Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Entries tagged django, python

Filters: Type: entry × django × python × Sorted by date


Why is snapEDA.com slow? Is it because it uses Django?

No, it’s not slow because it uses Django.

[... 36 words]

What are some good resources to learn how to cleanse data using Python?

http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ “Text Processing in Python” is a free online book that covers a bunch of useful topics related to data cleanup. It’s over 10 years old now but is still mostly relevant—the chapter on regular expressions is particularly good.

[... 61 words]

Is it better to create your own framework, or would it be best to just use Django or something like that?

You should absolutely use an existing framework such as Django rather than writing your own.

[... 176 words]

For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?

S3 is really a no-brainer for this, it’s extremely inexpensive, very easy to integrate with and unbelievably reliable. It’s so cheap that it will be practically free for testing purposes (expect to spend pennies a month on it).

[... 88 words]

What advice would Simon Willison give to a beginner Python/Django developer?

Build something and put it on the internet. Make sure you have an easy way to deploy new versions (Heroku is a good bet if you don’t want to figure out Fabric). Pick a project that’s useful to you—a simple blogging engine is often a good bet, or maybe something that aggregates together your posts from Twitter and Instagram and so on. Or come up with something a bit more creative!

[... 109 words]

What is the best way to deploy Django?

These days a popular and reliable method is to run gunicorn behind nginx. This tutorial includes notes on using upstart for process management which is handy if you are on Ubuntu: http://lincolnloop.com/django-be...

[... 47 words]

Do Flask and Django have a GUI interface like web2py?

No. The web2py GUI is something of an oddity in the Python world.

[... 65 words]

What are some apps, problems you would suggest to solve a new python developer?

The best way to learn python in my opinion is using the interactive prompt. Install ipython (a massive improvement on the standard python shell) and use it to interactively solve some simple tasks—things like downloading a CSV file from the web using the urllib library, parsing it with the csv module, then poking around in the data using python list comprehensions and saving some of the results out to a JSON file.

[... 95 words]

What web programming framework best supports ’drag and drop’ actions?  Please give examples of sites and/or plug-ins that support the interaction.

Drag and drop is a client-side thing—it has nothing to do with the server-side technology being used.

[... 72 words]

Python Django load MySQL database from csv files performance issue?

Don’t use the Django ORM for bulk imports—the performance overhead is pretty small for regular web page stuff, but it adds up if you are running millions of inserts.

[... 63 words]

How can I look up Django functions?

You can use the ./manage.py shell command to get a shell which will import any Django modules (or any of your own code) without complaining about the location of the settings.py module. Install IPython first to get a much more useful interactive shell when you run that command.

[... 190 words]

How can I install Django in a server without shell access?

I don’t think you can.

[... 42 words]

Do Python programmers have a tendency to write their own software instead of contributing? Why?

I think you’ll find that PROGRAMMERS have a tendency to develop their own thing rather than contributing to an existing project. It’s even got its own TLA: NIH (Not Invented Here).

[... 94 words]

Are there any good Django video tutorials?

ShowMeDo has 55 video screencasts covering all sorts of aspects of Django development: http://showmedo.com/videotutoria...

[... 56 words]

Is Django on its way out?

Not as far as I can tell—but then like many (most?) other Django users I’m too busy using it to build things to worry too much about whether or not it’s fashionable.

[... 46 words]

Is South the best tool to use when doing database migrations in Django?

Yes. And I say that as an author of another Django migrations tool (dmigrations) which offered a small subset of South’s current functionality.

[... 42 words]

What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django?  Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?

At this point, I’d argue that the decision between them comes down to programming language rather than framework—the frameworks have mostly converged on a very similar set of features.

[... 145 words]

Who are the best Python developers in Los Angeles?

Mahalo is based in Santa Monica, and they have a very talented team of Python/Django people. They also host a regular Django meetup: http://www.meetup.com/ladjango/

[... 40 words]

What’s the easiest way to take an existing Django view and make it “real time” via long polling?

I’d advocate decoupling your long polling endpoints entirely from the rest of your web app stack. Personally I like Node.js for this, but Tornado would work just fine too (I’ve experimented successfully with Tornado long polling in the past).

[... 171 words]

What is the highest traffic website built on top of Django?

My best guess would be Disqus. Instagram are pretty enormous these days as well.

[... 31 words]

WildlifeNearYou: It began on a fort...

Back in October 2008, myself and 11 others set out on the first /dev/fort expedition. The idea was simple: gather a dozen geeks, rent a fort, take food and laptops and see what we could build in a week.

[... 558 words]

Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses

As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team at Guardian HQ to prepare for the release. Here’s what we built:

[... 2081 words]

Django ponies: Proposals for Django 1.2

I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out which ones are worth advocating for. I’m also ensuring I have the code to back them up—my innocent AutoEscaping proposal a few years ago resulted in an enormous amount of work by Malcolm and I don’t think he’d appreciate a repeat performance.

[... 1674 words]

djng—a Django powered microframework

djng is nearly two weeks old now, so it’s about time I wrote a bit about the project.

[... 1501 words]

rev=canonical bookmarklet and designing shorter URLs

I’ve watched the proliferation of URL shortening services over the past year with a certain amount of dismay. I care about the health of the web and try to ensure that URLs I am responsible will last for as long as possible, and I think it’s very unlikely that all of these new services will still be around in twenty years time. Last month I suggested that the Internet Archive start mirroring redirect databases, and last week I was pleased to hear that Archiveteam, a different organisation, had already started crawling.

[... 920 words]

Rate limiting with memcached

On Monday, several high profile “celebrity” Twitter accounts started spouting nonsense, the victims of stolen passwords. Wired has the full story—someone ran a dictionary attack against a Twitter staff member, discovered their password and used Twitter’s admin tools to reset the passwords on the accounts they wanted to steal.

[... 910 words]

DjangoCon and PyCon UK

September is a big month for conferences. DjangoCon was a weekend ago in Mountain View (forcing me to miss both d.Construct and BarCamp Brighton), PyCon UK was this weekend in Birmingham, I’m writing this from @media Ajax and BarCamp London 5 is coming up over another weekend at the end of this month. As always, I’ve been posting details of upcoming talks and notes and materials from previous ones on my talks page.

[... 446 words]

Announcing dmigrations

The team at Global Radio (formerly GCap Media) is the largest group of Django developers I’ve personally worked with, consisting of 14 developers split into two scrum teams, all contributing to the same overall codebase.

[... 625 words]

jQuery style chaining with the Django ORM

Django’s ORM is, in my opinion, the unsung gem of the framework. For the subset of SQL that’s used in most web applications it’s very hard to beat. It’s a beautiful piece of API design, and I tip my hat to the people who designed and built it.

[... 820 words]

Django People: OpenID and microformats

In hindsight, it was a mistake to launch Django People without support for OpenID. It was on the original feature list, but in the end I decided to cut any feature that wasn’t completely essential in order to get the site launched before it drowned in an ocean of “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-ifs”.

[... 626 words]