• • 11 December 2017
  • 7 minutes
  • Django, Django Admin, Performance

  Django Admin Range-Based Date Hierarchy

  A few weeks ago we encountered a major performance regression in one of our main admin pages. The page took more than 10 seconds to load (at best) and hit the query execution timeout at worst. When we investigated the issue, we found that the date hierarchy was the cause for most of the time spent loading the admin page. In the article we describe how we significantly improved the performance of Django Admin date hierarchy

• • 06 October 2017
  • 7 minutes
  • Django, Django Admin, Performance

  Scaling Django Admin Date Hierarchy

  The date hierarchy is a great feature but it comes at a price. On very large tables, the way date hierarchy is implemented can make an admin page nearly unusable. In this article we describe the limitations of the date hierarchy, and suggest a way to overcome them.

• • 16 August 2017
  • 6 minutes
  • Python, Django, Testing

  How We Replaced Dozens of Test Fixtures With One Simple Function

  We had a large codebase and a lot of tests. Unfortunately, a lot of our tests were a relic from when we were using fixtures extensively. In this article, we describe a different approach that reduced the number of fixtures we maintain.

• • 07 July 2017
  • 7 minutes
  • Django, ORM

  How to Manage Concurrency in Django Models

  The days of desktop systems serving single users are long gone. Web applications nowadays are serving millions of users at the same time. With many users comes a wide range of new problems: concurrency problems. In this article we describe two approaches for managing concurrency in Django models.

• • 09 June 2017
  • 5 minutes
  • Django, Django Admin

  5 Ways to Make Django Admin Safer

  With great power comes great responsibility. The more powerful your Django admin is, the safer it should be. Making a Django admin safer and more secure doesn't have to be hard - you just have to pay attention. In this article I present 5 ways to protect the Django Admin from human errors and attackers.

• • 11 May 2017
  • 6 minutes
  • PostgreSQL, SQL

  The Many Faces of DISTINCT in PostgreSQL

  I started my programming career as an Oracle DBA. It took a few years but eventually I got fed up with the corporate world and I went about doing my own thing. After I gotten over not having proper partitions and MERGE statement, I found some nice unique features in PostgreSQL. Oddly enough, a lot of them contained the word DISTINCT.

• • 29 April 2017
  • 7 minutes
  • Django, ORM, Performance

  All You Need To Know About Prefetching in Django

  A rundown of all the ways you can use Prefetch to speed up queries in Django.

• • 31 March 2017
  • 7 minutes
  • Django, Django Admin

  How to Turn Django Admin Into a Lightweight Dashboard

  Django Admin is a powerful tool for managing data in your app. However, it was not designed with summary tables and charts in mind. Luckily, the developers of Django Admin made it easy for us to customize. We are going to turn Django Admin into a dashboard by adding a chart and a summary table.

• • 18 February 2017
  • 5 minutes
  • Django, Testing

  How to Test Django Signals Like a Pro

  Django signals are extremely useful for decoupling modules. They allow a low-level Django app to send events for other apps to handle without creating a direct dependency. Signals are easy to set up, but harder to test. In this article we implement a context manager for testing Django signals, step by step.

• • 05 January 2017
  • 8 minutes
  • Python, Django, Testing

  Working With APIs the Pythonic Way

  Communication with external services is an integral part of any modern system. Whether it's a payment service, authentication, analytics or an internal one - systems need to talk to each other. In this short article we are going to implement a module for communicating with a made-up payment gateway, step by step.

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