In praise of inline CSS

September 24, 2013

Inline CSS style attributes get a bad press - but sometimes they can be A Good Thing.

If you have read anything about CSS in the last five years, you will know that inline CSS styles are A Bad Thing. Some claim that the existence of inline styles demonstrates bad programming. CSS should be in included static files, which can be . . .

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Roll forward, not rollback

Deployment strategies for the lean generation

September 24, 2013

If you deploy little and often, two things happen - first, you get a lot better at it, and second, you get to a point where it's easier to fix a deployment issue and redeploy than to attempt a rollback.

If you work in or around a corporate IT department for any length of time you'll get used to hearing a lot about . . .

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Django middleware, sessions and users

September 06, 2013

A brief walkthrough of the Django session and authentication middleware.

tl;dr If you already know how Django sessions and auth work, read no further - you won't learn anything new.

Coming from a .NET 'enterprise' background, one of the things that confused me at first about Django was the phrase . . .

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Caveat Refactor

July 25, 2013

Refactoring is important enough to be treated as a development activity in its own right and should not be shoe-horned in on the quiet along with other tasks

This post is partly an attempt to atone for my own sins (and apologise to @stevejalim), partly a public aide memoire to prevent me from doing it again.

In 20 years of . . .

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Custom filters for Django objects

July 16, 2013

Using mixins to add fluid filters to Django model managers.

There are plenty of samples on the web showing how to create custom Django
QuerySet and Manager classes to create fluid manager interfaces; here's
another one.

We have a lot of shared fields across models, that we filter on in similar
ways, . . .

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Deploying Django apps to Heroku (#3)

July 11, 2013

In the third (probably not final) post on our deployment process, our Fabric
script has become intelligent enough to manage deployment options on our
behalf.

First a quick recap. As I've posted previously, YunoJuno is a Django app,
hosted on Heroku. We use Fabric to manage deployments, which, as is the
Heroku way, . . .

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Testing OAuth APIs

June 14, 2013

Testing code that relies on remote APIs that themselves rely on OAuth can be painful, if not impossible. This is how we do it.

For all of its well-publicised issues, OAuth is a great step-forward for secure authentication / authorisation for granting access to remote APIs on by apps on behalf of users. We use OAuth to access LinkedIn . . .

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