Code

I was recently helping a friend who was transitioning from Matlab to Python. Giving him some tips, I realized that many of the cool nuances I learned in Python were taught me by someone in a “do you know that?” style or to solve a very specific problem that could be solved more simply. When helping this friend who is there on the other side of the world, I remembered the time when there was no one to teach me a cool trick and, in fact, I didn’t even know it could exist.

I started working with MongoDB for fun and for some side projects in the last year. The main idea of using MongoDB is its flexibility. The pymongo library is really nice for getting some information, but on a project more complex, we may need something a little more intense. A nice alternative is the MongoEngine library, which is an Object-Document Mapper (ODM), which treats MongoDB documents as a kind of ORM.

One year ago I started my new job as a Backend Python Developer. I have dropped a career, a profession and I almost drop my master degree. When everything happened, I think I didn’t understand the proportions that decision would have in my life. Now, one year later, I want to tell you a little bit about what happened this year.

This month is my 4 year anniversary of my first job as a developer. During this time I’ve had multiple jobs (startups, big companies and open source projects) and changed countries and continents. I was able to learn a couple of things that helped me improve my career and I wanted to share them as a celebration of my anniversary and everything that came with this new life.

Starting to contribute to an open-source project is always recommended to someone who is studying to be a programmer.

In today’s development, tests are a fundamental tool for keeping things nice and easy and to keep programmer’s sanity. I’ve been using a set of tools for developing my web applications with Django and it is time for me to share a little bit about them.

Most of all Django tutorials teach us how to return HTML as response to a request. Sometimes, it is useful to make it a little more RESTful. One option is to use Django REST Framework but sometimes you need something a little bit simpler. Then you have Restless. Restless is a miniframework made by Daniel Lindsley based on what he learned by making Tastypie and some other REST libraries.