Automated database migrations have been a convenient way of dealing with schema changes for a long time in Django. It’s been only 3 years since migrations have been incorporated into Django but South had been the de-facto solution since 2008.

The same way an ORM allows us to forget about SQL when writing queries to the database, migrations make sure we don’t write a single ‘ALTER TABLE’ in our schema changes. Some may argue that’s bad: we “lose control” over a critical part of our infrastructure, we don’t know how to write SQL anymore when needed, we’re not sure how that operation is really translated into SQL, etc, etc. Ok, these points are actually valid. However, Django migrations module is more than just a way of automatically generating and applying SQL statements, it’s also a transparent API to write your own database changes in Python. It comes with wheels for those who need it (or trust enough) and tools for those who like to get their hands dirty.

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Serverless. The new hype buzzword is taking over the development universe, promising big savings in infrastructure for applications and less deployment headaches to developers. In an agile world, shipping scalable software with budget constraints has become a big puzzle: one that Serverless may solve.

Today I’m going to give you an overview of its history, basic concepts, providers, frameworks, benefits and drawbacks. One thing, though: personally, I don’t like the term Serverless, as it was coined by the Serverless Framework, but now it stuck and everybody is using it. What can I do?

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When I started as an iOS developer, my biggest problem was with app crashes, that’s because I really didn’t know how iOS, Swift, and Objective-C worked. Back then, I wrote a lot of bad code, not worrying about memory usage, memory access, ARC or GCD. That’s simply because I didn’t know about that stuff. I was a beginner for god sakes.

Like most of the beginners, Stack Overflow community taught me a lot about “doing things in the right way”. I’ve learned a lot of tricks that helped me to improve my production process. In this article, I’ll share some of them about the most important tool used in this learning process: the breakpoints!

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Nowadays, images are an indispensable part of the web. However it wasn’t always like that. Only in 1993 the Mosaic browser would introduce images along with content in web pages. Some formats, like GIF and JPEG, already existed in that time and others like PNG and SVG, would only appear in the 90s. Images are used for multiple purposes, like showing pictures, branding, illustrations, charts and many other things.
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Have you ever wanted to prototype a RESTful API, integrate Internet services or IoT devices in a few minutes without having to learn how to use several APIs and libraries? Here you go.

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This post was originally written as an internal article on Cheesecake Labs’ wiki. It merges (no pun intended) pull request practices from many different cultures and backgrounds into a definitive workflow. We will discuss why you should have a guide for managing your PR lifecycle, as well as tips on how to accomplish that.

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When we think about the process of developing an MVP, what we have in mind is to create great value in a short period of time, avoiding complexities and solving problems in the simplest way possible.

Then, on a beautiful sunny summer day, the Project Manager comes up and says:

“We need to create an MVP for a chat system in just one month!”

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