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Normally your Django project’s deploy process runs the migrate command, and that takes care of updating your database as necessary. Especially on smaller databases, Django’s migration system can “just do it” for you.
Python’s requests package is very popular. Even if you don’t use it directly, it’s highly likely one of your dependencies does.
Slow queries happen, and when they do, it can be tough to dissect why they’re slow. This difficulty is compounded by using Django’s ORM, since it generates the SQL for you, so you may have little idea of the actual queries “under the hood”.
Investigating flaky tests is a dull necessity of testing. At least it is (in the best case) infrequent. Here are some shell commands you can use to automate steps in your investigations. These will work on (at least) bash and zsh.
Your PostgreSQL server is seizing up, with some naughty queries consuming too many resources or blocking others. Don’t panic! You can stop those problem queries and stabilize your system.
In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.
Projects often accumulate an amount of unused code. This cruft makes a prjoect harder to navigate, and can confuse future development or debugging.
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.
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.
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.