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.
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.
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.
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).
I often talk about making Django scale but what does it actually mean? It means getting consistent performance regardless of the amount of data. In this article we tackle The last nail in Django admin's scalability coffin - the paginator.
Every team has a unique development style. Some teams implement localization and require translations. Some teams are more sensitive to database issues and require more careful handling of indexes and constraints. In this article we describe how we enforce our own development style using the Django check framework, the inspect and the ast modules from the Python standard library.
ORMs offer great utility for developers but abstracting access to the database has its costs. Developers who are willing to poke around the database and change some defaults often find that great improvements can be made.