Django 4 by Example by Antonio Mele is a great book. I’ve been working through the projects. They are clearly laid out, the instructions are step by step and clear and the tone is friendly without being cold or patronizing.

So far I’ve worked through the ninth chapter. The latest project is a fairly complete online shop. I won’t go into the details here, but I’ve worked with custom model managers, QuerySets and to top it off full Stripe integration, with asynchronous tasks handled by Celery, managed by RabbitMQ with a shout out to Flower to monitor the tasks. There’s PDF and CSV generation tools in a custom admin panel for staff embers. Really complete, and so enjoyable to code up and get working on my local machine.

I took a wander down the Docker road to see what it might take to get these solutions up and running on my current host Render.com and so far I haven’t found the complete solution. I run a PostgreSQL instance on Render but am considering moving it to AWS or Google Cloud to get some experience with those.

We’ll see. As per my last post, I did get the poetry project up and running on Render.com. It was a mixture of settings, inexperience on my part and they had some problems with displaying error messages. At present there are two projects up there at https://blog-django-demo.onrender.com and https://listings.onrender.com. The listings app was built in Educative.io learning path, before I discovered Django 4 by Example. It’s basic.

As for the blog demo, it’s packed with features, I wrote skimpy blogs around each feature and used them to fill out some content for the full text search.

I haven’t gotten the next two projects from Django4 live as they are too complicated for my current understanding of Docker. Once I get a handle on it, (I think the last chapter of the book will cover this in depth), I’ll swing back and get them online.

With all the projects built, I feel I’ll have the tools at hand and the practice to start the new and improved critique wheel.