Where to Learn Django in 2019

How I Provision My MacBook with Ansible

Post-Apocalyptic Cowsay

Dropping Python 2 Support From Open Source Projects

'pip install' From a Git Repository

Django Quiz 2016 (2 years late...)

Making My Own Black Mirror Bandersnatch Easter Egg

A Salmagundi of Django Alpha Announcements

Django Quiz 2018

Using Yubikey on macOS with Colemak or other "weird" keyboard layouts

I just got a Yubikey for security at work. It’s a neat little device, and the way it sends one time passwords to your computer is by presenting as a vanilla USB keyboard and sending keystrokes. Pressing its single button types out a fresh one time password.

Useful Sites for Checking Your Internet Connection

Here are some sites that are useful for checking your internet connection. I tend to need them when connecting to any new Wi-Fi.

Synchronizing Django model definitions

Making the CloudFormation release history into RSS

Using boto3? Think pagination!

pytest-randomly history

Django Quiz 2017

Writing a Custom Ansible Dynamic Inventory Script

Optimizing the construction of Django QuerySets

Introducing multilint

AWS H3 is the Future of Hotels

Introducing django-perf-rec, our Django performance testing tool

Upgrading YPlan to Python 3 with Zero Downtime

Restricting the Ansible Version in Use

Deploying AWS Lambda Functions with Ansible

Swapping decimal for cdecimal on Python 2

Making Ansible a Bit Faster

Building a better DatabaseCache for Django on MySQL

An Ansible MVP (Minimum Viable Playbook) for Testing Tasks

Cleaning Up Nameless EC2 Instances with Ansible

Validating Ansible changes

Merging groups and hostvars in Ansible variables

Using IPython Notebook to Write Jekyll Blog Posts

Python Concepts: Part None

My Talk "Factory Boy Fun" at Django London Meetup

On Tuesday I gave another talk at the London Django Meetup Group, titled “Factory Boy Fun”, based upon my previous blog post of the same name. The blog post covers pretty much the same stuff, but if you want to flick through the slides quickly for an overview, they’re hosted on GitHub.

Factory Boy Fun

Time to Move on From Cron

My Talk "Django at scale" at Django London Meetup

On Tuesday I gave a talk on Django at the London Django Meetup Group, titled “Django at Scale.” The slides are hosted on GitHub.

DevOps Exchange London: Continuous Delivery

Last Thursday (24th July 2014) I went to the DevOps Exchange London Meetup on Continuous Delivery; here is my quick review of the talks and what I took away.

Five Neat Little Python Libraries

Here are some great little Python libraries that have made my life (well, at least the coding part) a little bit nicer and easier. They mostly add neat syntax and a few things that you always wanted to do, but never knew.

Installing and Removing R Packages With Ansible

I was asked by some of our Data Scientists to get a few R packages onto their server, which I configured by Ansible. R seems to be bit funny compared to other programming languages because it’s package installation happens inside R code, rather than with a dedicated commandline utility.

Extending Django's QuerySet to return approximate COUNTs

Update (2015-05-31): I've re-written and open-sourced a better way of doing the below as part of my library django-mysql. The docs there on approximate counting are just as good a read as the below, and you can pip install the solution.

Some Ansible Hints

Three useful little tidbits for using Ansible that I’ve come across.

What I Learnt Losing a Million Pageviews

Update (2019-03-08): This is a classic post when I ran my blog like a magazine, so it has an individual full-page layout. This is still a great outage story!

One Minute Happiness

Update (2019-03-08): This is a classic post when I ran my blog like a magazine, so it has an individual full-page layout. It's a nice exercise that might make you happier for a bit.

Meet Mary

Update (2019-03-08): This is a classic post when I ran my blog like a magazine, so it has an individual full-page layout. Now I'm a little bit older and wiser, I think there might be other solutions to this cognitive bias, for example "likeliness" is not being interpreted as a question about real probability but narrative reasonableness. Still, this I like the interactive educational nature of the post.

My Encounter with Frozen Dead People

Update (2019-03-08): This is a classic post when I ran my blog like a magazine, so it has an individual full-page layout. This is still one of my favourite travelling stories.

The T-Shirt That Makes You More Creative

Update (2019-03-08): This is a classic post when I ran my blog like a magazine, so it has an individual full-page layout. I was younger and much less wiser at the time, so more susceptible to believing a single psychology paper. Still, I like the graphics I made!