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There is a new version of gunicorn, 19.0 which has a couple of significant changes, including some interesting workers (gthread and gaiohttp) and actually responding to signals properly, which will make it work with Heroku.

The HTTP RFC, 2616, is now officially obsolete. It has been replaced by a bunch of RFCs from 7230 to 7235, covering different parts of the specification. The new RFCs look loads better, and it’s worth having a look through them to get familiar with them.

Some kind person has produced a recommended set of SSL directives for common webservers, which provide an A+ on the SSL Labs test, while still supporting older IEs. We’ve struggled to find a decent config for SSL that provides broad browser support, whilst also having the best levels of encryption, so this is very useful.

A few people are still struggling with Git.  There are lots of git tutorials around the Internet, but this one from Git Tower looks like it might be the best for the complete beginner. You know it’s for noobs, of course, because they make a client for the Mac 🙂

I haven’t seen a lot of noise about this, but the EU has outlawed pre-ticked checkboxes.  We have always recommended that these are not used, since they are evil UX, but now there’s an argument that might persuade everyone.

Here is a really nice post about splitting user stories. I think we are pretty good at this anyhow, but this is a nice way of describing the approach.

@monkchips gave a talk at IBM Impact about the effect of Mobile First. I think we’re on the right page with most of these things, but it’s interesting to see mobile called-out as one of the key drivers for these changes.

I’d not come across the REST Cookbook before, but here is a decent summary of how to treat PUT vs POST when designing RESTful APIs.

Fastly have produced a spectacularly detailed article about how to get tracking cookies working with Varnish.  This is very relevant to consumer facing projects.

This post from Thought Works is absolutely spot on, and I think accurately describes an important aspect of testing The Software Testing Cupcake.

As an example for how to make unit tests less fragile, this is a decent description of how to isolate tests, which is a key technique.

The examples are Ruby, but the principle is valid everywhere. Still on unit testing, Facebook have open sourced a Javascript unit testing framework called Jest. It looks really very good.

A nice implementation of “sudo mode” for Django. This ensures the user has recently entered their password, and is suitable for protecting particularly valuable assets in a web application like profile views or stored card payments.

If you are using Redis directly from Python, rather than through Django’s cache wrappers, then HOT Redis looks useful. This provides atomic operations for compound Python types stored within Redis.