Wholesome Django 🥰💻 #0014

This week at DelightChat has been quite eventful. We finally launched the first version of a widget that can be installed on any Shopify store and will help users solve their issues on their own.

Its usefulness aside, having our brand show up on a website that gets >200k visits a month is huge in itself!

The main highlight of the week however was when we used our own product to support our own customers who use our product to support their customers!

Confused? Here is how it went down. A customer of ours reported an issue via email. We received this email within the DelightChat interface where Preetam and I had an internal discussion on how this problem can be solved and then Preetam replied back to the customer within DelightChat itself.

There is no reason for us to use gmail anymore. Pretty soon we would be switching over to DelightChat to manage all of our emails and social media.

Not only is this fulfilling but also makes it easier for us to find blind spots within our product and fix them before our customers report them to us.

It was always a dream of ours to build a product that we can use to solve our own problems while at the same time making a business out of it. Watching it come true is exhilarating. 

What I wrote this week

I decided to continue the tradition I started a couple of weeks ago of writing micro blog posts and tweets about small nuggets of information that need to be kept in mind while developing Django applications.

This week I focussed my attention on how ORM queries can be significantly optimised just by explicitly mentioning what fields you need from the database instead of fetching the entire model.

👉 You can write better queries using values() or values_list().

You can read the tweet version of the post here

Interesting finds from the depths of the internet

This great guide on how to build your own minimal operating system

How this man physically hurt himself by making a mistake in his code

Ever get interrupted while coding only to realise that you are unable to get back into the zone? Here is why

Building a rule engine? A simple JSON might be the answer.

See you next Sunday ✌️