For fullstack web developers on small projects that still want a reactive single-application interface, it can be usefull to build and serve a React application directly from Django. Here I show how to achieve a minimal setup with the least number of dependencies, and then build on that to include optional but common libraries.
With the addition of asyncio in the Python 3.4 stdlib and the async/await syntax in Python 3.5, co-operative asynchronous programing is now an official part of Python. The co-operative asynchronous mode is not complicated to use - but the Python ecosystem is a bit confusing at first. Here I give an introduction to asynchronous programing concepts and eco-system in Python.
The asyncio library introduced in Python 3.4 allows us to write concurrent code running, amongst other things, network clients and servers. Here I show how to unit-test asyncio code to ensure it is possible to use it over an SSL connection.
Low bandwidth implies high latency - when implementing a site for low bandwidth conditions we must pay attention to the packaging and number of assets we include on each page. Here we look at an approach for combining assets in Django while preserving the relationship between each asset and the code that required it.
CKAN, an open source data portal platform, provides an API for fetching everything from datasets to individual records. Here we look at how CKAN's architecture allows developers to transparently re-implement the datastore API, and how this was used to improve performance by switching all searches to using a Solr backend.
Docker is extremely useful for deploying packages, but also for creating environments for running functional tests. Here I show how to easily setup a cluster of PostgreSQL servers in slave/master replication using Docker and drive them using the Docker Python API.
While the Python ecosystem is replete with libraries for fetching data over the web, none of them give you an easy way to interrupt requests before the queried server has returned the response headers. As more often than not servers will only output response headers once they have the full response at hand, this does not make it possible to release resources early. Here I show a possible implementation based on sockets and Httplib.
Looking to integrate a task queue manager in a service I was implementing, I discarded existing task queues and libraries as over complex for my need and implemented a simple solution based on existing examples found online.
