Here is the command for provisioning the cheapest database on Google Cloud SQL. There were a couple of pitfalls as I’ll explain.

I often find myself having to reimplement the sliding window algorithm. Here is a basic template for sliding windows. It is a good starting point for adding other features like counting characters or tracking the largest size of the window.

It is important to keep track of the performance of your application. One popular way to do this is to log slow queries. Below is how to do this in Django python. Your logging config will vary depending on how your django app is setup. On simpler django sites it might be in settings.py

Recently I completed the Leetcode 30 day Pandas Challenge. Pandas is a popular python library for data analysis and Leetcode has made a set of problems to learn it. Here I share my thoughts on the problems and whether you should try it too.

Python development is great for modern web development. There are several python based web frameworks that can help speed up building your web app. In this post we’ll go over one popular framework, Flask, and some of the topics you might get asked in an interview setting.

Distributed tracing allows to observe requests as they propagate through distributed systems, especially those built using a microservices architecture. In a distributed environment, tracing also helps you understand relationships and interactions between microservices. Distributed tracing gives an insight into how a particular microservice is performing and how that service affects other microservices.

In this post we detail how to use Swaks for testing emails over tls. This post picks up where the manual page leaves off and more explicitly goes over how to send a test email over tls. Swaks is a popular tool in penetration testing circles, it is written in Perl and according to it’s github history it was first published on December 12th 2001.

Cybercriminals like to go after small businesses because they tend to be vulnerable and unprotected compared to larger companies. In fact, nearly half of all cyber attacks target small businesses! Did you know that most small companies that experience a cyber attack go out of business within just six months? Fortunately, there are several precautions you can take to protect your customers’ data and safeguard the future of your company.

Here we show how to select all records that occur in an hour. This is useful for cases where you are running an async task at some interval smaller than a day. My first attempts at doing this type of filtering involved providing a start and end datetime. But there is a way to do it more simply by leveraging some database functions.

Here we share a small django management command that sends an email. This command is useful because it will use the same email credentials the rest of your django api is using to send emails. So you can use this as a sanity check to see if your settings are correct.