Matt Segal is a software engineer and tech lead who writes about software design, Python development, system architecture, and the craft of engineering teams. His blog focuses on practical approaches to building reliable, maintainable software - from dependency management and code reviews to continuous delivery and scalable system design.
57 articles from this blog
A guide to debugging production errors in a web app, using a real-world example of a missing email issue.
A guide to setting up automated testing for Django projects using Pytest and GitHub Actions for continuous integration.
A guide to setting up a free monitoring stack for Django applications, covering uptime, error reporting, logs, and performance.
A DevOps specialist shares how software engineering practices improved an academic infectious disease modeling project, applying web dev skills to research.
A guide to quickly compress and resize large images for webpages using a browser-only workflow to improve loading times.
A guide on integrating React into a Django project, focusing on a simple, incremental setup without complex JavaScript toolchains.
Learn how to configure VS Code to highlight unused Python variables and imports using the PyLance language server for cleaner code.
A beginner-friendly Django project guide for building a survey website to practice backend web development concepts.
A guide to designing wireframes for a Django survey application, covering user journeys for both survey takers and creators.
A guide to designing a data model for a Django survey application, covering models for Survey, Question, Option, and Submission.
A guide to resolving variable naming conflicts between Python's snake_case and JavaScript's camelCase in full-stack web development.
Explains how to configure NGINX as a reverse proxy for a Django application, breaking down the config file line-by-line.
A guide to configuring and understanding logging in a Django web application stack using Gunicorn and NGINX for effective debugging.
Analyzing Django's performance for web apps, discussing benchmarks, user experience, and hosting costs to determine if it's 'too slow'.
A guide to making Django projects portable and easy to share across different machines using Git and dependency management.
A discussion on why there's no single correct way to write tests, challenging the dogma around unit testing and TDD.
A guide for beginners on how to efficiently navigate and find answers in the extensive Django documentation, reducing frustration.
A guide to automating the process of downloading and restoring a production Postgres database backup for local Django development.
Tips for polishing GitHub projects to impress potential employers, including cleaning repos and writing effective READMEs.
Learn how to use Factory Boy and Faker to automatically generate realistic dummy data for testing Django applications.
