Mental Models for Class Based Views

Django’s class-based views are powerful and customizable, but unless you have a solid mental model of how they work, they’re also confusing and tricky to master. It’s easy to use class-based views without a deep understanding of their inner workings, which leads to Googling for which method or attribute to modify rather than confident usage […]

Lazy Django: How Django accesses project settings – Setup Part 1

Today’s post is the first of a four-part series on how Django’s setup process works. Specifically, we’ll focus on how Django accesses project settings.

Roll Your Own Class-Based Views in Django

Function-based views are typically easy for beginners to understand. Just create a function that receives a request object and returns a response object. But class-based views (CBV) tend to cause more confusion. Most of the functionality lives in out-of-sight base views and mixins, so using a CBV usually means overwriting a handful of class attributes […]

Python and Django Logging in Plain English

If you’ve ever written a program and printed out a value to see what’s going on during execution, then you understand at some level why logging is so valuable. Knowing what’s happening in your code at a point in time is enormously useful from both technical and business perspectives. This knowledge lets developers and product […]

How a request becomes a response: Diving deeper into WSGI

In the last post we looked at how a request gets from the internet to the front door of Django, the wsgi.py file. WSGI, which is short for Web Server Gateway Interface, is the topic of today’s post, as it lays the groundwork for understanding how Django handles requests. We’ll cover the key components of […]