I know what you're thinking, "Who in the world still uses FTP these days?". If you were born after year 2000, you may not even have heard of FTP before.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was a popular way to share files back in the AOL days. People will set up these FTP servers where you can upload and download files. I remember spending so much time in chat rooms during my teenage years asking around …

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 …

It's not easy to keep up with security updates and one of the most important updates to be aware of is the SSL security of your web server. Just in the past 2-3 years, there had been a bunch of very serious security vulnerabilities that were found in OpenSSL, such as Heartbleed, POODLE, and DROWN.

An easy way to check whether your web server is vulnerable is by using Qualys' SSL Server …

I just finished updating my ansible-django-stack project and added tasks to automatically issue a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and set up a cron job to auto-renew the certificate.

We're now using it for all our Shopify apps which are built in Django. Let's Encrypt certificates are only valid for 90 days, so if you have a bunch of web apps like we do and have more planned in the future, automating this process now could …

I've always hated the idea of having to pay for SSL certificates. You could always generate them yourself for free with OpenSSL and they're just as secure as the paid ones. But if you're running a public-facing website, you're pretty much stuck and have to pay for one if you don't want your visitors seeing security warnings in their browser. At least that was the case until Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority, came …