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We recently upgraded our 160,000 lines of backend Python code from Python 2 to Python 3. We did with zero downtime and no major errors! Here’s how we did it, hopefully it will help anyone else still stuck on Python 2!
I recently released version 0.1.10 of my library django-mysql, for which the main new feature was a backend for Django’s cache framework called MySQLCache. This post covers some of the inspiration and improvements it has, as well as a basic benchmark against Django’s built-in DatabaseCache.
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.
I’ve recently been working on improving the test suite at YPlan. The biggest change is moving towards dynamic fixtures for our Django models using “Factory Boy”. This library is essentially a tool that lets you define simple helper functions to generate random, sensible model instances quickly; by using them in tests you can avoid the static JSON fixture files that Django recommends you use in tests by default. Factories are also general purpose - they just generate data and use it to create a model - and so they can be re-used to fill your development database rather than dumping from production.
On Tuesday I gave a talk on Django at the London Django Meetup Group, titled “Django at Scale.” The slides are hosted on GitHub.
I was looking through the MySQL slow_log for YPlan and discovered that there were a lot of SELECT COUNT(*) queries going on, which take a long time because they require a full table scan. These were coming from the Django admin, which displays the total count on every page.