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Podcast: Running in Production
Episode:

An Internal Employee Management App Focused on Schools
Category: Technology
Duration: 01:00:28
Publish Date: 2020-08-17 04:00:00
Description:

In this episode of Running in Production, Chris Goodwin talks about building a platform with Django to manage 15k+ students and 2.5k+ staff members across 29 locations. It’s all hosted on a few on-premises Windows servers and has been up and running since 2017.

Chris covers evolving a solution from Excel sheets, working with a large monolithic Django code base, being a Microsoft shop and the importance of tests and logging.

Topics Include

  • 3:53 – There’s 2 developers and a manager who is also a database guru
  • 6:58 – Motivation for using Django and Python
  • 9:52 – It’s a monolithic app using Django templates with a touch of Vue + API endpoints
  • 15:51 – Since it’s an internal app, here’s an explanation of what it does
  • 22:52 – Celery isn’t being used but it’s on their list to start using it
  • 26:23 – It’s a Microsoft shop using MS SQL as a database and Apache for a web server
  • 33:19 – There’s a few beefy on-prem Windows servers and software is configured by hand
  • 41:43 – Walking us through developing a feature in development to deploying it to prod
  • 52:55 – Getting alerted in Slack if things go astray with the app
  • 55:57 – Best tips? Test and log everything and try to keep up with the updates
  • 59:02 – You can find Chris on GitHub, Twitter, Twitch (dev stream) and Instagram

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