Django Posts

Uploading a video to YouTube seems like a simple enough task, but non-existent documentation and unmaintained libraries can make even the simplest of tasks seem daunting.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Django Developer Ivan Carmo da Rocha Neto guides you through how to post YouTube videos from your Django app.

Donald Knuth said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But there comes a time, usually in mature projects with high loads, when the need to optimize presents itself. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Iulian Gulea talks about five common methods to optimize a web project’s code using principles that can be used in Django as well as other frameworks and languages. Using these principles, he demonstrates how to reduce the response time of a query from 77 to 3.7 seconds.

In this article, I will try to give you a good understanding of which scenarios could be covered by Celery. Not only will you see interesting examples, but will also learn how to apply Celery with real world tasks such as background mailing, report generation, logging and error reporting. I will share my own way of testing tasks beyond emulation and explain a few tricks that go beyond the official documentation and took me hours of research to discover myself.

In this tutorial, we will look at some common mistakes that are often made by Django developers and ways to avoid them. This tutorial is useful even if you’re a skilled Django developer because these mistakes aren’t just limited to new developers taking their first stab at Django.

So you’ve implemented user authentication. Now, you want to allow your users to log in with Twitter, Facebook or Google. No problem. You’re only a few lines of code away from doing so.

But while there are hundreds of OAuth 2 packages that pip knows, only a few actually do what they’re supposed to do.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Peter Goodspeed-Niklaus explains how to integrate OAuth 2 into your Django or Django Rest Framework using Python Social Auth.

Nowadays, almost all Python frameworks use WSGI as a means, if not the only means, to communicate with their web servers. This is how Django, Flask and many other popular frameworks do it.

This article intends to provide the reader with a glimpse into how WSGI works, and allow the reader to build a simple WSGI application or server.

Although the most wide-spread and supported way of running Django is on a Linux system (e.g., with uwsgi and nginx), it actually doesn’t take much work to get it to run on IIS. In this article, Toptal Engineer Ivan Voras walks you through a step-by-step tutorial, clearly explaining how to install Django on IIS.

I love and use Django in lots of my personal and client projects, mostly for those involving relational databases and more classical web applications. However, by design, Django is very tightly coupled with its ORM, Template Engine System, and Settings object. Plus, it’s not a new project: it carries a lot of baggage from the past to remain backwards compatible.

In a few of my client projects, we’ve chosen to give up on Django and use a micro framework like Flask, typically when the client wants to do some interesting stuff with the framework. At the same time, we often need user registration, login, and more, all of which is easily handled with Django.

The question emerged: is Django an all-or-nothing deal? Should we drop it completely from the project, or is there a way to combine some it with the flexibility of other frameworks?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s a well known phrase, but as we know, most of the human technological progress was made by people who decided to fix what isn’t broken. Especially in the software industry one could argue that most of what we do is fixing what isn’t broken.

Fixing functionality, improving the UI, improving speed and memory efficiency, adding features: these are all activities for which it is easy to see if they are worth doing, and then we argue for or against spending our time on them. However, there is an activity, which for the most part falls into a gray area: refactoring, and especially large scale refactoring.

It’s always fun to put your programming skills on display. A while back, I figured it’d be cool to try and control my laptop via my Android mobile device. Think about it: being able to play and pause music, start and stop programming jobs or downloads, etc., all by sending messages from your phone. Neat, huh?

At Toptal, we’re always looking for the best freelancers around. But what makes a freelancer truly great? Luis Martinho, one of our top developers, is beloved by his clients — so we sat down with him to talk about freelancing, technologies, and paying your taxes.