CTO with a CMO flavor

5 Biggest Agile User Story Mistakes

2019-01-30T12:20:00+03:00

Sometimes, teams feel that agile user stories are not worth the extra work. I think I know the reason why.

How corporate communications ruin your teamwork and a way to fix that

2017-12-02T12:20:00+03:00

Our new executive had almost ruined our team spirit. Did we fire her? No, we fixed the root cause - our communication technology.

Preparing for a holiday season? Make sure your website conversion rate is low enough

2017-10-13T10:20:00+03:00

There’s no typo in the title. Our figures show that the lower website conversion rate you have during seasonal peaks, the better it is for your sales. In fact, by decreasing conversion, we managed to boost our sales. Read on to learn how that works.

Make personal growth books work for you: the “Ideas Depot” reading strategy

2017-08-23T12:20:00+03:00

Reading personal growth and leadership books is always rewarding. Forgetting ideas soon without integrating them into your life - not so much. Read on to learn how to finally make books work for you with a simple 5-minute daily routine.

Django: how to create PDF, MS Word and Excel documents from templates

2016-07-11T12:20:00+03:00

If you’re building a Django system that implies serving some kind of documents like reports or bills, chances are you want to provide docs in various formats from PDF to MS Word to HTML. But how to implement this without resorting to numerous templates and packages for each document type?

Why you should use the Django admin: 9 tips

2015-12-09T10:20:00+03:00

This writing is inspired by a comment on Reddit concerning my recent post:

“The problem is that everyone I speak to seems to think the opposite - that the admin is super-limited, inflexible and hard to customize.”

— andybak on Reddit

I’m about to break this prejudice right now. The Django admin is a really brilliant piece of software, which can significantly speed up your development.

Here are some tips about the Django admin, which I’ve found to be quite useful.

Managed search and replace in many files using Vim and ag.

2015-11-16T10:20:00+03:00

Recently I faced an interesting problem. I had to search for the redundant lines of code (about a hundred occurences), and replace some of them. The bad thing is that I couldn’t do that automatically, as each case had to be manually reviewed.

So, how to automate this task, while keeping the manual control?

How to send Jabber (XMPP) messages from Django

2015-11-11T12:20:00+03:00

Did you ever want to have a simple Django notification bot? An intranet one which just sends you (or someone you tell it to) Jabber messages when certain events occur? So did I. Please, welcome: django-jabber.

Tip: How to get a single object`s value with Django ORM

2015-11-11T11:20:00+03:00

There are times when you want to get a single field of a single object in the database. For example, just get the headline of the blog post #1, not fetching it’s body. How do you do it in a usual way?

'Hello world' # Or maybe even this way: >>> BlogPost.objects.values('headline').filter(pk=1)[0]['headline'] 'Hello world'

Recently I’ve stumbled upon a shorter one:

When you shouldn’t use the Django admin

2015-11-11T10:20:00+03:00

In case you’ve thought I detest django.contrib.admin — by no means. Actually it’s one of the Django’s greatest features, I really love it. In most cases.

Here’s a real life story. We’ve had to quickly put up the first version of an intranet claim tracking system, and one of our developers was just crazy about the Django admin… So why not, we’ve got along with the stock interface as the primary one for …