Django

We’ve waited eagerly for DjangoCon 2021 since last year’s event was cancelled due to COVID-19. Not only is the event back, but it’s free to attend! DjangoCon will take place virtually on October 22 and 23 — it will be unprecedented since this is the first time the conference will be virtual.

There are multiple ways to schedule tasks in your Django app, but there are some advantages to using Celery. It’s supported, scales well, and works nicely with Django. Given its wide use, there are also lots of resources for learning more about it, and once learned, that knowledge is likely to be useful on other projects.

Have you heard of the Django Chat podcast? With more than 90 episodes on all things Django, it’s full of informative interviews featuring some of the best and brightest in the industry.

We regularly update and improve our upgrades and sustainability service offerings at Caktus, and a recent upgrade for a client precipitated a solution that I felt might be worth sharing. At Caktus, the preferred approach for addressing upgrades and sustainability is to make incremental updates to a project over time, trying to keep both Django and the servers themselves on a long-term support version. These are select versions of Django and Ubuntu, for example, that generally have much longer support periods than other versions, i.e., they are a good fit for applications that you will need to continue maintaining well into the future.

When removing fields from Django models, or adding non-nullable fields, it can be hard to avoid a mismatch between code running on some servers and the database in use.

Last year, Apple announced that they would transition their entire Mac line from Intel processors to their ARM64 Apple Silicon chip called the M1. Several weeks ago, I started testing development on MacBook Air with the Apple M1 chip (pictured above).

We’ve published summaries of our most popular blog posts before (see Top 19 of 2019 and Top 18 of 2018), but this time, we’re taking it a step further. We’re sharing the 20 most popular posts in 2020, regardless of the year the post was originally published. And some of these have been around a while! Based on total pageviews, here are the blogs that rose to the top of the popularity list, from most viewed to least viewed.

I keep up with what's happening in my field by following a number of blogs and an occasional email list. I don't read everything posted in all of these, but by scanning the topics in a feed reader, I can keep up with what's going on, without wasting a lot of time.

Last August, our CTO Colin Copeland wrote about how to import multiple Excel files in your Django project using pandas. We have used pandas on multiple Python-based projects at Caktus and are adopting it more widely.

During the last year we gave our popular technical blog an official name: Developer Access. We published 32 posts on the blog, including technical how-to’s, conference information, web development best practices and detailed guides. Among all those posts, 19 rose to the top of the popularity list (based on total pageviews):