Dev College #7: we made Django Channels unchained

Channels is an exciting upcoming feature of Django that will allow Django sites to support use cases that usually needed the use of external tools and libraries. It has the potential to change the way devs work with the framework.

It could not have been any other way: we had to organize Dev College workshops about Django Channels and made it unchained. So that on last Saturday, October 8, 2016, after the long summer break, we met again.

Merixstudio sent best people. Meeting was conducted by Miłosz (Team Leader of the Django Team) and my humble self. We focused on the praxis, but we started with some theory.

We briefly explained the underlying concepts of Channels and how they achieve their goal by extending some of core Django functionalities. We introduced our mini-project, which was a real-time web chat application. Then we went in for what Tigers like most - coding and practicing. The slide projector was displaying a wall of code for a few hours, and you could hear only the typing on keyboards at the office.

The main goal of the meeting was to familiarize everyone with the library and show that it’s incredibly easy to create web applications using WebSockets when working with Django. We started with some basic usage of Channels and then we subsequently extended our application to look more like a real chat.

We couldn't forget about something nutritional to eat - man does not live by code alone. A break with delicious pizza helped to recharge batteries with new energy.

By the end of the workshop, we’ve managed to create an anonymous chat application implementing some features, like sessions and saving/retrieving of chat history.

We hope that you left the workshop as satisfied as we. We will seek you at the next Dev College. The information will appear soon, so stay tuned and visit our Facebook profile and Dev College website. Some information you can also find on Meetup.com