I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day about new Shopify apps to build with Django. We decided it's finally time to start using Python 3.

Python 3 was actually released almost 8 years ago (and the programming language itself is over 25 years old!). But adoption had been slow due to backwards incompatibility with previous versions. There are tons of third-party Python libraries and if your project uses one of these …

I've finally decided to set up a Jenkins CI server for my Django projects earlier this week. For a long time, I've been deploying code via command line with Ansible. It worked very well but occasionally I find myself deploying from a coffee shop with unreliable connection, causing the deployment to get interrupted. Deploying instead from a virtual private server in the cloud would solve this and using Jenkins to do it was the first …

If you haven't tried the IPython Notebook yet, you're missing out on a very neat tool. I just started using it a few days ago myself and I regret not having used it much sooner.

I'm currently working on a new Django project where I need to use Amazon's MWS API. I find myself using the Django shell a lot to experiment with the API while building the app. While the IPython shell is quite …

Back in the early days of Docker Compose, when it was still called Fig, you couldn't use ipdb with it to do interactive debugging because the container's service ports weren't exposed when using the run command. This has been fixed by including a ---service-ports option to the docker-compose run command.

Below is a sample usage for one of my Django projects, EZ Price Alerts.

In my detail view, I added import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace() …

Before Docker came along, virtualenv was pretty much the tool of choice for Python developers as it allows you to separate package dependencies for different applications you're working on without having to create separate virtual machines for each one. It worked very well for me.

However, there are still some annoying things the developers will have to deal with. Such things include having to install additional applications and services required by the project such as …