Django Round-up #3

Happy Friday! Django Round-up #3 is packed full of good info. Let’s get started…

Featured

Everyblock Shutdown

We start off with some sad news, Django BDFL Adrian Holovaty’s brainchild, Everyblock, was abruptly shutdown by NBC News this week. Some of the code lives on, however, as part of the OpenBlock Project.

Django Circus Talks Announced

The next installment of DjangoCon EU is looking even better with a great line-up of speakers. So good, in fact, that early-bird tickets sold out in a matter of minutes!

Open Bastion wins DjangoCon US Contract

Speaking of DjangoCons, Steve Holden’s company, Open Bastion, won the bid to organize the next two conferences stateside. He’ll be bringing 2013’s conference to Chicago.

Links of Interest

RQ

RQ (Redis Queue) is a simple Python library for queuing and processing background jobs. It steals the best of Ruby’s resque and is designed to have a low barrier to entry. If celery feels like overkill for your needs, RQ may suit your needs.

Python Web Framework Session Management

Hoàng Vũ takes a deep dive into a few popular Python web frameworks (including Django) to see how they handle sessions by default. He shows a proof-of-concept attack that would allow an attacker with access to your SECRET_KEY to perform remote code execution. Just a reminder to keep your SECRET_KEY safe!

War is Peace

Rails has had it’s share of security issues lately, primarily around the way it handles YAML parsing. Ned Batchelder looks at common practices in Python and how developers can prevent making the same mistakes.

South’s `--update` flag

An often overlooked feature of South that lets you quickly iterate over a model’s schema without writing a new migration every time.

Shrinking images with image-diet

Here’s a clever extension for easy-thumbnails that will also compress your images (less bandwidth, faster load times) as it processes them.

Optimizing JavaScript with django-require

Now that you’ve got your images optimized, learn how to optimize your JavaScript. Writing for Safari Books Online, Jeremy Bowman shows how to integrate RequireJS with Django’s staticfiles framework using django-require.

Building Your First Django Blog Tutorial

A thorough beginners tutorial from .Net Magazine on how to put together the pieces of a new Django project and build your first blog application.

Translating Sentences with Substitutions

Core developer, Luke Plant discusses why this sort of translation is so difficult and proposes a solution in reference to Django issue #11688.

New & Updated Packages

django-extensions the venerable Django helpers bundle
django-conch an interesting experiment in exposing the Django shell as an SSH server
django-pipeline an asset packaging library, providing CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression among other features
django-nap a light REST library borrowing features from TastyPie and django-rest-framework
django-mini lets you run and test stand-alone Django apps without a settings file

Jobs

Like what you saw? Did we miss something? Drop us a line and let us know so we can make the next round-up even better!