Boasting the “framework for perfectionists with deadlines” title, Django is the go-to solution for building web applications with Python. Offering great features like great security, versatility, and scalability, Django attracts thousands of web developers all across the globe to use it and contribute to your next web project. With large numbers of Django developers to choose from, how to make sure that we hire the best candidate?
Seeing the power of Django framework, many companies are adjusting their hiring strategies. However, they are also realizing the struggles of choosing the right job candidate: in a large pool of available Django developers, hiring the best becomes quite tricky. There are Django developers, software engineers, programmers, consultants — all with their own rates, past projects, resumes, and skill sets. Sorting through each of these aspects is a potential headache for your company’s human resources department — and the cost of a mistake is just too high. This is why you need to trust hiring professionals to hire Django developers — let’s examine how Soshace can make your hiring process easier.
The first stage of our selection process is resume screening. Many Django developers put great focus on their resumes, detailing their work experience and success cases. Although a Django developer’s CV often contains just a few pages, it can provide great insight into their work attitude and proficiency. Many companies try to automate this process, utilizing special algorithms to try and sort through resumes — but we think that this approach is flawed. We prefer to analyze each resume in a thorough manner and gain valuable information about the candidate — after all, one detail can decide everything.
The second stage focuses on Django developer’s soft skills. The image of a coder sitting alone in a dark room is a stereotype — nowadays, as companies establish large teams consisting of members from all around the world, the ability to communicate effectively is ever so important. This is why we gauge our job candidates’ soft skills: these include communication, discipline, and teamwork. Ignoring the soft skills aspect can affect the whole team in a negative way: after all, communication is key.
The third stage consists of hard skills analysis: namely, professional skills test and online coding. During this stage, our hiring experts take their time to really test the job candidate’s Django knowledge. We do not put any time pressure on the interviewee; instead, we conduct our technical interviews in a manner that allows the candidate to showcase their knowledge. After all, a rushed technical interview is not what we are looking for.
At the end of our selection process is your prospective Django developer: they are sufficiently skilled and ready to join your team and make your project better. This is why our clients trust us to hire Django developers!
Django, the backbone of companies like Pinterest, Washington Post, NASA, Instagram, Udemy, and many more, is the go-to solution for rapid web development. Its potential is utilized by Django developers — and the more proficient the developer, the greater the project will turn out to be. So how can we test the Django developer’s skill set? These questions can help us assess just how well our job candidates know this framework — certain parts of this knowledge also related to general Python proficiency.
When is Django the most suitable solution?
Even though Django is awesome, it’s not perfect — so we’ve compiled a neat check-list to go through before choosing Django to power your next project:
- Fast development, fast deployment, fast changes.
- Robust, reliable, and secure, able to withstand attacks like SQL injection or XSS.
- Scaleable up/down.
- Able to include more complex technologies (e.g. computer vision) later.
- ORM support.
Still, in some cases, Django can become a bottleneck in and of itself or simply turn out to be a subpar choice:
- The project is going to be rather simple/basic. In this scenario, the team should opt for microframeworks like Flask (Django’s little sibling), Slim (written in PHP), or Express.js (in Node.js).
- The project is going to be built from the ground up — and the team is confident enough in their abilities.
- The project is going to be very large-scale and cannot be contained within a single codebase. In this case, splitting the app into microservices is preferable: each app will be managed by a dedicated team and can be created in a different framework, adopting the “best of all worlds” approach.
Django vs Flask
Or, in these frameworks’ own words, <q>The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines</q> versus <q>Web development, one drop at a time</q>. Although developers enjoy pitting different technologies against each other, the competition between these frameworks would not be fair: while Django is full-fledged and with “batteries included”, Flask can arguably be considered to be a “microframework”, forcing the developer to install the components they need manually.
Django comes prepackaged with a lot of great features which, in Flask’s case, are either absent or need fine-tuning:
- Object Relational Mapping (ORM) allows for seamless interaction with databases like MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Flask developers, on the other hand, have to rely on third-party database toolkit called SQLAlchemy.
- Django follows the Model View Controller pattern, while Flask lacks any model.
- Django Rest Framework enables developers to create powerful REST-ful APIs.
- Django also comes prepackaged with a bootstrapping tool , django-admin: it enables developers to create web apps within the project without any external input.
What are the benefits of using Python, web development-wise?
As Django is built with Python, it is important to reiterate what great features this language has to offer:
- Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world — and it is still gaining in popularity, as evidenced by TIOBE index and studies by GitHub and Stack Overflow. Although popularity is not a huge benefit per se, it encourages many developers and companies adopt the language, making the Python community bigger and more dedicated — and in the end, this leads to a better language.
- Python is easy to learn. This is important when a developer team decides to adopt new Python-based technology, e.g. rewrite a feature or start using a framework like Django or Flask.
- However, “easy” does not equal “primitive”: Python is powerful, able to handle heavy tasks like machine learning.
- Python follows the motto “Code is read more often than it is written” which explains its great readability.
What are some common mistakes that can be caught during code review?
Inefficient database queries. Django ORM, although powerful enough to handle large data sets, often prevents the developer from keeping the under-the-hood processes in check. This can lead to the developer making inefficient queries which, as time goes on and projects get larger, start to build up — and their combined power can significantly slow the whole project down. Here’s how this problem can be addressed:
- Use the database for complex filtering instead of Python. The database will be more efficient in data filtering thanks to its nature — to create complex queries, we can use “and” and “or” operators combined with Django’s “object” feature. For instance, we can find all tweets related to Soshace via:
Tweet.objects.filter( Q(text__contains=Soshace) | Q(text__contains=hiSoshace) )
- Monitor queries during development. This can be done via the Django shell with python manage.py shell command (and setting the DEBUG option to True); alternatively, Django can log database queries to a special file — however, the file can quickly grow in size as logging is quite verbose.
Check configuration files. To protect confidential information, we should ensure that it never leaks through logs or error reports. In DEBUG view, for instance, Django automatically hides values of the following settings: API, KEY, PASS, SECRET, SIGNATURE, and TOKEN. However, if you name your components differently or simply mistype a word (e.g. user_passwor), Django’s filter stops working — and this can lead to exposure of sensitive information.
For GDPR compliance, it makes sense to store as little customer data on the server logs as possible. Additionally, the ADMINS setting creates email reports and sends them the listed email addresses, detailing server errors — this is another security risk as these errors often contain sensitive information. To avoid this pitfall, sensitive_variables() and sensitive_post_parameters() decorators should be used.
Manage dependencies responsibly. Despite widening the project’s functionality, dependencies also a security threat when introduced improperly.
How can we set up query logging to a file?
We can add this code to our settings file (/Django/project/folder corresponds to our project path):
LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': False,
'handlers': {
'file': {
'level': 'DEBUG',
'class': 'logging.FileHandler',
'filename': '/Django/project/folder/debug.log',
},
},
'loggers': {
'django.db.backends': {
'handlers': ['file'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
},
},
}
Write two views.py samples for printing the string "Website created on Django" with and without a template
1. Without a template:
from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
return HttpResponse("Website created on Django.")
2. With a template
from django.shortcuts import render def index(request): return render(request, 'main/index.html')
# templates/main/index.html
Website created on Django.
Showcase an example of using CSRF protection
# settings.py
MIDDLEWARE = [
'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
# other middlewares
]
# template
<form method="post">
{% csrf_token %}
<!-- other fields -->
</form>
Create a page with the latest 5 questions according to the given model
# polls/models.py
from django.db import models
class Question(models.Model):
question_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
Answer:
# polls/views.py
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template import loader
from .models import Question
def index(request):
latest_question_list = Question.objects.order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
template = loader.get_template('polls/index.html')
context = {
'latest_question_list': latest_question_list,
}
return HttpResponse(template.render(context, request))
# polls/templates/polls/index.html
{% if latest_question_list %}
<ul>
{% for question in latest_question_list %}
<li><a href="/polls/{{ question.id }}/">{{ question.question_text }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% else %}
<p>No polls are available.</p>
{% endif %}
