posts

MusicButler is the first web-app I ever built. It notifies its users about new music by artists found in their libraries. It’s also how I learned a lot of what I know about programming and most of what I know about web-development. I believe it played a huge part in how I got to make a career shift to a software developer in my 30s.

Over the course of developing several Django apps, I’ve learned quite a bit about speed optimizations. Some parts of this process, whether on the backend or frontend, are not well-documented. I’ve decided to collect most of what I know in this article.

This post is a guide on how to scaffold (quick-start) new projects efficiently with Cookiecutter, a library that creates projects from project-templates. It outlines how I created my own Django cookiecutter, Scaffold Django X, but the same can be applied to Flask and pretty much any other Python project.

Returning early is a fairly basic but useful technique and it’s one that I’ve only adopted relatively late in my Python journey. The Zen of Python states that “flat is better than nested” and returning early can definitely make a noticeable difference in this regard.

This is a walkthrough tutorial on how to implement what’s defined as “incremental search” in a Django app. We want results to refresh (with a tiny delay) as the user types their search term. We’ll also give a visual indication that the search is running by animating the search icon.

Dictionaries are versatile, fast, and efficient. This post will cover two dictionary related features that I feel don’t get enough attention: setdefault and defaultdict. They’re presented together to highlight both the differences and the similarities between them.

I’ve recently deployed a tiny changelog app in one of my Django projects. The models.py file looks like this:

Perhaps the most-dreaded aspect of setting-up a new machine is the time spent on reinstalling apps and reapplying all of the customizations from the previous one. As my MacBook Pro is about to turn six, I had been looking for a way to automate this process. At least for the applications part, I recently found a good solution (that’s apparently been around for a while).

When I first started dabbling with Django and web-development, a good friend with a little more experience advised that I should keep logic away from my templates. “Templates should be dumb”.

Something I learned today which should come handy. The include tag allows rendering a partial template from another:

I’ve recently had to download my Django app’s database for local inspection. Heroku lets you do that pretty easily with: