Django 3.2 is just around the corner and it’s packed with new features. Django versions are usually not that exciting (it’s a good thing!), but this time many features were added to the ORM, so I find it especially interesting!
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Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on March 3, 2021.
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 usual. We thought this is a good opportunity to do some cleanups that would otherwise be much more challenging.
To start from the end, we ended up freeing more than 70GB of un-optimized and un-utilized space without dropping a single index or deleting any data!
Using conventional technics such as…
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 GIN or GIST indexes. If you manage a read intensive database (or just follow this blog), you may also be familiar with BRIN indexes.
There is another type of index you are probably not using, and may have never even heard of. It is wildly unpopular, and until a few…
Many developers think that having a critical bug in their code is the worst thing that can happen. Well, there is something much worse than that: Having a critical bug in your code and not knowing about it!
To make sure I get notified about critical bugs as soon as possible, I started looking for ways to find anomalies in my data. I quickly found that information about these subjects tend to get very complicated, and involve a lot of ad-hoc tools and dependencies.
I’m not a statistician and not a data scientist, I’m just a developer. Before I introduce dependencies into my system I make sure I really can’t do without them. So, using some high school level statistics and a fair knowledge of SQL, I implemented a simple anomaly detection system that works.
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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 care of backups and replication. After setting up the database, the infrastructure DBA would pop up from time to time and do some “instance tuning”, things like sizing caches.
The Application DBA got a clean database from the infrastructure DBA, and was in charge of schema design: creating tables, indexes…
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 to think about your answer.
Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on June 1, 2020.
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. In the article I also demonstrate important migrations concepts such as reversible migrations, migration plans and introspection.
Read “How to Move a Django Model to Another App” on RealPython ≫
Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on May 6, 2020.
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 such as Twilio. In this article, I show how to organize your code in a way that would isolate your bushiness logic and make it easier to test separately. The article demonstrate useful testing patterns using Django’s RequestFactory, unittest.mock, Pytest fixtures, build-in django-pytest and many more.
The source code for this article and the previous one can be found here.
Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on May 1, 2020.
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 write content using markdown the tools at our disposal are scarce.
In this article we describe how we developed a Markdown extension to address challenges in managing content using Markdown in Django sites.
Like every website, we have different types of (mostly) static content in places like our home page…
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.
Aside from “making your server talk” and diving into the cool speech features, I found the most challenging part working on IVR is designing the views. Unlike APIs and Forms, IVR is very limited in the type of input it takes (DTMF tones, transcribed speech), and the amount of data it can communicate and process is limited.
Originally published at https://hakibenita.com on February 12, 2020.
