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.
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.
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.
From time to time I like to read documentation of modules I think I know well. The python documentation is not a pleasant read but sometimes you strike a gem.
Hunting down slow tests by reporting tests that take longer than a certain threshold (Because the first step to better test performance is awareness!)
Tests can be a bummer to write but even a bigger nightmare to maintain. When we noticed we are putting off simple tasks just because we were afraid to update some monster test case, we started looking for more creative ways to simplify the process of writing and maintaining tests. In this article I will describe a class based approach to writing tests.