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Async Support in Django

Hello, my dear readers! Yes, this article is about the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines, as well as Django’s lack of async support. It’s more like an Enhancement Proposal (less formal than it could be) or RFC. So, if you like that sort of thing, you might be interested. 

Django Foundation has also considered the issue of adding async support. Their discussions have resulted in DEP-09, which describes the current approximate roadmap. I have even discovered that my post doesn’t contradict it. It’s just that it has very little information about async-native support. It is considered the last stage that still needs to be reached. This reminds me of a meme about how to draw an owl: first, we draw two circles, and then we finish the rest.

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Dev Interrupted: Async Dev with DuckDuckGo Engineering Director

This week on the Dev Interrupted podcast, I spoke with Cate Huston, Director of Engineering at DuckDuckGo. She’s an expert in asynchronous development and shared tons of interesting ideas: 

  •  How DuckDuckGo utilizes transient and permanent spaces differently
  •  How product feedback sessions are completed asynchronously
  •  How to help new remote employees feel a sense of belonging and accomplishment. 
  •  The unique relationship between asynchronous managers and developers  

Cate is really smart and has a super-awesome sounding accent so check it out! 

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Apache Kafka In Action

Challenges and Limitations in Messaging

Messaging is a fairly simple paradigm for the transfer of data between applications and data stores. However, there are multiple challenges that are associated with it:

  1. Limited scalability due to a broker becoming a bottleneck.
  2. Strained message brokers due to bigger message size.
  3. Consumers being in a position to consume the messages at a reasonable rate.
  4. Consumers exhibiting non-fault tolerance by making sure that messages consumed are not gone forever.

Messaging Limitations Due to:

High Volume

Messaging applications are hosted on a single host or a node. As a result, there is a possibility of the broker becoming the bottleneck due to a single host or local storage.

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How to Interact With a Database Using Async Functions in Node.js

So far in this async series, we’ve covered Node.js style callbacks, the Async module, and promises. In this final part of the series, we’ll learn about async functions (AKA async/await). To me, async functions are the most exciting thing to happen to JavaScript since Ajax. Finally, we can read JavaScript code in a synchronous manner while it executes asynchronously as it always has.

Async Functions Overview

Async functions are a relatively new feature of JavaScript (not specific to Node.js). Support for the feature first landed in Node.js v7.6 via an update to the V8 JavaScript engine. Because async functions rely heavily on Promises, I recommend you read the previous post before continuing.