Two Scoops Study - Session 12

Presented Chapter 17, "Working with REST APIs," from Two Scoops of Django, and separately organized the parts that were unclear with a focus on DRF Authentication. Based on the concepts of Django Rest Framework, the explanation followed the book's flow through to backend-and-JavaScript communication.

Authentication runs when a view starts, before permission checks, and on success it sets request.user and request.auth. The default authentication scheme can be specified via DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES in settings, with BasicAuthentication and SessionAuthentication given as examples.

The ways to apply it were also organized:

• CBV (Class-based View): specify the authentication method with authentication_classes in APIView
• FBV (Function-based View): set it up with the @api_view, @authentication_classes, and @permission_classes decorators
• APIs referenced: BasicAuthentication, SessionAuthentication, TokenAuthentication

In the deep-dive study, the CharField migration tip stood out. As the book recommends, you should keep only blank=True and avoid null=True, but in practice, when adding a new CharField to a large table, temporarily using null=True reduces creation time and also avoids table Lock. It was shared that you can prevent accidents by later removing null=True again and leaving only blank=True.

Finally, creating a VPC and VPN connection using the Amazon VPC Console was also covered. However, it was noted that networking and infrastructure concepts remain quite difficult, and even with diagram-based explanations, the perceived difficulty was still fairly high.