Tackling performance problems in Django

Launching a product is fantastic fun, but the work doesn’t end there. Once you start to build up a considerable amount of content and gain more users interacting with your system you will need to be on the lookout for areas of poor performance. In this blog post I will explain some of the code-level tools and techniques we use to identify & improve the performance of BOS. Continue reading

Validating email addresses in Python and Javascript

On the BOS2 project we have added email address validation to our survey input fields. To achieve this we initially used Django’s EmailValidator but it has some limitations – noticeably it does not impose a length restriction on the local part of the email address (before the ‘@’ symbol), and it also requires a dot (.) in the domain part (so example@com fails to register as valid when it should). Continue reading

New feedback tool ‘Duat’ released

Duat is a simple, lightweight user acceptance tool written in Django.

It requires minimal integration with the target website – only requiring a single script tag inserted at the end of the page. It’s intended to be used to allow site visitors to report problems and issues that they come across such as:

  • Highlighting CSS issues
  • Reporting spelling mistakes
  • Submitting bug reports

I developed duat primarily for use with our BOS2 tool and modelled it after Google’s feedback mechanism. Continue reading