First, a little background

Django has an excellent messages framework which provides support for cookie and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request, and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level determining its priority (e.g. success, info, error).

For example, in a view you can send a message:

To regression test, or not to regression test

Building up a proper testing suite can involve a good amount of work, which I'd prefer to avoid because it's boring and I'm lazy.

On the other hand, if I'm not careful, taking shortcuts that save effort in the short run could lead to a massive productivity hit further down the road.

For example, let's say instead of building up a rigorous test suite I test my code manually, and give a lot of careful thought to its correctness.

Right now I think I'm OK. But how long will it stay that way?

Every now and then Liraz and I find ourselves chatting about how much we love Python, but more so the lessons we have learned from coding, and how to apply them to create beautiful Python code. I've tried to refine some of the "lessons" into practical guidelines that I apply religiously to all new code I write, and the refactoring of old code I written.

When settings.DEBUG is set to False, exception tracebacks will be sent to settings.ADMINS. To make it simpler to track down how and why the exception was raised, it's beneficial to know which user caused the exception.

It's quite simple to do this using some custom middleware. In the Hub, we include the associated users email address in the exception with the following: