All articles by Peter Baumgartner

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Django Logging, The Right Way

By Peter Baumgartner on

Good logging is critical to debugging and troubleshooting problems. Not only is it helpful in local development, but in production it's indispensable. When reviewing logs for an issue, it's rare to hear somebody say, "We have too much logging in …
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Disabling Error Emails in Django

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of Django's nice "batteries included" features is the ability to send emails when an error is encountered. This is a great feature for small sites where minor problems would otherwise go unnoticed. Once your site start getting lots of …
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Dynamic Test Servers with Salt

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of the things I love about the DevOps movement is how (when done right) it empowers developers to work with infrastructure in a safe and controlled manner. Once you've nailed down deployments to a static set of servers (production, …
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The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 2

By Peter Baumgartner on

In this long overdue follow-up to Part 1, I'll be discussing the infrastructure issues associated with creating and serving image thumbnails at scale. The naive solution to generating thumbnails is to declare the image sizes you want in your templates …
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Django Patterns: Fat Models and cached_property

By Peter Baumgartner on

One of my favorite patterns in Django is the combination of "fat" models and cached_property from django.utils.functional. Fat models are a general MVC concept which encourages pushing logic into methods on your Model layer rather than the Controller ("view" in …
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Django Anti-Patterns: Signals

By Peter Baumgartner on

Django's Signal Dispatcher is a really powerful feature that you should never use. Ok, it has valid use cases, but they may be rarer than you think. First, to dispel a misconception about signals, they are not executed asynchronously. There …
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10 Years of Lincoln Loop

By Peter Baumgartner on

April marked Lincoln Loop's 10th anniversary in business. As I reflect on that, I find myself going through all the typical platitudes: it's been a roller-coaster ride, how proud I am of the team, looking forward to another 10 years, …
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Serving Static Files with uWSGI

By Peter Baumgartner on

Serving Static Files with uWSGI As noted in a previous post, uWSGI is a Swiss Army knife of functionality. One of its features is a built-in static file server. When to Use uWSGI for Serving Static Files While it may …
Image for The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 1

The Trouble with Thumbnails: Part 1

By Peter Baumgartner on

Images are everywhere on the web. Whether you're building a simple blog, a CMS, or a true web application, chances are good that you'll need to deal with images. Editors, authors, users, etc. expect to be able to upload images …