Django Rest Framework Recipes

One of my favorite tools in my app development toolkit is django rest framework (drf), that makes developing REST APIs with python and django easy and fun. It’s easy to set up, extensible and saves so much time. The documentation of django rest framework is pretty extensive, there is a great tutorial, api docs and plenty of examples. But reality is usually a bit more complex and you need to customize your use of the framework. In this article I’m going to share a bunch of recipes from my use of django rest framework…

Django - growing up from SQLite to PostgreSQL

Django by default comes with SQLite as a database. It’s a great choice for initial development and for testing, but not if you want to run multiple app servers, e.g. in a SaaS project. At some point it’s time to pick up a DB like MySQL or PostgreSQL that is more suitable for this purpose.

I’ve been working on my open source side project Invertimo for a while and at some point I decided to change the db engine from SQLite to PostgreSQL. Well… it wasn’t an entirely smooth transition.

Shooting yourself in a foot with django and recovering from it

I have recently built an API (for my side project Redeal) that turned out extremely slow. I knew that what I was building wasn’t supposed to be super fast or optimal and I was building it with python and django which aren’t really known for their speed, but I haven’t expected such atrocious performance:

Yup, you are seeing it right, it was taking about 30 seconds for all the API calls finish. Each individual call was slow and there were also multiple of them. In this post I will tell you what I did to make it more than 200x faster.

Revived

I got too busy with a new job and living in a different country. But I love writing and I am very happy to start writing in tinystruggles.com again.

What have I been up to in last couple of years? I have joined Google in Dublin, so new job, new country, new friends, new hobbies. Lot’s of changes and I got pretty absorbed by them.

Since that time (late 2015) I have updated this blog literally once and in 2017. I lost the habit of consistent blogging and I also focused my tech related activities around work. Obviously not working too much, I was pretty serious about maintaining my work life balance, but I was learning much more about distributed systems and databases instead of for example web development. I did work on bunch of technical side projects, but with Google’s copyright, etc. I felt reluctant to make any of it public.

Marketing

Marketing to random strangers is actually really hard.

People who I talked to or interacted with are most willing to help. Build in public community on twitter. Wannabe entrepreneur folks.

Random post on twitter productivity subreddits not effective.

Getting good content for SEO not easy, hard to market productivity related content or at least I’m a bit at loss. Technical content seems easier.

How could I have credibility for productivity/life content?