Django for rapid prototyping

from twilio

A little history

• naval battles in the American Civil War
• drove boats through (old) mine field in Battle of Mobile(?) Bay
• “damn the torpedos”
• sometimes the best thing to do is grit your teeth and go full speed ahead
• take part in lots of hackathons
• feed junk food and caffiene to developers and see what happens
• learnt a lot about prototyping (and django in that role)
• “throw away code” to get stuff going - but weird, we don’t normally throw code away
• do try to avoid “proto-duction”

django is good for prototyping is good because:

• pedigree (built for newsroom) good for rapid getting stuff done
• flexible
• foreman is useful tool - make file
• two scoops project - good basic layout
• plato (from mozilla) - good for security, but django 1.3, uses jinja templating

static files - django.contrib.staticfiles is good - look inside both project and application folders

heroku good to get up and running quickly

config management really pays off

• chef recipes for django on ubuntu precise - nginx, gunicorn, ...
• salt also good

REST API

• tasty pie

• django rest framework

  • more tightly coupled
  • bit more time to set up, but lets you work with Django Views
  • easy browsable interface

social auth

• rats nest - lots of options
• django-social-auth seems to be the best option currently, bit of set up required
• django-allauth also a decent option, good for facebook

south migrations

celery as task queue is really good part of django ecosystem

• can use db as back end for small instances, rabbitmq later
• config mgt helps

testing

• still need to do testing - the mistakes you make twice are the ones that kill you
• nose and django test client