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Technology Blog

Testing + QA

Quality development requires testing to uncover situations that can negatively impact clients and users. It also helps ensure consistency and reliability when deploying code. Topics include testing approaches and strategies, the various testing tools available in Python and Django, continuous integration testing tools and building effective unit and integration tests.

Tuning Site Search for Covid-19

The recent spike in usage of the term covid-19 introduced some inconsistent results in Imaginary’s custom site search engine, iScraper, a tool which utilizes Elasticsearch as its indexing engine.  We’ll take a closer look at these results and show how we corrected the problem with an Elasticsearch configuration change. iScraper...

Quick Introduction to Mock

Quick Introduction to Mock Mock is a powerful library for facilitating testing.  It allows users to replace components of your application with powerful mock objects at testing runtime.  These objects can then be used to make observations about call patterns and to assert which methods of the object were accessed, the...

5 million votes and counting at Rockhall.com

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently announced their 2015 nominees.  At the same time, they opened up a Fan Voting application so that music fans across the world could make their selections known. Rock Hall approached Imaginary a couple weeks prior and asked if we could design an...

Remember your robots.txt

Because the development site is also on the web, it needs its own web address (e.g. dev.yourcompany.com).  There are many adjustments needed in the configuration file to accommodate the development URL, especially when testing third-party connections.  For example, ecommerce gateways don't like when credit card information is coming from a...

Testing and Django

At the last Chicago Djangonauts meeting, which we host in our office, I gave my first Python/Django talk. I spoke regarding unit-testing your code in general, but, also how unit-testing works within the context of web-applications. The talk went smoothly and it seemed to be well recieved. Python's standard library...

Testing As a Different Django User

All types of Django auth do basically the same thing: They associate a browser session ID with a Django user if the user logs-in successfully.  I found a neat technique to bypass a Django login by modifying with a Django session, which can be useful for testing purposes. Why is...

Where Django programming and Google Analytics meet

We just recently discovered an issue where a programming decision affected the ease (or lack thereof) of establishing goal funnels in Google Analytics.  What we also discovered was that it was completely avoidable with a little better communicatioin between our Django programming staff and our analytics staff.  As is typical...

Django and Continuous Integration

There are a wide variety of reasons why we should worry about testing in our Django applications, obviously. However, as a former system administrator, I have some ideals that are absolutely engraved straight into my brain I think. The main idiom being: "Never do the same thing three times. Do...

The Importance of Daily Briefings

Even as a small company, we face our share of communication challenges. Not a week goes by without someone uttering, "we need to communicate better." Communication struggles cause a myriad of problems - project misdirection, irritations, management involvement. Production makes up the bulk of our staff - programmers, user interface...