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Heroku makes hosting simple, but most developers overlook its advanced capabilities. After years of running apps on the platform, I’ve found several underrated features that speed up your workflow and make your apps more reliable. Here are seven you shouldn’t miss. 1. Preboot Preboot spins up new dynos and starts routing traffic to them before the old ones are terminated. The result is seamless, zero-downtime deployments. The tricky part is knowing when the cutover is complete, since the Heroku dashboard doesn’t show it. Use this command to confirm when the new dynos are live: ...

Starting in Django 5.0, you can use db_default to define database-level default values for model fields. It’s a great feature but comes with a subtle and dangerous gotcha that can silently break your code before the object is ever saved. The Gotcha in Action Let’s say you’re building a simple task manager, and you want to track whether a task is completed: from django.db import models class Task(models.Model): is_completed = models.BooleanField(db_default=False) The db_default option ensures the database applies the default in raw INSERT queries and prevents errors during a rolling deployment. ...

Squashing merges multiple database migrations into a single consolidated file to speed up database setup and tidy up history. Django’s squashmigrations command promises to handle this, but it’s error-prone and unnecessarily complex. A clean reset is faster and simpler. ⚠️ Why squashmigrations Falls Short Broken in Practice In medium-to-large projects, I’ve consistently seen squashmigrations generate poor results, such as failing to optimize basic no-ops (like adding and deleting the same field) and even breaking migrations. The official docs acknowledge this: ...

If your Django queries feel slow, the problem might not be your database — it might be your ORM. Recently, I was working with a query that took 25 seconds to run through the Django ORM, but the underlying SQL completed in just 2 seconds. With a single change, I got the ORM query down to 2 seconds as well — and reduced the memory footprint by 70%. Let’s walk through what happened, and why using .values() instead of .only() can dramatically improve performance. ...

A simple insert query turned into a silent performance killer. Our frontend pings our server every few minutes to track device activity. Each ping attempts to insert a row into a DevicePingDaily table, which has a unique constraint on (device_id, date) to ensure only one record per device per day. In Django, the logic looked like this: try: DevicePingDaily.objects.create(device=device, date=today) except IntegrityError: pass It seemed harmless. But as traffic grew, latency spiked and API timeouts increased. Observability tools quickly pointed to the culprit: ...