I’ve been running this blog for about five years, and during that time, it’s undergone several transformations. Initially, it was built with plain Markdown, HTML, and CSS. Over time, I experimented with various frameworks before finally settling on Tailwind CSS. The blog has been using Tailwind for a while now, and I’m happy with the results. In addition to Tailwind, I’ve incorporated other tools that enhance the blog’s functionality and aesthetics, such as Pygments for syntax highlighting and Medium Zoom for an interactive image zooming experience. Now that I’ve settled on a stack that I’m happy with, I thought it would be a good idea to document it. This post will cover the tools I use for my blog, including Tailwind, Pygments, Medium Zoom, and other tips & tricks.

Django channels are great for asynchronous views, but they can be a headache to test. This is due to the incompatibility with database transactions and all the side effects that the incompatibility produces. For example, the common pattern of rolling back the database after tests does not work, the data remains there which makes other tests fail as test outputs become flaky.

Scrapy is a great web scraping framework, but it lacks a good logging setup. In this short blog post, I’ll show you how to use Structlog with Scrapy.

Django channels is great for adding support of various network protocols as WebSockets, chat protocols, IoT protocols and other. It’s a great way to add real-time functionality to your Django application. To use channels however, requires you to deploy an ASGI server in production. This is a bit more complex and there are multiple flavors of ASGI servers to choose from. In this blog post I’ll show you how to deploy Django channels with Daphne and Nginx in a Kubernetes environment.

Django’s admin is an amazing batteries-included addition to the Django framework. It’s a great tool for managing your data, and it is easily extendable and customizable. The same goes for Django’s ./manage.py shell command. If we were to combine these two give then it would have a great outcome, a fully interactive Django shell where you can manage your data in the admin. This was the idea behind django-admin-shellx, a Django application that provides a shell in the admin interface.

Django comes with default views for 400, 403, 404 and 500 pages which is great. However, the default templates for these views are minimal - they just indicate what error it is. This blog post will walk through how to add custom templates and views for the error pages.

Django comes with many great built-in features, logging is one of them. Pre-configured logging setups that vary between development (debug mode) and production environments. Easy integration to send you emails on errors, out-of-the-box support for various settings as log levels and log format. But how do you setup colorized logging, JSON logging and unified logging formats between Celery and Django, for example? Examples were hard to find and documentation was tricky to understand. Therefore, this blog post will walk through an opinionated setup on Django development and production logging using Structlog.

Django provides session support out-of-the-box and stores sessions in the django_session database table. Django leaves it up to the project maintainers to purge sessions in their Django project. This means that if it’s not done on a regular basis the table grows infinitely. However, they provide a simple command called clearsessions for it. Using it within a Celery task in a cron schedule resolves any long-term storage issues with large tables for sessions. The below solution requires both Celery for the task and Celery-beat for the cron schedule.

The admin interface that comes with Django is one of the great things about Django. It comes with a ton of features out of the box and has many open source packages that extend the base functionality even more. Well documented and works very well, the only pain point I’ve found when using the admin and its features is when I’ve had large tables containing millions of objects. In that case, searching, sorting, ordering, counting and other features cause the admin to load slowly and creates database pressure. At that point we need to optimize the admin and there are many small changes that you can do that will speed up your admin load times and reduce any additional database load. This blog post will describe approaches to the common performance problems I’ve experienced when having a large database.

Celery is a python project used for asynchronous job processing and task scheduling in web applications or distributed systems. It is very commonly used together with Django, Celery as the asynchronous job processor and Django as the web framework. Celery has great documentation on how to use it, deploy it and integrate it with Django. However, monitoring is less covered - this is what this blog post aims to do. There is a great Prometheus exporter for Celery that has dashboards and alerts that come with them.