2024-09-24 –, Junior Ballroom
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 well despite high user load
* Managing duplicate applications in the system
* Regularly replicating gigabytes of data to a data warehouse
* Migrating data from 230 organizations into the system
* And more!
Talk Outline
In the outline below, each bullet point corresponds to roughly 1 minute of talk content
Introduction
- Who am I
- Motivation
- Outline
Brief Overview of Housing in Massachusetts
- Three programs
- ~230 housing agencies, 100k+ applicants
- Previously all paper, still needs to support paper
What We Built
- Online application with dynamic questions
- Ranking waitlists for a vacancy and housing applicants
- Generation of screening letters
- Document uploads and storage for verification documents
- Recording determination of applicant claims
- Reports and data pipeline
- Migration of data from 230 organizations
How We Built It
- Django model forms
- Django + Datatables
- Django + Vue integration
- Permissions framework
- Multi-organization support
- Async tasks
Particular Challenges
- Efficient computation across clusters of linked models
- Duplicate application management
- Security features
- Accessibility features
- Translations
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Performance monitoring and optimizations
- Reports and data pipeline memory use
- Upgrading Python versions
Zags is the co-founder and CTO of Zagaran, Inc., a software consulting company. He has led dozens of full-stack software development projects between both the private and public sectors. Zags graduated from Harvard in 2012 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science. He previously worked at Google, mentors for TechStars, and is a published game theorist.