Surfing in Kansas
2010 February 14
Django itself has shipped with a "semi-private" introspection API, _meta, for a long time. I have created a drop-dead simple wrapper on top of this.
The value of introspection keeps growing on me as I realize how it makes making truly reusable applications possible. It is an interesting intersection of ...
2010 February 06
UPDATE: There is a new thread about the roles and implementation of a Design Czar up on the Django Developers mailing list. Please contribute there as well, if you have thoughts and ideas.
There has been a [recent discussion](http://groups ...
2010 February 05
[This is part of the Large Problems in Django Series, see previous entries about: APIs, Search, and Database Migrations]
Django is ...
2010 January 07
A couple things I want to talk about. First of all, I will be participating in project52; which is a competetion to write a blog post in every week of the year. The last 2 years I have done the november post-a-day, and gotten about 25 of ...
2009 November 22
With Kong, I have been trying to figure out a way to provide overridden model defaults. At work, our pythonpath's default to /home/code, however your setup is probably different. It would be useful if there was a simple way to let you override the defaults for your Kong ...
2009 November 19
When working on side projects, usually you wear all of the hats. Sysadmin, developer, designer, marketing, etc. You have to do all of them, and presumably you do one or two of them well, and the others well enough to get by. Working at the Journal World has been the ...
2009 November 18
On Monday at work, our sites started to slow to a crawl. We looked to diagnose the problem, and found that the database server had a load of 10, and was struggling to keep up with the morning rush of traffic. After EXPLAINing the slow queries from the slow query ...
2009 November 17
At work we have to manage a ton of Django based sites. Just for our World Company sites, we have over 50 different settings files, and this doesn't take into account the sites that we host for other clients. At this size it becomes basically impossible to test each ...
2009 November 16
At most open source conferences, a lot of attention is given to the talks. At the ones that I have been to (Djangocon and Pycon), the most fun that I have had, and the most I have learned is during the sprints. I want to talk about the value and ...
2009 November 13
As part of the summer of code 2009, Django test coverage has been developed. I mentored Kevin Kusabik, who developed the code. It is hopefully going to be merged in 1.2, but there are still a few issues to be worked out in the implementation ...
2009 November 12
When I was about to graduate from college, I was often asked what I would be doing with the rest of my life. This is a usual question that is asked of graduates and I have very rarely heard it answered to satisfaction. Upon being asked this for the 42nd ...
2009 November 11
This is the third part of my Large Problems Series. The first two were Search and Database Migrations.
A lot of efforts have come and gone in the Django space, trying to provide a ...
2009 November 10
Updated at the bottom of the post.
Warning: This is a bit of a brain dump.
In the software industry there is a lot of back and forth about the value of a college degree. This post won't go into that too much, I just want to talk about ...
2009 November 09
At work, a lot of our sites have sweet mobile versions. The problem is how to educate people of their existence. Currently we just have little ads that show up on the site that promote the ...
2009 November 06
Continuing in the series of big problems that are mostly solved, we have database migrations. A couple days ago I talked about Search.
Database Migrations are an interesting piece of the Django community. Rails has the functionality built in, but ...
2009 November 05
Python packaging has been in a bit of a state of disarray for as long as I've been using it. Pip has come along to make installing python packages easier. It has a lot of features that are useful, but they have been talked about in many other blog ...
2009 November 03
In my previous post about template tags, I discussed the two steps required for template tags. Today I will be focusing on Parsing of template tags, and how they may be improved in the framework of Class Based Template Tags from yesterday ...
2009 November 03
In Django, template tags currently are separated between a Node class and a "parsing function". The parsing function takes the tag, represented as a string, parses the input, and passes the correct arguments to a Node class. The Node class then does whatever rendering it does, or updating ...
2009 November 02
It's been a little over a year since I started doing Django development full-time, for one of them real jobs. Around that time, there were a few large problems in the community that hadn't been solved yet. They were kind of blemishes when you would talk to people ...
2009 October 16
Update As of Django 1.2, Django ships with default test settings for sqlite. They require two databases to be defined, because of Multidb. More information at Django advent and in the docs
Alex Gaynor ...
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Correct way to handle default model fields.
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