Application Development – Craig Perler's Blog

Deploying a Dockerized Django Application to Production

Discover how to efficiently deploy a Django web application using Docker, Gunicorn, and Nginx on DigitalOcean. Follow this comprehensive guide to set up your environment, configure your application, and ensure your web app is scalable and production-ready.

How to Set up Django with Docker, PostgreSQL and React

Figuring out how to set up Django with Docker, PostgreSQL, and React can be a complex task, especially if you, like me, don’t really code much nowadays. The boilerplate effort around configuring these technologies is often the first thing I forget with each re-immersion. This article serves as a reminder for how to kickstart aContinue reading “How to Set up Django with Docker, PostgreSQL and React”

Web Scraping, Part 4 – Scrapy

While it’s all well and good to know how to retrieve pages, parse them, and build a crude web crawler, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel given there are many open sources libraries that package this up for you. The most prolific Python library for scraping is Scrapy. In this post, I’ll use Scrapy to scrapeContinue reading “Web Scraping, Part 4 – Scrapy”

Web Scraping, Part 3: Scraping Case Study

In this post, we’re going to use what was covered on web scraping in the first two posts (#1 and #2) in this series for a web scraping case study: scraping contact details for all of the jewelers certified by the American Gem Society. The AGS is an organization that “[helps] protect the jewelry-buying public from fraudContinue reading “Web Scraping, Part 3: Scraping Case Study”

Web Scraping, Part 2: Parsing

In the last post, we saw that many times the web page you request is not the page you receive. Similarly, often the page you’ve downloaded looks nothing like the page you end up viewing. When you download a web page, your browser executes scripts that transform the raw content into something entirely different. Consequently,Continue reading “Web Scraping, Part 2: Parsing”

Web Scraping, Part 1: Web Scraping Basics

While I have some writing momentum, I’m going to take a stab at a series on teaching some web scraping. My plan is to do this through some case studies of increasing complexity. Let’s get some preliminary stuff out of the way first. If you’re reading this on Medium, you’ll be missing out on the codeContinue reading “Web Scraping, Part 1: Web Scraping Basics”

On Web Scraping

Web scraping is the art of programmatically extracting content from the web. For those entirely unfamiliar with the concept of web scraping, consider this example. It was theorized that doctors who received payments from the medical industry prescribed differently than those who did not. If your doctor is recommending some random drug, it’d be good toContinue reading “On Web Scraping”

Plumbing and Coding

I’m in a new home (actually, I’m not – I wrote this post a year ago and for whatever reason failed to hit ‘publish’ on it), and I want to get water from point A to point B. It seems easy enough – the sink is over here, it has water; the fridge is overContinue reading “Plumbing and Coding”