… then try ignorance.

This message is intended to motivate developers to document their stuff.

Extract from a great thread on the django-developper mailing list started by Trey Raymond:

I’m a DB engineer working for Yahoo, and we have a new product using django that I’m onboarding. We see a variety of easily fixed issues, but one major one - there are 21 many-many tables here, yet they have auto increment primary keys

-- Example, existing:
CREATE TABLE `accounts_profile_starred_groups` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `profile_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `group_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `profile_id` (`profile_id`,`group_id`),
  KEY `group_id_refs_id_e2f1545` (`group_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
-- Fixed:
CREATE TABLE `accounts_profile_starred_groups` (
  `profile_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `group_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`profile_id`,`group_id`),
  KEY `group_id_refs_id_e2f1545` (`group_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Looking forward to see how it goes !

Sounds pretty cool if you ask me. Check out this fine free DNS management service.

Here’s a really cool contribution. Harry Percival emailed django-developers about his employer, PythonAnywhere:

We do offer Django hosting as part of our Free plan, so it’s a nice place for people to come and try out Django, for free, maybe host a prototype web app…

I registered to give it a tried and received an amazing welcome email, which I won’t spoil for you !

This is the second article about reversing urls in javascript. The previous article actually presented a bad idea.

Github API v3

Github’s API is undubitably quite suprising for a web developer that isn’t aware of the HATEOAS concept, here’s the kind of things you can see for example:

[
  {
    "updated_at": "2012-11-27T14:42:24Z",
    "svn_url": "https://github.com/yourlabs/django-cities-light",
    "language": "Python",
    "milestones_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/yourlabs/django-cities-light/milestones{/number}",
    "downloads_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/yourlabs/django-cities-light/downloads",
    "subscription_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/yourlabs/django-cities-light/subscription",
    "teams_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/yourlabs/django-cities-light/teams",
    "full_name": "yourlabs/django-cities-light",
    "git_url": "git://github.com/yourlabs/django-cities-light.git",
    "git_tags_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/yourlabs/django-cities-light/git/tags{/sha}",
    "owner": {
      "login": "yourlabs",
      "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/orgs",
      "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/followers",
      "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
      "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/following",
      "avatar_url": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c0efe8e5c15bd268224fbc40a574329d?d=https://a248.e.akamai.net/assets.github.com%2Fimages%2Fgravatars%2Fgravatar-org-420.png",
      "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/repos",
      "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/subscriptions",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs",
      "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/events{/privacy}",
      "gravatar_id": "c0efe8e5c15bd268224fbc40a574329d",
      "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/received_events",
      "id": 1040547,
      "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/yourlabs/gists{/gist_id}"
    },

Wow, so many URLs… At first, this may look original, if not excentric. Why aren’t they just documented ?

Keeping your inbox clean can be quite a pain. Except with keyboard shortcuts.

• ? shows the list of shortcuts,
• / to search mails,
• c to compose a message,
• gi brings you to the inbox,
• j and k moves the little blue cursor between threads,
• x selects the thread that has the blue cursor,
• e archives selected threads,
• o opens selected thread
• a is for reply to all,
• r is for reply.

That’s it !

IMPORTANT UPDATE: the approach proposed in this article is bad. Read this one instead.

You can start building a user interface using Django’s awesome CRUD in a matter of seconds, for example with just this server side configuration:

    url(delete/(?P<pk>\d+)/$', 
        generic.DeleteView.as_view(model=YourModel),
        name='yourapp_yourmodel_delete'),

http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/syntax.html#syntax-attr-unquoted

Stuff like this: Can now be: That should save some bits !

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/timers.html#dom-showmodaldialog

This specification of HTML5 provides an API for modal dialogs, we will not need a plugin anymore. This blog will present a cool HTML5 feature every now and then.

The previously announced backward compatibility break, although minor, has been released.

So don’t do pip update -U django-autocomplete-light unless you’re ready to change to in your autocomplete_light templates overrides (actually, that might not even be necessary now that I think of it).

You’ve been warned !