All articles by Peter Baumgartner

Thumbnail image for The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 2

The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 2

In this long overdue follow-up to Part 1, I’ll be discussing the infrastructure issues associated with creating and serving image thumbnails at scale. The naive solution to generating thumbnails is to declare the image sizes you want in your templates …
Thumbnail image for Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

One of my favorite patterns in Django is the combination of “fat” models and cached_property from django.utils.functional. Fat models are a general MVC concept which encourages pushing logic into methods on your Model layer rather than the Controller (“view” in …
Thumbnail image for Django Anti-Patterns: Signals

Django Anti-Patterns: Signals

Django’s Signal Dispatcher is a really powerful feature that you should never use. Ok, it has valid use cases, but they may be rarer than you think. First, to dispel a misconception about signals, they are not executed asynchronously. There …
Thumbnail image for Multiple Sites with Routing in uWSGI

Multiple Sites with Routing in uWSGI

In another of our “you can do that?!?” with uWSGI posts, today I’ll show you how to use uWSGI to host multiple sites and properly route traffic based on the hostname to those sites. Multiple Sites (aka Emperor Mode) uWSGI …
Thumbnail image for 10 Years of Lincoln Loop

10 Years of Lincoln Loop

April marked Lincoln Loop’s 10th anniversary in business. As I reflect on that, I find myself going through all the typical platitudes: it’s been a roller-coaster ride, how proud I am of the team, looking forward to another 10 years, …
Thumbnail image for Serving Static Files with uWSGI

Serving Static Files with uWSGI

Serving Static Files with uWSGI As noted in a previous post, uWSGI is a Swiss Army knife of functionality. One of its features is a built-in static file server. When to Use uWSGI for Serving Static Files While it may …
Thumbnail image for The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 1

The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 1

Images are everywhere on the web. Whether you’re building a simple blog, a CMS, or a true web application, chances are good that you’ll need to deal with images. Editors, authors, users, etc. expect to be able to upload images …
Thumbnail image for Our Failed Kickstarter Was Really a Success

Our Failed Kickstarter Was Really a Success

Our Kickstarter campaign for a companion video series to our book High Performance Django ended today just shy of its target. We consider it a great success! That’s right… a success. When we started the campaign, our internal goal was …
Thumbnail image for The uWSGI Swiss Army Knife

The uWSGI Swiss Army Knife

uWSGI is one of those interesting projects that keeps adding features with every new release without becoming totally bloated, slow, and/or unstable. In this post, we’ll look at some of its lesser used features and how you might use them …
Thumbnail image for Speeding Up NPM Installs

Speeding Up NPM Installs

I’ve been working on improving our deployment processes as part of the High Performance Django Infrastructure project we’re building out. One consistent pain point is our front-end build system, and particularly, npm installs. For a number of reasons, instead of …