How to Clean Up Unused Code With Git
Projects often accumulate an amount of unused code. This cruft makes a prjoect harder to navigate, and can confuse future development or debugging.
How to Be a Teapot in Django
HTCPCP, or Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, was published as an April Fool’s joke 24 years ago today. It’s an HTTP extension for controlling coffee pots, and whilst it is a joke, it appears in various places around the web.
How to Make Django Raise an Error for Missing Template Variables
It’s all too easy to forget to pass a variable to your template, or make a typo in a variable name. Unfortunately, it can be quite hard to debug such mistakes, since Django’s default behaviour is to ignore the problem and render an empty string.
You Probably Don’t Need Django’s get_user_model()
Django’s authentication system, django.contrib.auth, provides a built-in User model class. You can swap this to a different class with the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting, most easily at the start of the project.
How to Lock Your Project’s Node.js Version
It’s a good idea to ensure your project uses the same Node.js version in all environments. This way you can be sure that your code will work as expected, from development to production.
How to Squash and Rebase a Git Branch
It can be tiresome to rebase feature branches with many commits. You may have several commits that conflict with your main branch. Before rebasing such branches, you may want to squash your commits together, and then rebase that single commit, so you can handle all conflicts at once. Here’s how to do that.
How to Run a Command on Many Files in Your Git Repository
Occasionally it’s useful to run commands on files in your repository, or all files matching a pattern. This is possible by combining git ls-files and xargs.
django-htmx Now on Read the Docs
I’ve just released django-htmx 1.9.0. As part of this release, it now has a documentation site built with Sphinx, hosted on Read the Docs at django-htmx.readthedocs.io.
Announcing WhiteNoise 6
WhiteNoise is a simple solution to serving static assets. It lets you skip configuring a separate web server for your static assets, and serve them straight from Django. It’s a brilliant tool. I’ve used it for years on various projects, and I’ve recommended it many times, and mentioned it in several blog posts.
Appearance on Podcast.__init__
I joined host Tobias Macey on Podcast.__init__, in Episode 349, published this monday. The episode is titled “Improve Your Productivity By Investing In Developer Experience Design For Your Projects”. We covered various topics related to “developer experience” and general ways to improve it on any Python project.