Writing code is a craft. Practice your skills and sharpen your tools to be the best programmer you can be.
If you’ve spent any time working in or learning about software development, chances are you’ve heard of the classic book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.
You likely know a lot of the stories and terms from the book. Hunt and Thomas introduced the world to rubber duck debugging and code katas. They also popularized ideas like don’t repeat yourself (DRY) and early iterations of what would come to be known as agile development.
So, you probably…
Building a REST API in Django is so super easy. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the steps to get your first API up and running.
(This post is part of a series where I teach how to deploy a React front end on a Django back end. However, nothing in this post is React specific. Whatever your API needs, read on!)
[Just want to see some source code? My pleasure: https://github.com/bennett39/drf_tutorial]
Before we get to the code, it’s worth considering why you would want to build an API. …
The best developers I know all maintain a list of Bash aliases to make their lives easier. It’s one of the signs of a good developer — how much can you automate the tasks you do repeatedly?
Bash aliases are super easy to create, too! It’s low-hanging fruit to reduce your time, typing, and mental energy while coding. In this post, I’ll explain why every developer should have a list of aliases, how to do it, and the ten I’ve found most useful.
Bash aliases are a major key to my productivity as a developer. …
Meetings ruin your productivity. If you’re a developer building complex applications, you should follow the Maker Schedule.
As a software developer, I hate meetings. If you’ve worked as a developer, you probably understand.
To me, meetings feel frustrating and demoralizing. If I have a meeting scheduled, I often feel like I can’t accomplish my coding goals.
You may have noticed this, too. If you have a meeting at 1pm and another at 3pm, the hour in between the meetings feels unproductive. One hour simply isn’t enough to get complex coding work done.
As a developer, a meeting costs you a…
I recently got a good question from a reader:
Using Vue CLI, how we can use Django data in Vue? Suppose I have a pandas dataframe or dictionary I want to pass to the Vue app, how to do it?
If you’re using Vue with Django as I’ve described, there are two ways to pass data to your components:
1. Expose an API for your data and use fetch
or axios
inside your Vue component. (Usually inside the mounted()
method)
2. Pass the data in via the Django view/template and then set it as a prop on your vue component…
Great ideas! When you're learning to code, I believe it's so important to start small.
Build interesting projects using what you already know - not following a tutorial. These are great examples.
I wrote a whole post about this idea: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/learning-python-start-small-29d15881f780
And I wrote a series of posts making a tic-tac-toe game with the same motivation as your post. Your readers might find it interesting:
https://bennettgarner.medium.com/tic-tac-toe-series-starting-small-with-python-86e2f49db797
Thanks for writing your article! I wholeheartedly agree.
Starting to use Vue.js within a Django project is pretty straightforward.
If you just want to build a few simple Vue components and drop them into your Django app, you can do it the simple way — inline. I’ve written a whole Vue + Django tutorial demonstrating that approach:
But inline JavaScript/CSS is limited, and that approach will only get you so far. I’ve learned this firsthand by building apps with Vue and Django.
In order to get the most out of Vue, you’ll probably want to use the Vue CLI and .vue
files. These tools enable you to create…
Getting started with Django is super fast and easy!
Known as “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines,” Django powers some of the biggest websites in the world.
I write about Django a lot, and this post is my ultimate resource for getting started with Django from scratch.
Here’s a video of me doing these steps for a project:
First, consider creating a new virtual environment for your project so you can manage your dependencies separately.
I use pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv for my environments:
$ pyenv…
“Serverless” is a hot buzzword, but it often gets an eye roll from the developers I know — especially when mentioned in connection with microservices.
Advocates of serverless say it scales seamlessly to meet demand while not wasting resources if not in use… if you set it up correctly.
On the other hand, many developers see serverless architecture as overly complicated — especially when it comes to rearchitecting existing applications and setting up deployment strategies.
So, who is right? As a developer, you’ll hear a lot of opinions, but my best advice is this: If you’re interested in a new…
This advice will be controversial and seem counter-intuitive, I know.
Tutorials are a bad way to learn real coding skills.
Don’t get me wrong, tutorials are a great way to learn syntax and common patterns. However, they only show you one way to solve a problem.
Tutorials don’t teach you how to invent solutions to new problems.
Problem solving is the ultimate goal of coding. And there’s no tutorial that will teach you everything you need to know for every situation you encounter in a software development project.
To become a great developer, you need to learn to solve problems…