Django Pony GIFs
I discovered GIFCities recently. It’s a project by the Internet Archive for browsing GIFs extracted from their Geocities archive.
I discovered GIFCities recently. It’s a project by the Internet Archive for browsing GIFs extracted from their Geocities archive.
I received a cheery notification email (twice) from AWS that they’re deprecating Ubuntu 14.04 on CodeBuild:
DjangoCon Europe 2019 was great fun. I loved meeting old and new friends, giving my talk and workshop, and learning in the other talks.
I found Mikey Ariel’s talk on documentation at DjangoCon Europe 2019 “Docs or It Didn’t Happen” well timed. I’ve recently been focussing on the lifelong skill of writing, in particular for technical writing such as this blog.
Code coverage is a simple tool for checking which lines of your application code are run by your test suite. 100% coverage is a laudable goal, as it means every line is run at least once.
A discussion recently came up on django-developers mailing list about how to build the SQL query CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT (CTAS) with Django’s ORM. This statement and its cousin INSERT ... SELECT are useful for re-shaping data inside your database, using SELECT queries.
This is a recipe I’ve used on a number of projects. It combines pytest fixtures with Botocore’s Stubber for an easy testing experience of code using Boto3. (Botocore is the library behind Boto3.)
I occasionally enjoy solving algorithmic problems, for example Project Euler or The Advent of Code. I’ve been doing them since I was a pimply PHP-slinging teenager, competing with my peers across the UK in the British Informatics Olympiad. It was terribly nerdy and terribly fun.
On Saturday, I posted my guide on Scoring A+ for Security Headers in Django, following my talk at DjangoCon Europe. I thought it would be a good idea to step up and make my own site score A+, rather than a dismal F! My site isn’t built in Django, but as a Jekyll static site. It’s hosted on AWS S3 and CloudFront.
On Thursday I gave a workshop at DjangoCon Europe on deploying a Django application on AWS Lambda. I gave participants a Git repository to clone and temporary AWS keys to individual, restricted IAM users on my Workshops AWS account.
This is a blog post version of the talk I gave at DjangoCon Europe 2019 on the 10th April.
A lot of people pick Flask over Django because they believe it is simpler to start with. Indeed, the Flask front page includes an 8 line “hello world” application, while the Django default project has 172 lines in 5 files, and still doesn’t say “hello world”! (It does show you a welcome rocket and have a full admin interface though, both are pretty fun).
I was at PyCon Namibia in Windhoek from the 19th to 21st of February, and had an amazing time! PyCon Namibia is one of the longest running PyCons in Africa, this being its fifth edition in as many years.
I quite often get asked for resources on where to learn Django. Here’s a list of the places I know!
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of speaking at the London Ansible Meetup on the topic of provisioning my MacBook with Ansible.
While tidying up my mac-ansible repository in preparation for a talk I’m giving on it at the London Ansible Meetup tonight, I found my two-headed cow. It’s a bit of ASCII fan-art I made for the Fallout game series, whose post-apocalyptic setting has all the cows mutated this way.
I’ve recently dropped Python 2 support from most of the open source projects I maintain. Python 2 support ends 2020-01-01 (see pythonclock.org), and many major projects have signed the Python 3 Statement that declares that they will remove Python 2 support before, so this year is crunch time for migration.
It’s quite common to want to pip install a version of a package that hasn’t been released to PyPI, but is available on its Git repository host, such as GitHub. If the package is pure Python or has a relatively simple build process, you can normally install it directly via Git.
I realized I’ve posted the 2017 and 2018 editions of the London Django Meetup December quizzes on my blog, but forgot to post the first one in 2016. So here it is reproduced below, if you’d like to play at home or scroll through to the answers to pick up on some more Django trivia.
The TV program Black Mirror released an interactive choose-your-own-adventure film on Netflix called Bandersnatch over the holiday period. I enjoyed playing through it and finding the various endings, especially since I recently played The Stanley Parable which is in the same genre but with more humour. Bandersnatch has many endings and easter eggs, so naturally there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to tracking them down. The most impressive is an embedded Spectrum tape noise containing a QR code that leads to a real ZX Spectrum game made in 2018 by developer Matt Wescott.
Reading the Django 2.2 alpha announcement, the phrase “salmagundi of new features” stood out to me. I had to look up “salmagundi” in Wiktionary, where it is defined as:
On Monday evening I gave a quiz at the December London Django Meetup Group for the third year running - that makes it a tradition! Here it is so you can follow it at home - answers are at the bottom, no cheating.
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.
Here are some sites that are useful for checking your internet connection. I tend to need them when connecting to any new Wi-Fi.
This is about a small problem we faced with the models used for customers in YPlan, now Time Out Checkout.
