Caktus Blog Best of 2017

With 2017 now over, we highlight the top 17 posts published or updated on the Caktus blog this year. Have you read them all?

1. Using Amazon S3 to Store your Django Site’s Static and Media Files: Our most popular blog post was updated in September 2017 with new information. Learn how to use Amazon S3 to serve static and media files and improve site performance.
2. A Production-ready Dockerfile for Your Python/Django App: Docker provides a solid way to containerize an app. This blog post includes a Dockerfile ready for your use plus instructions on how to use it in a project.
3. Python Type Annotations: Type annotation support in Python helps developers avoid errors. Read this post for a quick overview on how to use them.
4. Digging Into Django QuerySets: Learn how to use the Django shell with an example app to perform queries.
5. Hosting Django Sites on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk: We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for deploys and autoscaling. This post introduces the basics and how to use it with Python.
6. SubTests are the Best: Good tests are important to good code, but what makes a good test? Three factors are detailed in this post, which was also presented as a talk at PyOhio 2017 and can be watched on YouTube.
7. Writing Unit Tests for Django Migrations: Another all-time top blog post which received an update this year, with a walkthrough demonstrating how to write thorough tests for multiple versions of Django.
8. Managing Your AWS Container Infrastructure with Python: Introducing CloudFormation and Troposphere as tools to host and manage Python apps on AWS.
9. New Year, New Python: Python 3.6: Highlights from the Python 3.6 release, including secrets, new string interpolation methods, variable type annotations, and more.
10. Advanced Django File Handling: Customize Django’s file handlers for more flexibility. This post shows you how.
11. 5 Ways to Deploy Your Python Web App in 2017: Part of our PyCon 2017 Must See Series, this summary also includes the video of the talk at PyCon. Take a look at a live app deployment with ngrok, Heroku, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Platform, and Docker.
12. Python Tool Review: Using PyCharm for Python Development - and More: One of our developers reviews the PyCharm IDE for Python. Learn more about how it’s used at Caktus in this interview with our developers (from JetBrains).
13. Opening External Links: Same Tab or New?: An exploration of the debate around how external links should open, with perspectives from marketing, UX, web development, and users.
14. Building a Custom Block Template Tag: A walkthrough of how to build a block tag, with references to relevant Django documentation.
15. 3 Reasons to Upgrade to the Latest Version of Django: For business stakeholders new to website development, we offer three reasons why upgrading the technology behind the site should be considered a necessity.
16. From User Story Mapping to High-Level Release Plan: The user story map created as part of a discovery workshop is an excellent tool to use in writing the first release plan for a development project. Find out why in this post.
17. How to Make a jQuery: Recreate the most helpful parts of jQuery to learn how to develop without it.

Going into 2018

What were your favorite posts? What topics did you find most interesting or helpful? What are you hoping to learn about in 2018? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter what you’d like to see more of in the coming year.