Know the environment

Use Linux with the "Terminator" shell.

Use a version control system.

Use virtualenv, for managing different versions of Python and dependencies, e.g.

virtualenv path --python=python2.7 --no-sites-packages
system libs: ./configure --prefix=envpath ; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=envpath/lib

Use yolk, handy tool to query pypi and status of pypi installed packages

yolk -l (to see installed packages)
yolk -U (to see if there are updates on pypi)
yolk -a

Use the bash autocomplete script.

Use djangodevtools (PyPi/site with description of the new commands), for lots of useful things such as adding test coverage (./manage.py cover test myapp).

Continuous integration

Use Buildbot and Django-Buildbot (note: there was a configuration example on the speaker slides).

In settings.py:

try:
    from setting_local import *

setting_local.py shouldn't be shared or checked in.

Thanks to alias, from djangodevtools, you can simply create commands to do whatever you want, e.g. clean up rabbit queues. The commands are stored in a manage.cfg file that is shared.

uWSGI is an application server with many options. --auto-snapshot sounds quite interesting. It supports clustering. It'll be in the official Django deployment documentation from the next release (ticket 16057).

Coding

get_profile() tends to be a problem. It's possible to monkey patch the User.get_profile() method (to make sure a new profile is created if it doesn't exist) but you have to be careful where it's loaded. It's also possible to use a Meta proxy together with a new middleware (set up after the authentication middleware)

Django model form factory (django.forms.models.modelform_factory) sounds interesting to create forms more quickly.

uWSGI

There was an on-the-fly short talk on uWSGI after the talk, by someone whose name I didn't pick up. It can talk to many protocols, it has lots of plugins so you can only use what you need. It's not the fastest but speed isn't the main factor that should make you decide to use it.