Drf on Kuldeep Pisda

From 30 Seconds to 200ms: The Django Queries Nobody Asked For

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

With the ERP’s permissions now defined from a screen instead of a deploy (chapter 9), the platform had crossed a line I could feel: the content team, the department heads, and the booking staff were all self-serving from the same Django backend without filing a ticket. It was doing real work for real people. And then, quietly, it started doing that work slowly.

The complaints didn’t arrive as a crash. They arrived as a shrug. “The courses page takes a while to load.” “The admin list just spins.” On a good connection the course listing came back in three or four seconds — annoying but survivable. On a mid-range Android phone on 4G in a small town, which is most of our users, the same endpoint could take twenty to thirty seconds before the first byte. That is well past the point where a user assumes the app is broken and closes it. We were losing people not to a bug, but to a spinner.

OTP Phone Authentication for Indian Consumer Apps in Django

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The first real product decision I made on this veterinary clinic-management platform — one I built solo for the Indian market back in 2019 — had nothing to do with clinics. It was this: the login is a phone number and a six-digit code, not an email and a password.

That sounds obvious now. It wasn’t the default I reached for. Django hands you username + password out of the box, djangorestframework-simplejwt assumes the same, and every tutorial I’d read wired auth that way. But the users were pet owners in Indian towns. A lot of them don’t have an email they check. All of them have a phone number, and they already expect “enter your number, get an OTP” because that’s how every app they use — payments, food, ride-hailing — logs them in. Phone is the identity here. Building email auth and bolting phone on later would have been solving the wrong problem first.

Permissions as Data: The ERP the Org Rewires Without an Engineer

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The Ambarsthan booking engine from the last chapter put its foot down in exactly one place on purpose: the correctness of two people grabbing the same slot lives in the database — row locks, an exclusion constraint, the right isolation level — not in hopeful application code. Same Django backend, a very different neighbour app riding on it, and this time the hard part is not concurrency. It is change.

The Rebuild That Never Had a Cutover Day: Strangling Directus With Django

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0530

By the time the paying-user number stopped being arguable, we had earned the right to build the real thing. Three months of the FastAPI proxy hack had turned “would anyone actually pay for a course?” into a hard number — roughly 6,000 users on the Happy Thoughts platform, about one in ten of them paying — and those same three months had turned the proxy itself into something I no longer trusted. The two facts arrived together, and that was the whole signal: demand was proven, and the thing holding it up was creaking exactly as a hack should.