Kristian Øllegaard KristianOellegaard

Where people struggle learning Django

Over the last 3 years or so I've helped a bunch of companies, small and large, switch to Django. As part of that, I've done a lot of teaching Django (and Python) to people new to the platform (and language). I'd estimate I've trained something around 200-250 people so far. These aren't people new to programming — indeed, almost all of them are were currently employed as software developers — but they were new to Python, or to Django, or to web development, or all three.

In doing so, I've observed some patterns about what works and what doesn't. Many (most) of the failings have been my own pedagogical failings, but as I've honed my coursework and my skill I'm seeing, time and again, certain ways that Django makes itself difficult to certain groups of users.

This document is my attempt at organizing some notes around what ways different groups struggle. It's not particularly actionable — I'm not making any arguments about what Django should or shouldn't do (at least

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

	# to install xplenty python SDK run: pip install xplenty
	# more info here: https://github.com/xplenty/xplenty.py

	from xplenty import XplentyClient
	import time


	account_id = "" # your account id (http://app.xplenty.com/account_id/)
	api_key = "" # your api key (get it here https://app.xplenty.com/settings/edit)
	cluster_nodes = 1 # required number of nodes in cluster

	# Do you use boto3 or botocore? Want to capture and inspect your AWS API
	# traffic? This script will send all AWS API traffic to a Runscope bucket for
	# analysis and debugging.
	#
	# Instructions:
	# 1. Sign up for an account at https://www.runscope.com if you don't already
	# have one.
	# 2. Your account will have a single bucket. Get the Bucket Key from Runscope's
	# Traffic Inspector tab; paste that into the RUNSCOPE_BUCKET_KEY constant.
	# 3. Go to https://www.runscope.com/applications and create a new application.

	location /resize {
	alias /tmp/nginx/resize;
	set $width 150;
	set $height 100;
	set $dimens "";

	if ($uri ~* "^/resize_(\d+)x(\d+)/(.*)" ) {
	set $width $1;
	set $height $2;
	set $image_path $3;

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	'''
	Harvest (www.getharvest.com) does not support setting monthly budgets for projects.
	The recommended workaround is creating a new project every month. This script is
	supposed to run on the first of every month and uses the Harvest API in order to
	archive last month's projects and create new ones for the current month. Members
	and tasks are automatically copied over to the new project.

	Projects with monthly budgets need to fulfill two requirements:
	1. They need to have a budget set

	npm install sonos
	npm install git://github.com/balbeko/node-hipchat.git