Dhiraj Thakur dhirajt

Where people struggle learning Django

Over the last 3 years or so I've helped a bunch of companies, small and large, switch to Django. As part of that, I've done a lot of teaching Django (and Python) to people new to the platform (and language). I'd estimate I've trained something around 200-250 people so far. These aren't people new to programming — indeed, almost all of them are were currently employed as software developers — but they were new to Python, or to Django, or to web development, or all three.

In doing so, I've observed some patterns about what works and what doesn't. Many (most) of the failings have been my own pedagogical failings, but as I've honed my coursework and my skill I'm seeing, time and again, certain ways that Django makes itself difficult to certain groups of users.

This document is my attempt at organizing some notes around what ways different groups struggle. It's not particularly actionable — I'm not making any arguments about what Django should or shouldn't do (at least

Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu 14.04, nginx with webroot auth

This document details how I setup LE on my server. Firstly, install the client as described on http://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/using.html and make sure you can execute it. I put it in /root/letsencrypt.

As it is not possible to change the ports used for the standalone authenticator and I already have a nginx running on port 80/443, I opted to use the webroot method for each of my domains (note that LE does not issue wildcard certificates by design, so you probably want to get a cert for www.example.com and example.com).

Configuration

For this, I placed config files into etc/letsencrypt/configs, named after <domain>.conf. The files are simple:

	# -- coding: utf-8 --
	from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
	from django.utils.cache import patch_response_headers
	from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
	from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_page, never_cache
	from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt


	class NeverCacheMixin(object):
	@method_decorator(never_cache)

	#!/usr/bin/python
	#
	# git-slim
	#
	# Remove big files from git repo history.
	#
	# Requires GitPython (https://github.com/gitpython-developers/GitPython)
	#
	# References:
	# - http://help.github.com/remove-sensitive-data/

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Leaflet</title>
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet-0.3.1/leaflet.css" />
	<script src="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet-0.3.1/leaflet.js"></script>
	<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?v=3.2&sensor=false"></script>
	<script src="http://matchingnotes.com/javascripts/leaflet-google.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>

	#!/bin/bash

	echo "Number of arguments: $#"
	if [[ $# -ne 1 ]]
	then
	echo "We need a file to kill!"
	exit 1
	fi

	if [[ -f $1 ]]