Django

Part two of six in the 2017 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

When considering a website upgrade, many business stakeholders probably think about the frontend, i.e., how the website looks or the features users interact with. Perhaps less often considered is the importance of upgrading the backend; that is, the databases, applications, and servers powering all the behind-the-scenes activity. Infrastructure support and upgrades are necessary but often performed as a separate project from any improvements to design or user experience, rather than as part of a holistic update project.

Once per quarter, Caktus employees have the opportunity to take a day away from client work to focus on learning or refreshing skills, testing out ideas, or working on open source contributions. The Q2 2017 ShipIt Day work included building apps, updating open source projects, trying out new tools, and more. Keep reading for the details.

Building custom tags for Django templates has gotten much easier over the years, with decorators provided that do most of the work when building common, simple kinds of tags.

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.

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.