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Python

Django Friday Tips: Secret Key

One thing that is always generated for you when you start a new django project is the SECRET_KEY string. This value is described in the documentation as: A secret key for a particular Django installation. This is used to provide cryptographic signing, and should be set to a unique, unpredictable value. The rule book mandates […]

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Random Bits Technology and Internet

Managing secrets

A few hours ago, I published a small article on Whitesmith’s blog about sharing and managing secrets, inside a software development environment. At first I dig a little into this problem that is very common and later I explain how we are addressing these issues. You can check it through the following link: Managing Secrets […]

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Personal Python

Browsing folders of markdown files

If you are like me, you have a bunch of notes and documents written in markdown spread across many folders. Even the documentation of some projects involving many people is done this way and stored, for example, in a git repository. While it is easy to open the text editor to read these files, it […]

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Python Technology and Internet

Django Friday Tips: Security Checklist

Security is one of those areas where it is very hard to know if everything is taken care of. So you have been working on this project for a while and you want to deploy it into a production server, there are several settings on this new environment that should differ from your development one. […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Managing Dependencies

This one is not specific of django but it is very common during the development of any python project. Managing the contents of the requirements.txt file, that sometimes grows uncontrollably can be a mess. One of the root causes is the common work-flow of using virtualenv, install with pip all the required libraries and then […]

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Technology and Internet

Securing IoT Devices

During the first couple of months of the year 2015 I’ve worked a “little” on the subject of security in the Internet of things world. Even though there is a lot of information about this topic and its crucial role on this new era of the IoT. So today I will share a small document […]

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Python

Django friday tips: Switch the user model

In the most recent versions of django, you’re no longer attached to the default user model. So unlike what happened some time ago, when you had two models (User and Profile) “linked” together through an one-to-one relationship, nowadays you can extend or substitute the base user model. It is as simples as adding the following […]

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Technology and Internet

An heavy chat application

Following up the quote I pointed some time ago in an entry entitled “Bloat”, I will let here one good example. I know Slack it is a great application and it has some complex features, yet I don’t see any reason for any chat program to steal almost 900 Megabytes of my computer’s memory. Note: […]

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Technology and Internet

Newsletters for Python web developers

The amount of new information that is added each day to the web is overwhelming, trying to keep up daily with everything about a given topic can be a time consuming process. One good way I found to tackle this problem and to avoid wasting a good chunk of my day searching and filtering through […]

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Technology and Internet

Getting started with GPG

Last week I gave a small workshop during the lunch hour (the famous Whitesmith’s “Lunch’n Learn”) about openPGP. It only covered the most basic aspects so that non-technical people could be introduced to this tool, something that can be very useful when someone is sharing or working with sensitive information (either personal or work related). […]