avium's comments

avium | 7 years ago | on: CRISPR machines that can wipe out entire species

Not my area of expertise at all, but mosquitoes seem unique in nature in that they can pick up diseases from one animal and spread them to another by direct blood transfusion. I've long wondered if this might confer some kind of advantage to the animals being bit, perhaps along the lines of how vaccines work.

avium | 9 years ago | on: Tips for Building High-Quality Django Apps at Scale

I agree the doordash article gets some stuff right and most stuff wrong, almost to the point where it's difficult to read. But (somewhat tangentially) I admit I have struggled in the past with separating out Django apps for reasons not mentioned in the article.

Specifically, say I have two apps, with a second more specific app heavily dependent on a first more general app. What I find in this scenario is that I sometimes need hooks into the general app from the specific app, which means that I wind up importing modules from the specific app into the general app. This hasn't generally been a showstopper in my experience, but it creates some friction because:

a) I would prefer for the general app to have no dependencies on the specific app

b) This results in circular imports (which can themselves be addressed, but this is an implementation detail I would prefer not to have to worry about)

I realize these issues can be mitigated with signals, but I try to use signals sparingly for various reasons (https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16547#comment:2). It also helps that foreign keys can be expressed using a string literal rather than the actual model, but in the end, I still occasionally run into situations I don't feel great about.

Please note that I'm not advising against separating out functionality into apps. Instead, I'm merely citing an issue about having multiple apps that bothers me.

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