In light of the recent pandemic (and partially as a result of being laid off recently, due to said pandemic), I recently took it upon myself to build a reporting service of sorts for the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, gotta have something to work on during quarantine. The project consisted of the following core steps: 1) Find a REST API with comprehenisve and reliable data, 2) Clean the data, and calculate aggregates, 3) Render the data into HTML templates, 4) Deploy the client to a production environment.

Let’s face it: keeping software up-to-date is critically important, but also often quite a pain. The more software you have installed on your PC, the more true this is. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be, even on Windows. All you need is: a package manager, a little Python, the Windows Task Scheduler, and a batch file.

This post will be demonstrating how to easily install, configure and update a PostgreSQL instance on Windows, specifically via the Chocolatey package manager. Yes, you can always take the old school route by going to the official Postgres website, and download an installer, followed by clicking through a wizard a bunch of times. However, using a package manager makes it easier to install, and much easier to update regularly.

This post follows up on my earlier post about storing json data in Postgres. In this article, I will be going over how to integrate the same JSONB data I used in that post with a Django web application.