Posts tagged: DJANGO

Preamble

This article is two things:

1. A description of one way to use version control with a Django project
2. An introduction to using the darcs distributed version control system in particular

First, though, a mini-sermon which someday will be a post in the You Really Should series: You really should use version control. Most of you probably do. But if you’re among those not using version control to manage your software projects, start now! Learn a good version control system and start using it on just one project. You’ll work so much more productively and confidently that you’ll want to use version control everywhere. If you’re just getting started, learn Subversion – it is more or less the standard at this point, and employers and other programmers will assume you know it.

One of the neat things about PyCon, even for those of us who aren’t attending, is that people save up goodies to announce and release during the conference. Django is certainly a hot topic at this year’s PyCon, and as of today at least two significant new Django-based sites have launched:

One is CheeseRater (great name!), from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, a quick-rating system for items in the Python community’s official package index, the Cheeseshop. In other words, if you think PyOMFG is the greatest module ever you can vote it up, and if you notice that PyFlockOfSeagulls hasn’t been updated since 1992 you can vote it down. The Cheeseshop is one of several pieces of python.org that I’ve thought could benefit from the application of some crowd wisdom; Jacob gets a prize for taking action. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

When I’m doing Django development work I sometimes find my way to the #django channel on freenode.net to exchange advice. As has been the case on the Interweb since ancient days, certain Questions are Frequently Asked there, so I decided to try the experiment of making a FAQ specifically addressing those questions. Hopefully it won’t be too redundant of other material in the wiki – but if it is, I’m sure the group refactoring intelligence will take care of it.

In the wonderful small city where I live, Northampton Massachusetts, there’s a fun annual music festival called Django in June. It’s all about gypsy jazz – performances, music clinics, and jam sessions.

Last year it occurred to me that the festival would be a perfect time for a get-together of Django (web framework!) people in the region. Nothing fancy – some short talks, coding, pizza, beer. With open blocks in the schedule to go hear some gypsy jazz of course. The date(s) would be Saturday June 16th and/or Sunday June 17th, 2007.

It’s that time of year. In no particular order, here’s a quick list of goals for Paul-as-developer in 2007.

• Convert my remaining legacy PHP code (side projects and regular work both) to Django.
• Write a useful PyObjC application.
• Make some kind of contribution to Python itself, if possible.
• Continue to add revision control and deployment automation to existing projects, as well as using it on new projects.
• Continue to add unit tests to existing projects, as well as using them on new projects.
• Learn a new language well enough to write a useful (small) application. Current candidates (all of which I’ve done at least enough reading on to have specific reasons for my interest, and some of which I’ve written toy programs in) are Haskell, Common Lisp, Io, Objective-C, and Ruby.

So, what about you? What are your coding goals for 2007?