[ Updated: I've had an offer, so this has been taken care of. Thanks. ]

I'm trying to make it to Washington, DC, for the Django sprint on August 1. Is there anybody in the area who has a couch or floor I could sleep on for the night before the sprint and the night afterwards? If I can save having to buy a hotel room around the area in the peak of summer, that would be nice.

Any responses to "malcolm at pointy-stick" (or firstname.lastname at gmail). Thanks.

Topics: software/django

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Clint Ecker doesn't seem to have his posts syndicated over at the Django aggregator. (*) Over the recent couple of days, though, Clint's been posting about a few different Django apps he's been using in his professional projects and has released to the wider world. Plus a few "how I work" tips.

• django-chunks (seriously, dude! That was the best name you could come up with??)
• Super-simple Google analytics
• Three Django tips

Go read them. Now.

(*) Probably because we've reached the legal limit of Chicago people on that page and he lucked out. Ironic really.

Topics: software/django

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Seems to be my week to be interviewed. Shabda Raaj interviewed me over IM earlier this week about Django and Open Source in general. It's been published at The 42 Topics Blog.

Topics: software/django, software/open source

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Michael Trier and Brian Rosner released another episode of This Week In Django and I was asked to play the role of guest speaker. The focus was on internalisation in Django (and in general in software).

I realised after we recorded it that I neglected to mention a few things that are probably of note for developers trying to write international software. Consequently, here's a small follow-up with some additional things I thought of last night.

This isn't entirely Django-specific, since most of these techniques apply to software in general.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/django, software/internationalisation

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Following on from some positive feedback to my recent post about writing portions of the ORM layer in Django, I'm encouraged to do another post about one particular implementation detail that took some time to puzzle through.

Sorry, general non-technical readers. This is another heavy Python post. Sorry, technical readers. This is another "how Malcolm thinks" post. It's not pretty. The good news is, there's no SQL in this post.

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Topics: software/design, software/django

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Too busy to write any long blog posts at the moment. Far too busy to write shorter ones.

Instead, a quick follow-up to my recent posting about Rusty Russell's API design levels. Rusty has now started with the first in what he promises will be a series about good API design.

I'm taking the hard line on a few API design decisions in Django at the moment for reasons I've learnt from people like this. More about that in a future post. In the meantime, people should learn this stuff.

Topics: software/design, software/django

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I haven't done a Django-related post in a while. Mostly because I've been a bit depressed by the whole thing lately for various reasons and writing tutorials isn't going to fix that. So, instead, here's a bit of a brain-dump of stuff I've been working on.

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Topics: software/design, software/django

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In a little over four weeks (17 March in the US), Django will have another one of our code sprints. The 'main event' will be in Chicago, USA, where a bunch of people will be taking advantage of the post-PyCon sprint sessions for three days. However, as always, remote participation is possible and encouraged.

Somebody recently asked on django-users what they could to prepare for the sprint, since this was going to be their first time. Jacob has promised to give an introductory tutorial on the day in Chicago, which will help those present in person. For others, here are my thoughts on how to prepare (and why now isn't too early to start if you want to get some real work done).

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Topics: software/django

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Whilst going through my feed reading this morning, I read the application-level context processors were not possible. This came as a bit of a shock, since I've been using them for a while now. :-)

It's not hard and there's an interesting conclusion to be drawn about the power of scoping rules (plus a reprise on my thoughts on why putting everything under the sun into a framework isn't a great idea).

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Topics: software/django/tips

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On the Django mailing list, we periodically see requests for help by somebody trying to create a semi-complex form of some description. Often, getting a second perspective is a good choice because the original poster was overlooking a possibly easier alternate approach.

Today, I want to fill in one of the gaps. Something that is really easy once you know the machinery and possibly not so obvious until you sweat it out once: putting multiple repetitive sections into a single form.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/django/tips

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