An Internal Employee Management App Focused on Schools

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

Links

📄 References

• https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• vue →
• apache →
• bootstrap →
• jquery →
• mssql →
• slack →
• windows →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://github.com/select2/select2
• https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest-django

Support the Show

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