Improve Django development experience with django-fastdev

I came across a post from Trey Hunner which resonated with me, about how Django sometimes swallows errors in its templates. It can be convenient on prod, when the code is proven to be correct, but when I develop I’d rather have louder errors to guard against typos. adamghill replied with the 3rd party package django-fastdev. I’ve never heard of before but it seems very useful.

I’ve inspected the code to understand a bit how it works, and it’s pretty much all implemented in the apps.py file. It’s working by monkey patching various parts of Django. One may find this approach questionable but as long as it works, makes me more productive and that I don’t have to maintain it, I’d be more than happy to use it. It’s also very easy to remove if it ends up not working any more.

This is a creative and pragmatic way to solve the problem, bypassing entirely the much more difficult way to get thing into core. Underlines the points recently made by Carlton Gibson about the power of the 3rd party Django apps.