DEV Community: Arunmozhi

Customizing Strapi API - A Mini-Series

Arunmozhi — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 13:20:59 +0000

Strapi is an Open Source headless CMS based on NodeJS. It provides the backend admin tools to quickly create an API – both REST and GraphQL.

This is a mini series which outlines:

I wrote the above posts based on what I learned from trying to use Strapi as the backend for a user-focused application. I think Strapi provides a fantastic base to start building a web application and hope the things I learned is useful for someone else too.

P.S: I am sorry that I couldn't post the full article here. I hope some day Dev.to's liquid tags will support Wordpress posts.

Thinking about next steps as a Python Full Stack Developer

Arunmozhi — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:05:40 +0000

As someone who identifies as a Python Developer and uses Python as the primary language for programming, thinking about what to learn next is confusing. I primarily do “Full Stack development”, that is write backend API in Python Flask/Django and use modern JS (React/Vue) for the frontend. But recently I am seeing a disconnect between the idea of “Python Developer” and “Full Stack Developer” in the job postings. Full Stack development seems to be defined more or less synonymous to JS development. Python Job postings on the other hand are more closer to dev ops, systems development, data analytics and machine learning.

I downloaded the job listing from Stack Overflow and looked at the numbers.

Full post below at my blog on the link below

https://arunmozhi.in/2020/06/15/thinking-about-the-next-step-as-a-python-developer/

How to simplify a complex factory pattern?

Arunmozhi — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 07:22:13 +0000

I have a function which takes the incoming request, parses the data and performs an action and posts the results to a webhook. This is running as background as a Celery Task. This function is a common interface for about a dozen Processors, so can be said to follow the Factory Pattern. Here is the psuedo code:

processors = {
    "action_1": ProcessorClass1, 
    "action_2": ProcessorClass2,
    ...
}

def run_task(action, input_file, *args, **kwargs):
    # Get the input file from a URL
    log = create_logitem()
    try:
        file = get_input_file(input_file)
    except:
        log.status = "Failure"

    # process the input file
    try:
        processor = processors[action](file)
        results = processor.execute()
    except:
        log.status = "Failure"

    # upload the results to another location
    try:
        upload_result_file(results.file)
    except:
        log.status = "Failure"

    # Post the log about the entire process to a webhoook
    post_results_to_webhook(log)

This has been working well for most part as the the inputs were restricted to action and a single argument (input_file). As the software has grown, the processors have increased and the input arguments have started to vary. All the new arguments are passed as keyword arguments and the logic has become more like this.

try:
    input_file = get_input_file(input_file)
    if action == "action_2":
       input_file_2 = get_input_file(kwargs.get("input_file_2"))
except:
    log.status = "failure"


try:
    processor = processors[action](file)
    if action == "action_1":
        extra_argument = kwargs.get("extra_argument")
        results = processor.execute(extra_argument)
    elif action == "action_2":
        extra_1 = kwargs.get("extra_1")
        extra_2 = kwargs.get("extra_2")
        results = processor.execute(input_file_2, extra_1, extra_2)
    else:
        results = processor.execute()
except:
    log.status = "Failure"

Adding the if conditions for a couple of things didn't make a difference, but now almost 6 of the 11 processors have extra inputs specific to them and the code is starting to look complex and I am not sure how to simplify it. Or if at all I should attempt at simplifying it.

Something I have considered:

Create a separate task for the processors with extra inputs - But this would mean, I will be repeating the file fetching, logging, result upload and webhook code in each task.
Moving the file download and argument parsing into the BaseProcessor - This is not possible as the processor is used in other contexts without the file download and webhooks as well.

Update:
The title was changed to better describe the situation.