Tie Guan Yin #05

I did another live coding as an episode 5 of The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin. Topics covered:

  • Deploying a an existing Django project to Heroku and its configuration
  • Converting Django project with file-based settings.py to accept environment variables
  • Attempting to connect the project to database hosted in RDS

The Graveyard of Tie Guan Yin is a webcast series where I drink tea and refactor my old Czech website (that is due for its 20th anniversary next year) into an open-source project.

I plan to cut this into annotated shorter snippets at one point, but I want to get the work done first. The aim is to help new programmers bridge the gap between finishing basic learnings and tutorials and submerging into a real-world project. The particular areas I see people struggling with:

  • Debugging, debugging, and debugging. Discovery and reasoning behind old decisions
  • Orienting yourself in a larger codebase
  • Making product micro-decisions
  • Considerations tied to running the project in production
  • Practical learning and blending the learnings of fundamentals with technologies that operate on top of them

This is thus an unstructured series that doesn’t contain prepared segments. I do share how I learn, how I debug and how do I overcome obstacles thrown in my way in technologies I am not an expert in. I am also trying to demonstrate how technology decisions depend on the context and sharing how I would decide differently under different conditions (i.e. larger project, stringer security requirements, etc.). I am also producing a real code produced under time constraints and going through optimal time/value path.

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