Month: September 2022

Testing in Django, or “How long has that been broken?”

When the phrase, “how long has that been broken?” enters into your vocabulary, it’s probably past time to add tests to your project.

Finally got my tests going with some momentum. I’ve also adjusted the dashboard view a bit over at JobTrek; although I’m lacking time to design a UI, at least it looks a bit better now. (Leave a comment if you think I shouldn’t wait to find another Bootstrap theme.) And dear Lord help me, I’ve bought a domain name and even coughed up the $7 for the Heroku Hobby plan with SSL.

I’d learned some basics in the Kickstart Coding course, but couldn’t get my basic tests to pass. Turns out I’d been adding my tests to the wrong tests.py file, in the wrong app directory. Hopefully this blog post will save some random person out there from making the same mistake!

Another beginner issue for me was testing templates and content for anonymous versus authenticated users — more on that in my next post.

For some good, free content on testing in Django, check out VeryAcademy’s series on YouTube.

The J.O.B. search continues — is there an app for that?

The fun-employed phase has lost its luster; I’m not quite at the soy-sauce-over-rice-for-dinner stage, but let’s just say it’s crunch time. Now firing off apps left and right, sending LinkedIn DMs, and contacting recruiters and former co-workers is the daily grind.

In side project news, I’ve abandoned SelfWars and all those Vuetify components. Also, I’m finally digging in to SQL joins (studying via Kickstart Coding,) after avoiding it like the plague for so long.

Lately been building a job search progress bar web app in Django. Fun, fun, fun! Wanna take a sneak peek?

“Your search will take approximately 8 weeks”

Step 1: register — I know, I know (a user story for anonymous sessions is on my plate)

Step 2: add some jobs you’ve applied to, using the simple form

Step 3: view your interview rate percentage and offer rate percentages on a handy pie chart (more graphs are planned)

See if your interview rate is around at least 15%, and see approximately how long your search will take. Based on lovely research from TalentWorks.

I know I said ‘progress bar,’ but for now it’s in the form of a pie chart; hey, who dun’ like pie?

I realized I was giving all this ‘daily grind’ advice out to Nucamp students, but when folks see in starkly-presented numbers just how long their job search could take at a certain pace, I think it’s got the potential to be an illuminating kick in the pants.