In this episode of Running in Production, Dash Winterson talks about building a new type of chat app for iOS using Django and Python on the back-end. It’s hosted on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk and has been up and running since mid 2020.

Dash covers creating async compatible code in Django, developing a monolithic back-end that a few developers develop against, investing in the AWS ecosystem, end to end message encryption and the Zen of Python.

Topics Include

3:05 – Rewriting an existing Django app into a new Django app with 90%+ test coverage
8:49 – Async features in Django and not using Celery
12:07 – A breakdown of gRPG and Protobuff
15:13 – The platform has about 300 daily active users, dead locks and monitoring
17:47 – A monolithic Dockerized app with 4 developers working on the project
20:05 – There’s only an API back-end in Django, the front-end is a native iOS app
22:51 – The SimpleJWT and Redis / ARedis libraries were very helpful in Python
27:04 – The phonenumbers library showed to be very useful too
30:02 – Using Docker Compose in development with a multi-stage Dockerfile
32:22 – Using Elastic Beanstalk in production and a number of other tech choices
38:06 – There’s no configuration management tools being used, but that’s next
42:09 – Most AWS instance types they are using are medium size
44:00 – The process to deploy code from development to production
49:20 – Dealing with backing up user generated data and encrypting messages
54:06 – Getting alerted of errors through Slack and email
58:01 – Best tips? When in doubt stick to the Zen of Python
1:00:53 – You can find Dash on GitHub and Twitter

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

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