Learning Vue Through Terrible Pull Requests

18 Apr 2020 I made a pull request asking to "remove the unused public/index.html" file from django-vue-template: https://github.com/gtalarico/django-vue-template/pull/53

Well, the author responded and it turns out it's definitely used (by vue magic): https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/html-and-static-assets.html

Oops, definitely should have googled "vue public/index.html" before making that pull request. I made another pull request to add a link about it to the django-vue-template docs: https://github.com/gtalarico/django-vue-template/pull/54

Server Side Templates Vs Front End Framework

12 Apr 2020 These Reddit comments have some of the best descriptions I've seen for the type of scenario where you'd use a front end framework over server side templates:

"Server side templating can work really well when the website is static. The problem is that as you add more and more dynamic elements, you either have to go to the server and re-render everything with every change (which can be slow), or you can make the changes on the client side with something like jQuery. But the latter option presents a challenge because you'll eventually find yourself duplicating functionality.

For example, imagine a to-do list website that you render on the server with a templating language. It fetches the user's to-do items from the database and then renders the list. Now let's say you want to let a user add a new item without re-rendering the entire page. You could use AJAX to tell the server to add the new item, but now you need to update your UI list accordingly. You could use jQuery to construct a new DOM element and append it, but now that list element exists in two different places: in your jQuery code and in your template on the server. If your website becomes very dynamic, this situation can get really unwieldy from a programming perspective.

Both Angular (from what I've read) and React (from personal experience) are highly suitable for creating single page apps, with the goal of creating a dynamic, fast, and maintainable website. There are other benefits, as well as downsides, to using Angular and React, but I hope this clears it up a little bit. Both of them make server side templating unnecessary by moving UI logic/rendering from your server to the client's browser. So a user who visits your React powered to-list website would get the React code as a JS bundle, it would make an AJAX call to your server to get just the data, and then it would render the UI based on the data." -/u/VertiGuo (https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6t22cr/back_end_templating_engine_or_front_end_framework/dlhukkf/)

"for example putting together a form, and handle the response is easy, but if you have to manage a list of items where the user can add/remove items, or change the schema of items based on a selector (e.g. phone type or address) you have to split the logic, and put some on client side scripts, which can become very messy. not to mention live updates like chat, comments etc.

creating a separate backend and frontend solves this problem, as the backend's responsibility will be only manipulating the database, retrieve data and run jobs providing an api and the frontend's will be the only the representation of these data, providing the user interface. this separation lets developers use different technologies and languages on the two side, as well as specializing in these. for the beginning this approach is a bit hard to learn, but it will worth it on the long run." -/u/bdvx (https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cbrdte/html_templating_vs_spa/etifiar/)

Integrating Django and Vue.js

08 Apr 2020 This is a great guide for including vue bundles in server side templates: https://medium.com/@rodrigosmaniotto/integrating-django-and-vuejs-with-vue-cli-3-and-webpack-loader-145c3b98501a

Otherwise, if you're starting a fresh project with a separate front-end, this is a good template: https://github.com/gtalarico/django-vue-template/

The deepest reason why modern JavaScript frameworks exist

04 Apr 2020 Another really good article about why using a front-end framework is a good idea:
https://medium.com/dailyjs/the-deepest-reason-why-modern-javascript-frameworks-exist-933b86ebc445

Make your life easier with Vue.js

02 Apr 2020 This is a really great article that shows how vue can make dynamic forms so much better: https://dev.to/tsanak/make-your-life-easier-with-vuejs-4mj5

Django - RelatedManager.set not removing models

14 Feb 2020

In my opinion, one of django's biggest gotchas is using `RelatedManager.set` with models that have non-nullable ForeignKey fields. ### Example Models.py (with a one-to-many relationship and a non-nullable ForeignKey): ``` class Reporter(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=255) class Article(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=255) reporter = models.ForeignKey(Reporter, on_delete=models.CASCADE) ``` Guess how many articles are on the reporter after you do this?: ``` reporter = Reporter.objects.create(name="paul") # add 2 articles to the reporter article_1 = reporter.article_set.create(title="blah") reporter.article_set.create(title="blah2") # set only 1 article on the reporter reporter.article_set.set([article_1]) ``` I expected just one article to be on the reporter. Nope: ``` reporter.article_set.count() 2 ``` How do the docs say it should work? >This method accepts a clear argument to control how to perform the operation. If False (the default), the elements missing from the new set are removed using remove() and only the new ones are added. Well, crap, what's going on? It turns out you need to read the docs for `RelatedManager.remove` for a hint: >For ForeignKey objects, this method only exists if null=True. So, it turns out that `set()` is using `remove()` and `remove()` is only available on models with ForeignKeys that are `null=True`. What does `set()` do with things it needs to `remove()` when `remove()` isn't available? Nothing...

Django - ChoiceField Display Text

14 Jan 2020 I made a repo to demonstrate how to get a django ChoiceField's current selection's display text: https://github.com/pawl/django_choicefield_display_example/

I came across a few other examples, but they didn't do a good job of displaying the initial value or handling choices with integer values.

Python - Pipenv to pip-tools

20 Dec 2019 I've been using Pipenv for the last few months and my biggest issue is that "--keep-outdated" has been broken in the latest release (2018.11.26) for a while. I've needed to install Pipenv from the master branch to make it functional. However, the last time I used "--keep-outdated" from the master branch, it wouldn't automatically update the hash of the dependency being updated.

Updating specific requirements is something I need to do pretty often, and it's not fun to explain all the Pipenv quirks to the team.

Pip-tools looks like it does everything I need and has fewer quirks, so I ended up making the switch.

Pipenv uses pip-tools under the hood, so the migration to pip-tools was very smooth. The migration process was:

Copy the dev-packages and packages sections of the Pipfile to their own requirements.in files.
Run pip-compile
Copy over the specific versions and hashes from the Pipfile.lock to the generated requirements.txt.

I did have a small issue where updating a specific package with pip-tools removed a bunch of dependencies from the requirements.txt unexpectedly, but running pip-compile with "--rebuild" fixed it.

HTML5 - video playsinline

25 Jul 2019 I added "autoplay muted" to my <video> tag to make a video autoplay in a carousel. It worked on desktop Chrome or Firefox, but didn't work on iOS Chrome or Safari.

I learned about the "playsinline" fix from here: https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/

Adding "playsinline" to my video tag fixed it.

ESP32 Plant Sensor

12 Jul 2019

I set up a ESP32 houseplant soil water + temperature + humidity + light sensor that sends me a daily status update message.

Here’s the code for it: https://gist.github.com/pawl/6a408afde1411c6b1f58980e3d1dff83

esp32 plant sensor 1

esp32 plant sensor 2

esp32 plant sensor 3

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