Deep insights from our research and experience

Two of the biggest benefits pipenv and poetry are dependency locking and hash checking. Dependency locking means you can specify the direct dependencies your code requires, for example, celery==4.4.* and the tooling will lock, not only celery to a specific …

Consider a “white labeled” app where a CMS admin can customize the design of their public-facing dashboard. The developer is tasked with saving a handful of user-populated values to the database. Colors, fonts, and perhaps a background image or two …

In a previous post, we showed how to use shiv to bundle a Django project into a single file for distribution and deployment. Running a large Python project as a single file feels like magic – which is great until …

This post covers portions of my talk, Containerless Django, from DjangoCon US 2018. Deploying Python has improved significantly since I started working with it over a decade ago. We have virtualenv, pip, wheels, package hash verification, and lock files. Despite …

Most of the Django projects I work with take advantage of django.contrib.auth. It manages users and groups and is tightly coupled with django.contrib.admin. In this post, we are going to explore how it resists a potential attacker. The study below …

Our venerable IRC logger, BotBot.me logged its first lines in the summer of 2012 . Since then, it has logged over 100 million lines for more than 400 IRC channels, primarily on the Freenode and Mozilla networks. Despite the rise …

With Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) now a year away from end-of-life, we’ve been planning and performing upgrades for the soon-to-be legacy OS. The biggest change is the move from Upstart to Systemd for managing services. It’s trivial to convert a service …

I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical about Systemd and its companion log aggregator Journald, but after working with if for a few months, I’ve seen the light (or drunk the Kool Aid… not sure). Typically I …

Every Django project starts with a manage.py file in its root. It’s a convenience script that allows you to run administrative tasks like Django’s included django-admin. In our last post, we discussed the merits of including a setup.py file in …

A client recently asked me why all the Django projects we create have a setup.py in the root of the project. Lots of projects get by just fine without one, so why do I use it? The explanation turned out …