Tech Highlights #3

Hi, labfollower! Periodically, our devs share what they are reading, and in this edition, we bring some highlights on Python, Django, and even CSS gamification!

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Have a nice reading!

CSSBattle: replicate target images using CSS to score

CSS drawing and animations can be a complex task, requiring precision and creativity. We need to keep our CSS skills sharp, and engaging in challenges like those on CSSBattle.dev is a great way to do that. These battles offer a fun way to practice and improve your CSS skills with your friends and colleagues.

Django app for creating database-backed HTTP debug endpoints

Django-HTTP-debug is a project that helps integrate with other tools that make external API calls to your project. It allows you to activate/deactivate the logging to each configured endpoint. When it is activated, it saves the requests into the database.

Biome: all-in-one toolchain tailored for web development

Built with speed in mind, thanks to Rust, Biome handles tasks like code formatting, linting, and optimization, effectively replacing tools like Prettier and ESLint. Its no-fuss setup, adaptability to large projects, and high efficiency make it a go-to for developers.

Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)

Python's GIL allows only one thread to execute at a time in CPython, limiting true parallelism in CPU-bound tasks. While this simplifies memory management and prevents race conditions, it hinders multithreaded performance on multi-core processors. To achieve parallelism, developers often turn to multiprocessing or use async programming for I/O-bound tasks. Despite its drawbacks, the GIL remains a fundamental part of Python's architecture.

Fine Tuning Python WSGI and ASGI applications for Flask, Django, and FastAPI

Diving into the async world and changing from the traditional WSGI to the ASGI protocol can be a challenge. One article that helped us a lot in recent projects was this one regarding fine-tuning. Setting up ASGI can be easy, but you have to also understand on a deeper level what you can optimize and configure to extract the most out of it. From profiling to less-known concurrency settings, the strategies mentioned in this guide are useful even if you are not using ASGI.

How to Create Software Architecture Diagrams Using the C4 Model

This is a tutorial on how to describe software architecture using the C4 model, and to maintain the generated diagrams with a diagram-as-code approach, using version control, collaboration, and automation. Integrating this procedure into the development workflow allows you to track changes to the architecture diagram and facilitates a shared understanding of the system architecture and its history.