Finding near locations with GeoDjango and Postgis Part II

This is a continuation of part I. Converting phrases into coordinates Let’s test out Nominatim – the Open Street Maps tool to search their map data. We basically want whatever the user types in to turn into map coordinates. We can take vague statements like New York and get the coordinates of New York City.… Continue reading Finding near locations with GeoDjango and Postgis Part II

Finding near locations with GeoDjango and Postgis Part I

With GeoDjango we can find places in proximity to other places – this is very useful for things like a store locator. Let’s use a store locater as an example. Our store locator needs to be able to read in messy user input (zip, address, city, some combination). Then, locate any stores we have nearby.… Continue reading Finding near locations with GeoDjango and Postgis Part I

Review of Tutanota

Tutanota is an open source email provider. It features easy to use end to end encryption. It’s notable as a modern, libre, and cheap hosted email provider. Why not gmail Gmail is easily the best email provider. It’s light years ahead of any open source system. It’s gratis for individual, education, nonprofit, and small business… Continue reading Review of Tutanota

Building an api for django activity stream with Generic Foreign Keys

I wanted to build a django-rest-framework api for interacting with django-activity-stream. Activity stream uses Generic Foreign Keys heavily which aren’t naturally supported. We can however reuse existing serializers and nest the data conditionally. Here is a ModelSerializer for activity steam’s Action model. from rest_framework import serializers from actstream.models import Action from myapp.models import ThingA, ThingB… Continue reading Building an api for django activity stream with Generic Foreign Keys

Open source chat

Web based chatting services like Hipchat and Slack are catching on these days. Such services are proprietary which severely limits your freedom to extend them and gives control over communication to a for profit company and probably the NSA. What free alternatives are out there? We have good old IRC and XMPP servers. But these… Continue reading Open source chat

The only time I will spam you

I’m applying to this $150,000 grant. We need 250 votes to be considered. Voting for us is an easy way to support projects like django-report-builder and django-simple-import. We spin off these third party apps whenever possible. Burke Software’s main focus is an open source school information system. If anything on this blog has helped you… Continue reading The only time I will spam you

Docker in dev and in production – a complete and DIY guide

Docker is an amazing Linux containerization tool. At Burke Software, we moved our development environment to Fig months ago and are now using Docker in production as well. This guide should give you ideas. I’m going to cover a lot of technologies not related to Docker to give you an idea how we do things.… Continue reading Docker in dev and in production – a complete and DIY guide

django, rest, and angularjs – a Don’t Repeat Yourself approach

I’m a django developer. When I started working with angular I wanted to keep using DRY principles that I’m used to with Django Forms. For example defining validation, verbose_name, etc in your models. This guide should give you an overview of building a system with django-rest-framework (DRF) and angular. It should also give you some… Continue reading django, rest, and angularjs – a Don’t Repeat Yourself approach