Inspired by an actual incident we had in one of our systems caused by an "Export to Excel" functionality implemented in Python, we go through the process of identifying the problem, experimenting and benchmarking different solutions.
Getting the last value of a group in an aggregated query in PostgreSQL is a challenging task. In this article we present a simple way to get the first or last value of a group using group by.
Have you ever stopped to think what staff user can do in your Django admin site? Did you know staff users with misconfigured permissions on the user model can make themselves superusers? Permissive permissions to staff users can cause disastrous human errors at best, and lead to major data leaks and at worst.
Explore the best way to import messy data from remote source into PostgreSQL using Python and Psycopg2. The data is big, fetched from a remote source, and needs to be cleaned and transformed.
When a developer chooses Python, Django, or Django Rest Framework, it's usually not because of its blazing fast performance. All of this doesn't mean performance is not important. As this story taught us, major performance boosts can be gained with just a little attention, and a few small changes.
If you have a public facing Django site in multiple languages, you probably want to let Google and other search engines know about it.
If you ever had to maintain a traffic heavy Django site, you probably had to deal with graceful migrations. In the article I explain what atomic and reversible migrations are, how to execute "raw" SQL in migrations the right way, and how using a little known migration command we can completely alter the Django migrations built-in behavior.
How we cut a heavy admin dashboard response time in half with advanced SQL and some Django hackery. I recently had the pleasure of optimizing an old dashboard. The solution we came up with required some advanced SQL that Django does not support out of the box. In this article I present the solution, how we got to it, and a word of caution.
I started writing about two years ago. Back then, I used to read a lot on Medium. When I finally felt the urge to write something, it made sense to publish there as well. Medium provided me with a platform, an audience, and constant reinforcements in the form of stats, likes and comments. It motivated me to keep writing. Despite it's many advantages, I feel Medium is lacking in some areas.
Modeling polymorphism in relational databases is a challenging task. In this article, we present several modeling techniques to represent polymorphic objects in a relational database using the Django object-relational mapping (ORM).