Notes

In this episode, we took a break from the regular app to work on an app for a local hackathon that I’m participating in. This is the second week for the hackathon and in this stream, I apply the final touches to the application. We work on models, a template, and build an RSS feed using Django syndication contrib app.

The final presentation for the app was the next day so it was crunch time to finish everything off. After showing off what was done so far, I tried to show the new page and we were met with an exception. The code was in a half finished state before I started the stream because the Service model was changed without an associated migration.

We added a test for the model change and generated the migration. After completing the model change, I talked about working with databases in Heroku and why SQLite won’t work there.

After finishing the modeling work, I integrated the remaining design from my team’s designer and plugged it into the live template. We had a to polish a couple of edges on the design to make it fit well with the rest of the site.

Once the design was finished up, I showed how to mobile testing with ngrok. We tested the app out on my mobile phone to ensure everything worked and looked good.

I explained how to add a sprinkle of JavaScript without pulling in npm and a big JavaScript toolchain.

With the UI out of the way, I needed to work one piece of non-UI functionality. The app is going to have a mailing list for users to receive announcements. The announcements also exist on the site. To help the administrator avoid creating an announcement in two places, we used Django’s syndication app to create an RSS feed. The mailing list service, Mailchimp, will read from the RSS feed to send out announcements automatically from whatever is set in the feed.

I finished the feed and wrote tests for it. That completed all the functionality of the app. To finish the stream, I deployed the final version of the app to Heroku!