Fighting Homelessness with Django with Benjamin "Zags" Zagorsky

My company built CHAMP, the online application for state-aided subsidized housing for the state of Massachusetts. We did it in Django. This site is used to find housing for thousands of low-income and homeless applicants a year. The site handles over 10,000 monthly users at all times of day. We've supported it in production for over five years, and deployed major new features continuously throughout that time.

In this talk, we'll cover the best tricks of Django we used to build the site, as well as the biggest challenges we faced and how we solved them. This includes:

Using Django with Vue
Keeping the site running fast despite high user load and large data volumes
Managing duplicate applications in the system
Regularly replicating gigabytes of data to a data warehouse
Migrating data from 230 organizations into the system
Zero-downtime deployments
And more!

This talk was presented at: https://2024.djangocon.us/talks/fighting-homelessness-with-django/

LINKS:
Follow Benjamin "Zags" Zagorsky 👇
Website: https://zagaran.com/

Follow DjangoCon US 👇
https://fosstodon.org/@djangocon
https://x.com/djangocon

Follow DEFNA 👇
https://www.defna.org/

Video production by Confreaks
Follow Confreaks 👇
https://confreaks.com
https://x.com/confreaks