All articles tagged Development

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Cracking Django Password Hashes

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 …
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Sandboxing Services with Systemd

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 …
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Goodbye manage.py

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 …
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Django Logging, The Right Way

Good logging is critical to debugging and troubleshooting problems. Not only is it helpful in local development, but in production it’s indispensable. When reviewing logs for an issue, it’s rare to hear somebody say, “We have too much logging in …
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Disabling Error Emails in Django

One of Django’s nice “batteries included” features is the ability to send emails when an error is encountered. This is a great feature for small sites where minor problems would otherwise go unnoticed. Once your site start getting lots of …
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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 …