Keep Putting Yourself Out There

The most significant and life changing experiences are typically ones you didn’t plan for. This I call serendipitous events. But there is a problem: serendipitous events are essentially random. But how does one plan for that?

Answer: By putting yourself out there.

The only way to increase your chances of such events occurring is by just simply going out, talking to people and doing things. The more times you put yourself out there in the wild, the higher the likelihood of you encountering a serendipitous event.

How I got my job at Odeon, and now the startup I’m working with, is really through a series of quite random events. If I had stayed within my comfort zone, I doubt I would be in the position I am in now.

So get out of your room and your comfort and do something! You never know just what might happen.

First Pull Request

First pull request accepted 🙂

https://github.com/earle/django-bootstrap/pull/52#issuecomment-5394530

Minor change but I’ll take it!

Testing and Django

Awesome video by Carl Meyer on the topic of Testing in Django. You know you’re getting there when you’re nodding your head at some of the points raised during the talk. 

Top 2 Takeways

1. Don’t hit the db if you can avoid it. I have a lot of ORM that creates objects literally in the test database. This is slow. Use factory boy instead
2. Check out django-webtest. A lot of my tests for the projects are essentially testing the forms within a view function.

Generating a landscape layout PDF in Django with columns

I just wrote a blog post explaining how I generate a 3 column layout PDF output in Django at the Odeon blog.