Technical decisions rarely get written down anywhere useful. They happen in chat threads, in meetings, inside a developer's head — and then they evaporate. The result is predictable: lost context, repeated debates, and avoidable mistakes.
Software development has always been organized around the implicit assumption that building is hard, expensive and slow. Discovery, strategy and validation have often adapted to that constraint. Today, that assumption is starting to break.
In modern Django projects, files uploaded in Production are typically stored in an S3-compatible object storage service. Maintaining different file storage classes for local and production environments often complicates the codebase and can introduce subtle issues that only surface in production. A practical way to avoid this category of problems is to run an object storage service locally as well.
As the purpose of Django's form widget for dates is mainly to validate your input as a well-formed date, you might want to turn to the more refined user experience offered by the HTML5 date picker.
Ever wanted to test your Django endpoints before the front end is ready? You sure can.
Being part of a delivery team often presents sustainability challenges - not just at the organizational level, but mentally as well. We're mostly blaming context switching - the constant hopping from one activity or focus to another - for hindering an otherwise well-led sprint. It fragments attention, slows down productivity, and can ultimately lead to burnout. But there’s another tendency to watch out for.
GeoDjango comes with a native way of retrieving a simple line's geographic center, but will put us off in the presence of complex MultiLineStrings. Let's help ourselves to more advanced GeoDjango ORM tools for a flexible approximation of a marker placement.
As essential a practice as unit testing is in everyday development, it can be puzzling in the presence of prompt inputs. And the matter gets even hairier for passwords. Let's see how to effectively handle every such case easily.
A plethora of modules is available out there aiming to pretty-format a read-only JSON field in the Django admin. But do you really need to carry the burden of the extra features coming with such modules?
Ah, Django proxy models and the power they hold! Yet, the implementation aftermath can highlight a number of unwanted side-effects. Here’s a couple of tips when working with Django proxies that will make end-users grateful and developers sigh in relief.
Rather hidden away in Django’s meanders resides the “redirects” app. Let’s take it for a spin and find out how to extend it even further to accommodate features content managers and marketers use and love.
As vulnerable as the current client-side technologies are, can we do anything to keep our Electron app away from trivial reverse engineering attempts?
Django’s ArrayField is a nifty resource straight out of the Field API, helping you avoid polluting your database with tables that you already know won’t be subject to advanced aggregations. Yet, there is no such thing as a native helper for a trivial implementation of an admin list filter feeding from an ArrayField. Let’s fill the gap!