Recently I have been playing around with building a web site using F# through the Giraffe library. This has been an enlightening experience. Most of my previous web development knowledge is from the Python world, specifically Django. In this blog I will try to compare the feel these two so different niches have.F# vs PythonFirst things first - F# is a statically compiled functional language, which targets .NET framework. I'm … more »

COVID-19 has been with us for almost a year as a news item. The reports indicate, that a lot of people died of the disease. Every lost life is a tragedy, of course. It is important to understand, how exactly the pandemic affected mortality in large populations. Unfortunately, the cause of death attribution to COVID-19 is not always accurate. Sometimes people are recorded as have died of the virus simply … more »

What if you find yourself managing more than one Django-based web site at the same time in production? Do you have to deploy each one of them on a separate server? Or can you manage with just one, saving on hosting expenses? How will you go about the setup in this case, ensuring smooth running of these sites side by side.For "real" production web site, with medium to heavy traffic, … more »

Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS styling framework, originally developed by Twitter, and currently published in open source. While not the only player in that field, it remains a very popular choice for many web developers. It helps people with limited artistic abilities, such as yours truly, to create web sites that are reasonably easy on the eye. It provides many styles and utilities to make the visual layout of a web … more »

Close to 15 years I have been using Drupal for my personal web sites. Drupal is a flexible and configurable CMS (Content Management System) web framework, similar to Wordpress. It has been a relatively dependable working horse for my hosting needs - simple and not too flexible, but relatively robust and reliable. It was quite straightforward to bring up a new web site via it:Create a new MySQL databaseCreate a … more »

Django is a web development framework for Python. I used it for a few web sites, including a relatively large one. I must say, my overall impression is rather ambivalent.First of all, Django is definitely excels when you need stuff done, quickly. A lot of stuff simply works out of the box or with minimum effort, including DB access and ORM, caching, templating and so on. And there are so … more »

2020 just arrived and it's time for something new. I have been using Drupal since 2006, so we have been together for almost 14 years! It's an impressive journey and I am look back with satisfaction - Drupal is simple to use if it fits the requirements exactly, and I stoically avoided touching any of its smelly PHP bowls. However, with the arrival of Drupal 8 I realised, that I … more »

Python allows you to send calendar appointments (invitations / events) directly from your code. It is quite easy to create a new appointment in the standard iCalendar format (ics). You can do it by hand or use a convenient icalendar open source module. In order to convince Outlook, however, to present the iCalendar events as native calendar appointments, you will need to make some effort. Fortunately, other people have already … more »