Django Meetup Talks: July 2020

Using Simple Database Triggers to Solve Complex Django Problems

There are certain problems in Django that are very difficult to reliably solve in an application. For example, tracking model changes, protecting fields or models from deletions/updates, and “soft-deleting” models instead of fully removing them from the database.

These problems can be solved elegantly and much more reliably with database triggers. In this talk Wes Kendall  overviews how triggers work and how you can use django-pgtrigger to solve common problems in Django models using a Postgres database.

Wes Kendall has been involved in the Django community for close to a decade now and has been the founding engineer at several startups. He authored many of the open source works at github.com/ambitioninc, github.com/CloverHealth, and github.com/jyveapp.

Leveraging Teaching to Grow Software Engineering Teams

The software engineering industry is plagued by challenges surrounding talent and hiring, yet we’re overlooking a promising solution. Teaching is a powerful lever for building productive and stable engineering teams. By embracing it, organizations can solve their hiring and retention problems. In this talk Andy Scheff discusses how we lost sight of teaching as an industry and strategies for leaders to bring this age-old tool into their teams today.

Andy Scheff is a founder, software engineering leader, and life-long teacher. He held roles as an engineer, PM, and EM at Dropbox, and was as the lead engineer for a seed-stage startup called Motion. He’s currently experimenting with new approaches to continuous professional learning and working as a coach for software engineers.

Journey to Learning Django

As a new developer attempting to improve, it's good to reflect. Eighteen months ago Kevin Dublin wasn't a Django developer - and now he is! In this talk, Kevin walks through his continuing journey of learning Django (and python): what was easy to learn, concepts that were difficult, where he is now, and a few biased reasons why he thinks Django is a great first framework to learn.

Kevin Dublin is a writer of poetry, prose, scripts, and code who lives in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter at @parteverything.

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