Every few months we get an alert from our database monitoring to warn us that we are about to run out of space. Usually we just provision more storage and forget about it, but this time we were under quarantine, and the system in question was under less load than…

If you work with databases you are probably familiar with B-Tree indexes. They are used to enforce unique and primary-key constraints, and are the default index type in most database engines. If you work with text, geography or other complex types in PostgreSQL, you may have dipped your toes into…

When I started my career in development, my first job was a DBA. Back then, before AWS RDS, Azure, Google Cloud and the rest of them cloud services, there were two types of DBAs: The Infrastructure DBA was in charge of setting up the database, configuring the storage and taking…

Practical Dependency Injection in Python — One of my favorite job interview questions is this: Write a function that returns tomorrow’s date This looks innocent enough for someone to suggest this as a solution: This will work, but there is a followup question: How would you test this function? Before you move on…. take a second…

In my latest article for RealPython I share three ways to tackle one of the most challenging tasks involving Django migrations: moving a model from one Django app to another. The article covers some exotic migration operations and many of the built-in migration CLI commands such sqlmigrate, showmigrations and sqlsequencereset…

Following my previous article on how to build an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with Twilio, Python and Django, in this follow-up tutorial I show how to write automated tests for this system. It can be very challenging to test a system that rely heavily on a third party service…

Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on February 11, 2020. Read this article on by blog with proper syntax highlighting. As developers, we rely on static analysis tools to check, lint and transform our code. We use these tools to help us be more productive and produce better code. However, when we…

Last year my team and I worked on a very challenging IVR system. After almost a year in production and thousands of processed transactions, I teamed up with the great people over at the Twilio blog to write an introductory tutorial for developing IVR systems using Django and Twilio IVR. …