development

With the voting period over for DjangoCon Europe talk proposals I wanted to take a couple of minutes and go over what I think makes a good conference talk proposal and a couple of things that you shouldn’t do. Keep it Informative A lot of people try to be funny in their proposals but miss out on the key points. Your proposal should include a brief description of what you’ll be talking about, the audience that it’s intended for and anything else that you think would be useful for the audience....

Clip is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that allows you to store and quickly access text snippets and manage your clipboard. Installation Installing Clip is simple with pip: $ pip install clip Getting the Code You can either clone the public repository: git clone git@github.com:silent1mezzo/clip.git Download the tarball: $ curl -OL https://github.com/silent1mezzo/clip/tarball/master Or, download the zipball: $ curl -OL https://github.com/silent1mezzo/clip/zipball/master Once you have a copy of the source, you can embed it in your Python package, or install it into your site-packages easily:...

When I was in grade 9 I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t really know what that entailed and I had no idea how many more years of schooling I’d have to complete to realize my dream. In grade 10 I took my first law class and absolutely hated my teacher. From that moment on I knew I would never become a lawyer. I dropped out of law class and took computer science and fell in love....

Django users take for granted the ability to configure your own user model but prior to Django 1.5 you were stuck with Django’s predefined User model. If you want to take advantage of this new functionality then keep on reading as I’ll go through how to migrate your current application to the new configurable user model. Getting Started For the sake of simplicity let’s make our own User object that is exactly the same as Django’s current but fixes the email max_length field to comply with RFC 5321 of 254 characters and adds a required field for the user’s twitter handle....

With the announcement of Django 1.5B1 and the final release of 1.5 around the corner I thought I’d go over some of the largest new features. For those that want to see the release notes you can do so here. Configurable User Model The largest change coming to Django 1.5 is the ability to specify your own user model instead of having to use the one that’s been shipped with Django for the past 6 years....

G Adventures doesn’t hire new people the way most companies do. They still have the normal interview process but what sets them apart from most companies is something called the “Culture Fit” interview. This is the last interview that a candidate goes through and it gives the last go, no-go whether or not a candidate is hired. When I was hired I remember sitting in my Culture Fit interview, nervous and not knowing what to expect....

With the announcement of Django 1.4RC2 and the final release of 1.4 around the corner I thought I’d go over some of the largest new features. For those that want to see the release notes you can do so here. QuerySet.select_for_update() Previously if you had to loop through a QuerySet and update the Models the only safe way was to do QuerySet.objects.filter().update(). If you looped through all the instances and called the individual Models....

“Oh I’ll just write this little script to do. Nobody will ever see it”. I have heard many programmers say that exact sentence. And inevitably someone at some point will see the hacked together script that you never meant for public consumption. I want to propose a challenge to everyone. Write code as if everyone in the world will see it. Here are a few things you can do to complete this challenge....

Have you ever thought to yourself “I haven’t coded in so long, I really need to” but then did something else instead? This is called programming procrastination (PP), and every developer will face it at least once in their career. I get programming procrastination a lot when I’m trying to finish up my pet projects or even something to do with work. I don’t know why I don’t want to program sometimes but here are a few things I do to get me back into the programming mind:...

“If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” -Edsger Dijkstra Testing is arguably the most important step in any software project and also one of the most neglected steps. In most cases, testing is missed because clients don’t realize the importance of it and aren’t willing to pay for, or take the time to have the developers test properly....