Built with Django Newsletter - 2025 Week 6
Hey, Happy Thursday!
Why are you getting this: *You signed up to receive this newsletter on Built with Django. I promised to send you the latest projects and jobs on the site as well as any other interesting Django content I encountered during the month. If you don't want to receive this newsletter, feel free to unsubscribe anytime.
News and Updates
- Last few weeks have been pretty good in terms of personal productivity, so I allowed myself some time to play around with LLMs. The results were quite good. If you are curious about my work and content I produce, you can subscribe to my personal newsletter.
- First thing that came out of it is the post about Django Updates in January 2025. I wrote some code that gets all the commit from the django repo from January, summarizes each one with AI and then creates a master summary with all the important details. I would love to hear your feedback about it, if any. I will keep iterating over it to improve. Even thinking about making a separate product out of it.
- I started dabbling in a new project which is top secret for now. Just kidding... I'm thinking of creating a web app that will help me come up with creative ways of sharing my projects, blog posts and other work on the internet (directories, link aggregators, social media, etc), using specific voice for each place. This means that
- I'm back to updating the django-saas-starter. If you ever end up using it, feel free telling me about your experience. I'm trying to make it as easy to use as possible. I'm probably going to make it paid at some point. Just as an FYI, though I'm not 100% sure about it.
- Anyway... Sorry for the rambling. Let's get into this week's issue.
Sponsors
This issue is sponsored by SEO Blog Bot. Well, sponsor is a strong word. It is just another project of mine that I wanted to share with you 🙈. Fully free!
If you have a side project and are struggling with finding ideas for blog posts, this will help!
If you want to become a real sponsor, just reply to this email or check out available options here.
Projects
- Design Studio Manager - Business management software for interior design studios. Handles the entire back of office workflow, including proposal, procurement, invoicing, reporting and managing work in progress.
- SoundMadeSeen - SoundMadeSeen is a tool that allows podcasters to create videos from their audio content
- Freelancer Dashboard - A CRM, assignment/to do list tracker, and automated invoicing platform for freelancers.
- No Nonsense Recipes - Just the recipes, no long storie
- Bank Statement Analyzer - Analyze your spending patterns with AI
- ShareMySnaps - Create and Share Stunning Digital Albums In Minute
- Online Convert Pro - Free Online Tools for Simple, Creative, Easy
- Django WTF - Django Packages Index
- FotoIA - Turn your selfies into professional photos or fantastic portraits with AI - in minutes!
Jobs
From the Community
- Managing Django’s Queue by Carlton Gibson - Django’s queue is overloaded and slowing everything down. The GitHub effect pushes too many extractive contributions onto a few core maintainers. A federated model would spread out the work and keep the community open and healthy.
- Avoiding Mocks: Testing LLM Applications with LangChain in Django - This article discusses a testing approach for Django projects that use large language models (LLMs) without relying on mocks. It suggests using a test-specific LLM backend to define responses and inspect requests, improving test reliability and maintainability. The approach allows for better isolation of tests and avoids common pitfalls associated with mocking.
- An Introduction to Django Views by Evgenia Verbina - Django views are essential for handling web requests and rendering templates in Django applications. There are two types of views: function-based views, which are simple and straightforward, and class-based views, which offer more structure and reusability. Understanding how to effectively use views will help you develop your Django projects more efficiently.
- (Re)naming things is hard by Eric Matthes - Renaming a widely used part of a project takes significant work. The author changed “simple_deploy” to “django_simple_deploy,” which required thorough updates to code, documentation, and tests. They suggest prioritizing clear, consistent names early on and revisiting them if needed to help new users and contributors.
- What Changed? by Evan Rupert - The author uses a new project to refine workflows, switching from Make to Task, mandating an abstract base model for consistency, and focusing heavily on test coverage. He also reduces friction by integrating tests directly within the development environment. Yet he continues using Django Rest Framework and factoryboy, as they still provide rapid, reliable API and test development.
- What is OpenTelemetry and how to add it to your Django application by Jessica Garson - OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework that helps you monitor applications like Django in a standardized way. This blog post provides a guide on how to set up OpenTelemetry with a Django to-do list app and connect it to Elastic for observability. You can choose between automatic and manual instrumentation to customize your monitoring experience.
Top 3 links from last Issue
- Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer by Andrew Atkinson
- TIL: Django relations are not cached in model instance by Enrique Soria
- CheckIN - All In One Software For Car Wash Companies.
Support
You can support this project by using one of the affiliate links below. These are always going to be projects I use and love! No "Bluehost" crap here!
- Buttondown - Email newsletter tool I use to send you this newsletter.
- Readwise - Best reading software company out there. I you want to up your e-reading game, this is definitely for you! It also so happens that I work for Readwise. Best company out there!
- Hetzner - IMHO the best place to buy a VPS or a server for your projects. I'll be doing a tutorial on how to use this in the future.
- SaaS Pegasus is one of the best (if not the best) ways to quickstart your Django Project. If you have a business idea but don't want to set up all the boring stuff (Auth, Payments, Workers, etc.) this is for you!
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Built with Django:
Start the conversation: