DjangoCon US 2024

240927

I wasn’t able to attend in person this year or take too many notes due to work, but I was able to enjoy a few great talks in between things! Here’s to next year! 🤞🏼

Day 1

Choosing Wisely: SPA vs. HTMX for Your Next Web Project

Three options: Static HTML, Progressive Enhancements, SPA
- ← more server data, short user sessions
- → more client data, long user sessions
Static HTML is fast and simple, but not very interactive.
SPAs are interactive, but expensive and complicated.
PEs provide the best of both worlds.

Error Culture

[Error culture] accepts error notifications and ignores them, encouraging a reactive firefighting culture, instead of a proactive culture of problem-solving.

Are you in error culture?
- Is your deleted items filled with lots of emails from no-reply style email addresses that you didn’t even read…you just deleted them?
- Do you have a rule that just deletes emails?
- Do you get alerts and have no idea why or what to do about them?
- Are people rewarded for waiting until problems they knew about are big enough to alert everyone about and then resolve them?

Don’t take down a fence unless you know why it was put up. – Chesterson’s Fence

Ask yourself these questions when managing alerts:
- Is the alert important?
- Is the alert actionable?
- Who is the alert for?
Venn Diagram:
- !Actionable + Important + Right People = Confusion
- Actionable + !Important + Right People = Time Waste
- Actionable + Important + !Right People = Frustration
- Actionable + Important + Right People = Best Case

Product 101 for Techies and Tech Teams

What your PM really wants:
- A team that is interested in the strategy
- Genuine interest in solving problems
- Empathy with end users
PM responsibilities
- Empower their team with strategic insights
- Translate strategy into proposed actionables
Team responsibilities
- Take interest in the strategy
- Pay attention to details and quality
- Care for the user experience, from start to finish
Becoming a product-minded engineer
- Be interested in the business and its user base
- Stay curious
- Provide relevant input
- Be an ally to your PM

Passkeys: Your password-free future

django-allauth now supports passkeys!

The magical incatation! 🪄

# The main setup.
MFA_SUPPORTED_TYPES = ["webauthn"]
MFA_PASSKEY_LOGIN_ENABLED = True
MFA_WEBAUTHN_ALLOW_INSECURE_ORIGIN = True
MFA_PASSKEY_SIGNUP_ENABLED = True

# Allow email recovery.
ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED = True
ACCOUNT_EMAIL_VERIFICATION = "mandatory"
ACCOUNT_EMAIL_VERIFICATION_BY_CODE_ENABLED = True

# Allow creation without username.
ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD = "email"
ACCOUNT_USERNAME_REQUIRED = False

The art of (not) redirecting

Your URLs are a mirror to the soul of your code.

Naming is hard, so:
- Design as best as you can.
- Break as little as possible.
- Avoid 404s at all costs.

Status codes that will help!

302_FOUND
301_MOVED_PERMANENTLY
307_TEMPORARY_REDIRECT
308_PERMANENT_REDIRECT

The art of not redirecting (or how to design URLs):
- Readable: People will read them, some will even type them by memory.
  - ❌ /u/d/1/c/~q/page
  - ✔️ /user/profile
- Predictable: People should be able to guess-navigate your site by rewriting URLs.
  - ✔️ /user/profile/
  - ✔️ /user/settings/
  - ✔️ /user/security/
- Concise: Straight to the point, no redundancy.
  - ❌ /user/user-settings/security-settings
  - ✔️ /user/settings/security
- Complete: Every part must lead to somewhere, or at least redirect to somewhere else.
  - ✔️ /user/settings/security
  - ✔️ /user/settings
  - ✔️ /user
- Consistent: Single language, single style.
  - ❌ /current_user/Seguridad/multi-factorAuth
  - ✔️ /current-user/security/multi-factor-auth
- Beautiful: Well at least not ugly.
The art of redirecting (or how to avoid 404s at all costs):
- django.contrib.redirects, but that only works for static routes.
- For dynamic routes, they first used a middleware that mapped their old namespace to a new namespace.
- This only works for a single mapping, but what if you want to change them again? They implemented path(..., old=[...]).

❤️ Django: the web framework that changed my life

Day 2

Keynote: How To Be A Developer and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

To be a better developer is to be a better person to others.

Lightning Talks

Django Commons!
Twelve rules for job applications and interviews by Daniele Procida

❤️ Finding 2.0

The hesitation to call your project 2.0 is a lot like imposter syndrome.
How to find your 2.0:
- Intention. Intention to find your 2.0.
- Assessment. Where is your starting point.
- Vision. What is your destination.
- Acceptance. Prepare for breaking changes.
- Plan. Plan each version with a release date!
When to start?

Now is better than never – The Zen of Python

Change is coming. Change is inevitable. The question isn’t if we are going to change, but how. Because we’re either going to change by design or by disaster – Annie Leonard

Don’t wait for disaster, 2.0 is not sacred.

You got that nice tech salary, now what?

You got that nice tech salary, now what?
- Set financial goals
- Determine savings needs (nesteggly.com)
- Determine current expenses (last 3-6 months) (ynab.com)
  - Determine fixed, adjustable, and unexpected expenses.
  - Be aware of “Hedonic Treadmill”: A permanent increase in expenses for a temporary increase in pleasure.
    - Example: buying better coffee and not being able to go back
- Define a monthly budget
- Check-in every 3-6 months
- Max out your tax-advantaged accounts
- Index funds
- Term life insurance
- Check out /r/personalfinance/wiki
But where do we put our money to grow?!
- Not your savings account (but do have 3-6 months of expenses there!)
- Use any employer match.
- Max out tax-advantaged accounts
  - Roth/Traditional IRA
  - 401k
- Purchase low-cost, broad market, index funds.
  - 50% US stocks
  - 30% International stocks
  - 20% Bonds
  - Stocks = Higher reward, riskier
  - Bonds = Lower reward, less risky
  - Index funds track a collection of stocks index funds that outperform managed funds.

How to design and implement extensible software with plugins

Day 3

❤️ Keynote: The Fellowship of the Pony

❤️ Hidden gems of Django 5.x

❤️ A Brief History of Django

Django User Model: Past, Present, and Future

“We should push the user model back to being Django’s responsibility and address that leak.” – Carlton Gibson

Universal Concerns
- User Contract
- Separation of authentication from authorization
- Forms
django-allauth solves many of these problems.
My Current Approach
1. Custom user model
2. User profile model on ‘User’
3. Use ‘django-allauth’ 3rd party package
- Custom user model (empty) + django-allauth = my preference

API Maybe: Bootstrapping a Web Application circa 2024

Lean into Django.

Django has always been the framework for perfectionists with deadlines. When those deadlines are financial, all the more so. Django is the perfect web framework for our post-zero percent interest rate world.

Locality of Behavior is a starting point not a destination

[Locality of behavior] is a tool, not an end in itself.

Tools to achieve locality of behavior:

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