git bisectgit bisect efficiently searches for a commit responsible for changing a given behaviour. git log lets you see when a given file or line changed, but that’s often insufficient when the cause of some change is unclear. In such cases, git bisect shines, as it lets you check your running system.
pre-commit’s “fail” virtual language fails all files that it matches. Combine it with pre-commit’s file name and type matching to block unwanted files in your repository.
diff.algorithm=histogramContrary to common belief, Git doesn’t store diffs. It actually stores snapshots of whole files, heavily compressed to reduce redundancy. Then when displaying a diff is required, git diff generates it on the fly.
I just released a major update to my 2021 book Boost Your Django DX. This update contains new content, a bunch of edits, and uses the latest versions of tools, including Python 3.12 and Django 5.0.
PostgreSQL’s powerful full text search feature supports several query syntaxes. Of these, a website search feature should typically pick the websearch syntax. websearch copies some features from popular search engines, as covered below, offering familiar short syntax to users. It is also forgiving and will never raise a syntax error for user input, whilst other syntaxes can.
My two “Boost Your DX” books are available in a bundle deal, saving $10 compared to buying them separately. Great for improving your Django and Git skills at the same time.
zdiff3 styleBy default, Git presents merge conflicts like so:
Global Privacy Control (GPC) is a specification for web browsers to signal website operators not to share or sell the user’s data. This signal is intended to exercise legal data privacy rights such as those provided by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While GPC is a proposal, support has been implemented in Firefox and several other privacy-focused browsers and extensions.
A fairly common situation in a Django project is where you need to store and serve arbitrary HTML fragments. These often come from forms with rich text editors (using HTML’s contenteditable).
This evening I held a quiz at the December London Django Meetup Group. The quiz is a regular tradition: this was the fifth quiz that I’ve presented, and the sixth overall.
Some models have one or a few large fields that dominate their per-instance size. For example, take a minimal blog post model:
URLField.assume_scheme warningsSince Django’s inception, the web has gradually moved from HTTP to HTTPS, a welcome move for security. But the history has meant older parts of Django have had a lingering HTTP bias. Many of these have been migrated to default to HTTPS instead in previous versions. Django 5.0 starts the migration of another, tiny HTTP bias in forms.URLField.
git status output with --short or status.shortBy default git status uses “long format”, which lists information explicitly. This format takes quite a lot of words and vertical space to split file status by section:
git reflogIf you make a mistake whilst rebasing, it might seem hard to undo. But with git reflog, you can find the original commit SHA and revert back to it. Let’s see how with an example.
Here are some Django-related deals for this year’s Black Friday (24th Nov) and Cyber Monday (27th Nov), including my own.
runserver with lsofIf you start runserver but your terminal session gets closed, the server can continue running in the background. For example, this can happen when your IDE crashes. This situation is annoying because you can’t stop the backgrounded runserver with Ctrl-C.
Earlier this week, I made another podcast appearance on The Python Show, episode 22: Git and Django with Adam Johnson. As fellow authors, Mike and I talked a lot about the writing process, on topics like:
Last week, I made another podcast appearance on the PyBites Podcast, episode 139: Maximizing Your Developer Experience (DX) with Adam Johnson. We talked about various topics, including:
I had the pleasure of returning to The Real Python podcast in last week’s episode 179, Improving Your Git Developer Experience in Python. It was great to catch up with host Christopher Bailey and chat about:
Here’s a write-up of an optimization I made in my client Silvr’s project. I ended up disabling a PostgreSQL feature called the JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler which was taking a long time for little benefit.
git log with a commit SHA shows that commit and those before it:
Most projects I work on use Python, good ol’ Pip, and pip-tools. Below is a pattern I’ve used to speed up the GitHub Actions workflow runs on several such projects. On larger projects with many dependencies, it can save tens of seconds per run.
--force-with-lease and --force-if-includesWhen you push, Git checks that you are only adding commits to the remote branch. If you try to push an out-of-date branch, it will fail:
To show only the subject of the latest commit (the first line of its message), use:
The clipboard is an easy way to transfer data from the command line to other tools. Use your system’s “copy to clipboard” command to store a command’s output for pasting into other applications.