adding instance methods to a model to wrap reusable pieces of logic. However, the abstraction provided by ORMs is not perfect. There are pitfalls lurking for unwary developers, such as the N + 1 problem. On the bright side, it is not difficult to explore and gain a better understanding of Django's ORM. Taking the time and effort to do so will help you become a better Django developer.

PyCon 2017 is fast approaching, and we’re excited to support the event this year as sponsors once again. It’s a great opportunity to meet new friends, exchange ideas and interact with the community at large.

Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS)' Elastic Beanstalk is a service that bundles up a number of their lower-level services to manage many details for you when deploying a site. We particularly like it for deploys and autoscaling.

Update (October 29, 2019): I updated this post with more recent Django and Postgres versions, to use Python and pip directly in the container (instead of in a separate virtual environment, which was unnecessary), and switched to a non-root user via Docker instead of uWSGI.

The Debate

My teammates and I recently engaged in a spirited debate over whether outbound links (links to external websites) should open in the same or in a new tab. “Same tab” was a default behavior for a set of external links on a project we were working on. A suggestion had been made, however, that the behavior be changed.

When it comes to programming, I have a belt and suspenders philosophy. Anything that can help me avoid errors early is worth looking into.

Caktus CEO Tobias McNulty and Sales Engineer David Ray recently had the opportunity to attend a development sprint for the Wagtail Content Management System (CMS) in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two-day software development sprint attracted 15 attendees hailing from a total of 5 countries across North America and Europe.

Here are some brief thoughts on writing good bug reports in general.

Main elements

There are four crucial elements when writing a bug report:

Learn to live without jQuery by learning how to clone it

jQuery is one of the earliest libraries every web developer learns, and often is the first experience with programming of any sort someone has. It provides a very safe cushion between a developer and the rough edges of web development. But, it can also obscure learning Javascript itself and learning what web APIs are capable of without the abstraction over them that jQuery adds.