Django By Example
Glad to announce that a book I’ve been doing a technical review for has finally been published and is available on Amazon. It took about a year from start to finish, but I’m glad to see it finally done and available for purchase.
Mocking Responses in Python Requests
Lately, we’ve been trying to improve our testing structure around testing our API calls without actually having to make them. To do this we of course use the excellent mocking library for python. We commonly don’t just return the raw data from calls but rather wrap them, usually converting them to pure python objects for easier consumption by our applications. Because of this we really need to have the ability to mock the raw response and then test that against what we think the wrapper will do with the data.
Keeping it DRY with Mock and Python
This week while writing a new feature in the core of one our apps, I had to mock something that would be used in almost every single test in the test suite. I’m a huge fan of keeping things DRY so you can imagine that when I started to type things like this: {% highlight python %} import mock class NotificationsUtilsTest(base.NotificationTestBase, TestCase): def setUp(self): super(NotificationsUtilsTest, self).setUp() self.request = RequestFactory() self.request.user = self.
A Touch of Imposter Syndrome
Or why I feel behind all the time From Wikipedia Impostor syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
Henry Jay
We welcomed Henry Jay into our family just a few weeks ago on July 27, 2015. It’s been a wild and crazy few weeks as we juggle having 2 little ones around the house amid trying to get sleep. Below are a few pictures from the hospital.
1 Year In
It’s hard to believe its already been a year since I returned to Kansas State on the webteam. Throughout this year we’ve accomplished a lot and I wanted to reflect on some of those things. Virtual Machine Development via Vagrant One of the bigger items I pushed for almost immediately was getting our team developing on a consistent platform. Most of our team uses Macbooks, and while those are certainly easier to configure than Windows PCs, there are still problems with getting some software up and running.
New Software Releases
I’ve released new version of django-site-notifications and django-downtime. Both these releases bring support for Python 3.x as well as bringing them up to date with at least Django 1.7.
xGames Trip
This past weekend Lindy and I took a trip out to Aspen to check out the 2015 XGames being hosted at Buttermilk. We were able to see the qualifiers for Ski Superpipe, Big Air Snowboard, Ski Slopestyle. Random Practice jumps at the superpipe David Wise’s First Run David Wise’s Second Qualification Run Vail Village Vail Hosting FIS Apline World Championships The rest are random photos from the main xGames area at Buttermilk mountain and shots from the superpipe.
Wrapping Your API Calls for Fun and Profit
The last few months I’ve been working on fixing up our applications at K-State and how they interact with other custom built and off the shelf software. One of our common practices on the web team is to create applications that consume data from other organizations on campus, manipulate it, display it, etc. One of the things I noticed early on was that we would use the same boilerplate code to generate and get responses from various systems.
MLK Day at Keystone
This MLK day I spent the day Keystone getting as much powder skiing in as possible. The weather cooperated and I was able to get into Summit county without any weather issues. Here is a quick photo dump of the day. Ada trying on the helmet First shot from North Peak Three shots from The Outback where you can see Breckenridge in the background. I recorded the days stats on my /workouts page.