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Email inbox for Django development

My current project sends emails. Not a very controversial statement that, as most web projects probably need to send the occasional email. To make testing during the dev phase easy, I’ve configured the project to use the django.core.mail.backends.filebased.EmailBackend backend, which just writes an email to a file in a directory you specify. This means I can just open up the file, read and visually verify the email, and click on any links (eg.

December 8, 2022 Read
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Colourblind settings for Git

Like around 12% of people on the planet, I am colour-blind. Mine isn’t too bad compared to others, and is the common red/green kind (protanopia). I still like to use colours in my terminals though, as I find the various highlights useful, so I thought I’d share the colours I have set up for git to make life easy for me. Just copy/paste the following into your ~/.gitconfig file, and of course if any of these colours don’t work for you, just change them to something that does (mostly what I’ve done is get rid of the dark reds and blues, which are very hard for me to see on a blackish terminal background.

September 21, 2022 Read
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Debugging Django in a Docker container

Have you ever tried hunting for a bug in a Django app that’s running in a Docker container? It’s not always a trivial process and can have you dotting print statements all over the place because you can’t figure out how to use breakpoints properly inside the Docker container. Well, fortunately there is a solution to this. 2 solutions even. Solution 1: Configure VS Code to debug a dockerised app Step 1 - Configure VS Code VS Code has built in debugging support for a variety of languages.

September 18, 2022 Read
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Power-up your DuckDuckGo searches with !bangs

DuckDuckGo continues to gain ground over Google for searches, not least because it doesn’t track you. But is it as efficient as Google, and how can you get more out of it? Here are 5 simple tips: Make use of !bangs DuckDuckGo has had bangs for years, though I only discovered them recently. Put simply, a bang allows you to perform a search directly on another site, from the DuckDuckGo site.

May 24, 2022 Read
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Welcome to v2 of michjnich.com

Welcome … … to v2 of my personal site. Version 1 was created using mkdocs and deployed on GitHub pages. Mkdocs is extremely simple to use and a powerful tool, but perhaps not ideal for a more “modern” looking site. While I could have run a blog using mkdocs, it wasn’t entirely practical, and it was for that reason I then set up a seperate tech blog site. stddev.tech This was actually pretty short lived, mainly because I used the hosted version of Ghost, which was quite expensive for somebody just running a small blog with only a handful of visitors, so when it came time to renew I found it hard to justify.

April 3, 2022 Read