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Here’s a small problem I’ve seen where several modules share versions of the same “constant” variable. It came up in the context of a Django project with multiple settings files, but it could happen in different contexts.
In December I was awarded the Malcolm Tredinnick Award. This is an annual award, selected by nominations from anyone in the Django community. I’m incredibly honoured to have been selected, joining a fine list of past recipients. I’ve been inspired by every one of them.
Your site’s favicon appears in the browser tab, and is a key way to brand your site. Setting up a favicon is a simple task, but once you start considering vendor-specific icons, it becomes more complicated.
The “tabs versus spaces” war is scheduled to rage on until the heat death of the universe. And whilst the Python ecosystem is firmly in the “spaces” camp, there remain numerous other text formatting options.
On Monday I released my new book “Boost Your Django DX”. It covers many tools and practices that are useful for developing Django projects.
My new book, Boost Your Django DX is out now. I’m so glad it has shipped and I can relax, a bit 😅
I’ve again had the pleasure of joining Carlton and Will on the Django Chat podcast, in Episode #105. They moved fast with this one - we spoke yesterday, and the podcast is live today!
Happy new year, and happy new upgrade! Django has issued a new security release today. This is the first set of security fixes that I’ve been involved in, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain the issues in a bit more depth.
If you use Gunicorn, it’s likely you have a configuration file. This is a Python module that contains settings as module-level variables. Here’s an example with some essential settings:
Hitting “refresh” to see your changes is an instinct many web developers develop. But it’s a small waste of time that adds up to many hours per year spent waiting. It’s a sub-optimal development experience (DX).
Developer Experience (DX) is a catch-all term for anything that can improve your development workflow. Such improvements can help you write better code, faster, with fewer bugs.
functools.partial() in DjangoI remain convinced that Python’s functools.partial() is underappreciated. Following my previous post, here are three more ways to use partial() with Django.
Django 4.0 had its first alpha release last week and the final release should be out in December. It contains an abundance of new features, which you can check out in the release notes. In this post we’ll look at the changes to testing in a bit more depth.
Django deprecates a small list of features with every feature release, requiring us to update our projects, which can be monotonous. Today I’m announcing a new tool I’ve created, django-upgrade, that automates some of this drudgery for us all.
I released my book “Speed Up Your Django Tests” over a year ago, in May 2020. Since then, we’ve seen two major Django releases, including a whole bunch of test-related changes, some of which I worked on as part of the book.
A “magic number” is the anti-pattern of using a number directly rather than storing it in a descriptive variable name. In web code HTTP status codes are often used as magic numbers, perhaps because web developers memorize common codes such as 200 and 404. In Python, we can avoid such magic with descriptive references from the standard library’s http.HTTPStatus enum.
I released my book Speed Up your Django Tests (SUYDT) just over a year ago, on the 18th May. It’s had a great reception, with 379 customers so far, many writing in to say how it has improved their test suites’ performance and readability.
A common way to receive data in a web application is with a webhook. The external system pushes data to yours with an HTTP request.
Another way to use database constraints via Django’s CheckConstraint class.
functools.partial() in DjangoPython’s functools.partial is a great tool that I feel is underused.
Google has started rolling out FLoC, currently to 0.5% of Chrome users, and some sites are already disabling it. In this post we’ll cover what FLoC is, who’s disabling it, why, and how to do so on a Django site.
Here are three new security headers on the block:
heroicons is a free SVG icon set for your websites, from the creators of tailwindcss. SVG icons are great - they’re small, they sit inline in your HTML, and you can scaled and colour them with plain HTML and CSS. And heroicons is a great icon set - minimal, clear, and consistent.
I created django-feature-policy in 2018 allow Django projects to control the draft security header Feature-Policy. Feature-Policy allows your site to restrict which origins can use some sensitive browser features, such as the the payments API or access to the webcam. This is valuable if you’re using any third party JavaScript. Whether such JavaScript comes from npm or an external script tag, you can protect against it doing some bad things with your users.
TestCase from using setUp() to setUpTestData()Django’s TestCase class provides the setUpTestData() hook for creating your test data. It is faster than using the unittest setUp() hook because it creates the test data only once per test case, rather than per test.