Django

Simple controls over complex technologies, as we put it, wouldn't be possible without neat UIs for our user areas including start page, dashboard, settings, and docs.

Initially, there was Django. Back in 2011, considering our Python-centric approach, that was the best choice. Later, we realized we needed to iterate on our website more quickly. And this led us to detaching Django from our front end. That was when we decided to build an SPA.

For building user interfaces, we're currently using React as it provided the fastest rendering back when we were building our toolkit. It’s worth mentioning Uploadcare is not a front-end-focused SPA: we aren’t running at high levels of complexity. If it were, we’d go with Ember.js.

However, there's a chance we will shift to the faster Preact, with its motto of using as little code as possible, and because it makes more use of browser APIs. One of our future tasks for our front end is to configure our Webpack bundler to split up the code for different site sections. For styles, we use PostCSS along with its plugins such as cssnano which minifies all the code.

All that allows us to provide a great user experience and quickly implement changes where they are needed with as little code as possible.

Sentry started as (and remains) an open-source project, growing out of an error logging tool built in 2008. That original build nine years ago was Django and Celery (Python’s asynchronous task codebase), with PostgreSQL as the database and Redis as the power behind Celery.

We displayed a truly shrewd notion of branding even then, giving the project a catchy name that companies the world over remain jealous of to this day: django-db-log. For the longest time, Sentry’s subtitle on GitHub was “A simple Django app, built with love.” A slightly more accurate description probably would have included Starcraft and Soylent alongside love; regardless, this captured what Sentry was all about.

#MessageQueue #InMemoryDatabases

We recently switched from MongoDB and the Python library MongoEngine to PostgreSQL and Django in order to:

• Better leverage GraphQL (using the Graphene library)
• Allow us to use the autogenerated Django admin interface
• Allow better performance due to the way some of our pages present data
• Give us more a mature stack in the form of Django replacing MongoEngine, which we had some issues with in the past.

MongoDB was hosted on mlab, and we now host Postgres on Amazon RDS .

Django or NodeJS? Hi, I’m thinking about which software I should use for my web-app. What about Node.js or Django for the back-end? I want to create an online preparation course for the final school exams in my country. At the beginning for maths. The course should contain tutorials and a lot of exercises of different types. E.g. multiple choice, user text/number input and drawing tasks. The exercises should change (different levels) with the learning progress. Wrong questions should asked again with different numbers. I also want a score system and statistics. So far, I have got only limited web development skills. (some HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Wordpress). I don’t know JavaScript or Python.

Possible pros for Python / Django: - easy syntax, easier to learn for me as a beginner - fast development, earlier release - libraries for mathematical and scientific computation

Possible pros for JavaScript / Node.js: - great performance, better choice for real time applications: user should get the answer for a question quickly

Which software would you use in my case? Are my arguments for Python/NodeJS right? Which kind of database would you use?

Thank you for your answer!

Node.js JavaScript Django Python

I really love Django because it is really fast to create a web application from scratch and it has a lot a facilities like the ORM or the Admin module ! The Python language is really easy to read and powerful, that's why I prefer Django over Symfony.

I use Django at work to make tools for the technicians but I also use it for me to build my personal website which I host on PythonAnywhere, and with a domain name bought on Namecheap.

Python Django PostgreSQL Bootstrap jQuery

Healthchecks.io is a SaaS cron monitoring service. I needed a tool to monitor my cron jobs. I was not happy with the existing options, so I wrote one. The initial goal was to get to a MVP state, and use it myself. The followup goals were to add functionality and polish the user interface, while keeping the UI and the under the hood stuff as simple and clean as possible.

Python and DJango were obvious choices as I was already familiar with them, and knew that many of Django's built-in features would come handy in this project: ORM, testing infrastructure, user authentication, templates, form handling.

On the UI side, instead of doing the trendy "React JS app talking to API endpoints" thing, I went with the traditional HTML forms, and full page reloads. I was aiming for the max simplicity. Paraphrasing Kevin from The Office, why waste time write lot JS when form submit do trick. The frontend does however use some JS, for example, to support live-updating dashboards.

The backend is also aiming for max simplicity, and I've tried to keep the number of components to the minimum. For example, a message broker or a key-value store could be handy, but so far I'm getting away with storing everything in the Postgres database.

The deployment and hosting setup is also rather primitive by today's standards. uWSGI runs the Django app, with a nginx reverse proxy in front. uWSGI and nginx are run as systemd services on bare metal servers. Traffic is proxied through Cloudflare Load Balancer, which allows for relatively easy rolling code upgrades. I use Fabric for automating server maintenance. I did use Ansible for a while but moved back to Fabric: my Ansible playbooks were slower, and I could not get used to mixing YAML and Jinja templating.

Healthchecks.io tech decisions in one word: KISS. Use boring tools that get the job done.