October 2018 Review

In October, I doubled-down on efforts to write more for both the Pinax Project as well as for Eldarion. Here is a summary of what I wrote.

For a long time, I knew I should be writing more about all the things we are doing as part of Pinax and Eldarion, however, I wasn’t treating it as a priority.

This meant that the day got doing and a million other things needed to get done and then I was left with no time to write. Parkinson’s law is true, indeed!

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

–C. Northcote Parkinson

I wasn’t timeboxing all the things so work just expanded to fill the day squeezing out writing opportunities. So, I decided as an experiment I’d see what I could get done by giving myself a one-hour block first thing in the morning.

Some days would be spent researching a new topic, generating topic ideas, creating a rough draft of a new post or two, or editing and publishing existing drafts.

The more I stayed disciplined to this hour, the more words just flowed.

6 October 2017

An Ajax UX Pattern for Creating, Updating, and Ordering Items

It can be fairly common to have situations where your users need to quickly add items to a list, edit those items, and perhaps even sort them. Ideally, we can keep the user focused on their data and tasks rather than how to navigate the software facilitating the work.

17 October 2017

How We Maintain High Levels of Code Quality

For a long time, we used TravisCI and Coveralls for executing lint checkers and tests and tracking our code coverage. These are fine tools but we’ve recently switched to CircleCI and CodeCov. This is our default setup for projects.

18 October 2017

Progress Update on Semantic Templates for Pinax

As it turns out managing templates in an external app for dozens of different apps across 11 different projects is quite a tedious process. We need something simpler. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

23 October 2017

Adoption of a new Import Ordering Standard

For years we have supported the same import ordering rules in our CONTRIBUTING.md files as part of the Pinax coding style. One feature of this was separate sections for both django and django.contrib. Time has come for that to change.

24 October 2017

Javascript Testing with Jasmine and Karma

Recently I updated eldarion-ajax. to have more robust tests along with 100% test coverage. I wanted to get to this point before I venture into some potentially aggressive refactoring.

26 October 2017

Pinax Stripe 4.0.0 Release Coming Soon

A lot has been happening these past two months in pinax-stripe. I wanted to take a moment between all the Pull Requests and provide an update of what’s on master pending a new release.