Lunch Talk Series: Building maintainable Django projects: the difficult teenage years

This iteration of the Lunch Talk Series will be covering Alex Henman’s grounded DjangoCon US talk, “Building maintainable Django projects: the difficult teenage years”.

You should watch this if:

• You’re interested in real-world solutions to web application challenges
• You have a web app that’s experiencing growing pains

This talk covers some of the solutions Alex has picked up over his time as an experienced software engineer. I enjoyed the points he made because they are fairly specific. He explains the problem and then goes over enough of the solution for you to implement it on your own.

Unfortunately, he explains that he had to cut some scope from his original abstract. Given how helpful his other points were, it would have been amazing to have all of them!

Alex covers a wide range of topics. Including the json_script template filter, task routing strategies, setting a timeout for your queries and using PgBouncer to avoid toppling over your database. I love that these are all based in real-world usage. Those hard-earned nuggets of knowledge are the best.

For me, my takeaway is that I need to revisit PgBouncer. I’ve used it in the past, but it seems like I have an incomplete understanding of its features and that’s exciting!