Two Scoops Study Session #14

We went through Chapter 21, Third-Party Packages, of Two Scoops of Django 1.11 together. The presenter reintroduced PyPI, also sharing an experience from a previous company where they built and used a local PyPI. In particular, they added a memory of having used PyPICloud.

They also talked about how to find Django packages through Django Packages. In the past, they often built needed features from scratch, but after actively adopting third-party packages, they were able to easily use more stable and well-separated functionality. They noted that there's a lot to learn from seeing code modularized for reuse in other projects.

The book also covered how to make good Django packages and how to run them well as open source. In the deep-dive session, several packages were given as examples, and among them, django-test-plus stood out as useful for reducing test code.

• With something like assertNumQueriesLessThan(7), you can verify the number of queries executed and catch unnecessary DB lookups.
• It helps catch performance issues early in tests.

At the end, the presenter reflected on having written this recap a month late, but looked back on how much there was to learn through the study session. They also noted there's no need to think that deep-dive sessions must be led only by senior developers — it turned out to be a session where whoever prepared it could gain something from it, regardless of who they were.