Wholesome Django 🥰💻 #0003

Happy Sunday!

This week at DelightChat has been pretty hectic. We finally launched the beta version of our application and have actual users using the tool.

But as a result of this, users are reporting issues and we are solving them in real time so that they understand how serious we are about this product.

Some of the issues that users reported were within our control, but some of them were not. I want to talk about the ones which were not in our control.

In case you are wondering what is the context of this title, I am not talking about how people get trolled on the internet and hence it is hostile. I am talking about how the internet is hostile for app developers who try to integrate with other 3rd party applications.

To make DelightChat work, we integrated with Facebook's APIs to be able to send and receive messages from messenger and comments on Facebook posts and Instagram posts.

I ended up writing an adapter that connects DelightChat with Facebook and I expected that adapter to function like this:

But what ended up happening was this:

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The above image also does a good job of representing what my brain looked like when I was done with Facebook.

To summarize my experience, Facebook’s APIs do not function the way they are supposed to according to the documentation. 

Some of the APIs do not return the data which is critical to make your application work and we had to find a work around by fetching this data using a different API.

This is still fine but the main issue came up with Instagrams APIs. Facebook is supposed to send us a callback whenever somebody makes a comment on an instagram post and we use that to display the comment on DelightChat.

This callback is not sent to us when the instagram post in question contains original audio content. Why? I have absolutely no idea! They don’t even mention it anywhere in their documentation. It just randomly does not work sometimes.

But how do we explain this to our customers? As far as they are concerned, DelightChat was not functioning properly even though we did everything right from our end and Facebook not sending us the callbacks are completely out of our control.

Just to be clear I do not blame our customers, not one bit. We promised them something and they are well within their right to expect what we promised. I blame Facebook.

Phew, it feels good to vent out. Sorry about that folks, I will get back to providing value now. Here goes:

What I wrote this week

My last week's post on why to use Django garnered a couple of debates on Reddit around whether or not Flask is a better framework compared to Django.

So I took this opportunity to write a piece comparing the two popular web frameworks which I titled Flask vs Django: Which framework to choose in 2021?

As usual, I tried to put my own spin on the subject by comparing these frameworks with Pizzas. Do check it out if you like web development and pizza.

Interesting finds from the depths of the internet

Want to blow off some steam? Draw an iceberg and watch how it floats!

Apparently you can create your own digital human being now.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Python. Happy anniversary man, please be around forever.

What’s with the 3D printing craze? People are printing houses now.

My co-founder Preetam wrote a piece on how evolution happens via iterations.

Wholesome incident of the week

A day ago I received an email from someone at https://www.g2i.co/ asking if I would be willing to tag one of their blog posts in one of mine.

This felt great to me because these guys write really good content and the fact that they thought my website was worthy of linking their blog post meant something.

I have not yet decided where to tag them though. I am yet to find a relevant post for doing this. Perhaps next week 🤞

A Wholesome request

This is my first attempt at a newsletter, so I would be beyond thrilled if you hit me back with a feedback email. What did you like? What did you hate? etc. This will help me improve in the next one.

It has been proven that the best way to grow a newsletter is via word of mouth, so If you felt like this piece of content added value to your life, please tell other people.

You could share these links on twitter and WhatApp or forward this email.

See you next Sunday ✌️