For a while now, I've felt unsure about mocking in Python. It has helped me test in the past, but I've also seen a lot of smart people talk or write about its pitfalls.

Recently, I had to test some functionality around calls to Twilio, so I decided to investigate …

For longer than I care to admit, I was running my end to end tests in only Firefox. I thought it would be trivial to add a fixture to have my tests run using multiple browsers. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way in pytest to use fixtures as parametrized values …

For the tl;dr instructions, feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs.

Years ago, I used SourceTree for visualizing my git graph. At some point, SourceTree became bloated and I really didn't like the direction it went, so I looked around for alternatives. I forget if I settled …

At work last week, I was asked to write tests for code that reaches out to Twilio's verify service. Here is what that code looks like (from the Twilio docs):

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

verification = client.verify \
                     .v2 \
                     .services('VAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') \
                     .verifications \
                     .create(to='+15017122661', channel='sms')

I was able to …

At DjangoConUS 2023, I gave a lighting talk with this title. It was a lot of fun, and I'd suggest you try to give a lightning talk if you haven't before. It's a great way to try giving a talk at a conference without having to commit to a full …

I'd like to run a few small apps I've been developing for learning purposes (to do list, etc.) on a cheap or free platform as a service (PaaS) provider so I don't have to worry about a full deployment setup like I have on my main project. These projects aren't …

Since my last post on aliases, I've added a few new aliases. Two are from Boost Your Django DX, which I'd highly recommend. The first is a straight cut from the book:

alias pip="python -m pip"

Using python -m pip instead of pip ensures you are using the version …

I have been using Stripe to process payments for my company AstroVenture (see more context in a previous post here) for a couple of years now, and it has worked great. One thing that took me quite a while to figure out was how to test that we were properly …

This is the fourth and final installment of the series breaking down my talk from DjangoConUS 2022. The first entry covered background information about the project, the second was about using Django Rest Framework, and the third was about infrastructure and deployment.

Before diving in, I'd like to emphasize that …