Another Friday afternoon, another deployment fire. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. On too many projects, the chasm between application code and infrastructure management breeds manual configuration nightmares, crippling complexity, and agonizingly slow development cycles. But what if your team could sidestep this chaos, focusing on building features instead of constantly battling deployment gremlins?

FastAPI is a modern and high-performance Python web framework designed specifically for building APIs and web applications quickly and efficiently. Developed by Sebastián Ramírez and first released in 2018, FastAPI has rapidly gained traction in the developer community thanks to its focus on providing key features for API and web app development with excellent performance.

A+L has been working on a Single Page Application (SPA) wherein our client's users take on the role of Staff Users (think: project managers) as they aid their Customer Users in using the application to complete a complex project.

We have a customer that developed a hardware device to make physical measurements. Some years ago we wrote a suite of software tools for the customer: a tablet application for configuring the hardware device, a django web server to receive uploaded XML documents generated by the device, and a user-facing web application (using the same django server), providing reporting and data analytics.

So, it has come to this.

Last time, we decided to embark on a brave new adventure and give our Django framework a big upgrade with the inclusion of Django Channels. We got just far enough to get the development server running, but while this may be an adequate start, it's better to develop against something like what we intend to deploy, right?

You stare mournfully into the mass of code you've inherited. At some point, it's clear, the requirements called for the server to push information to the client, because there's an unholy mix of Server-Side Events, long-polling, hidden iframes and even a Java applet in there, all supporting some level of long-term connectivity with the server. It's almost fascinating in its barely functional hideousness, and you would be inclined to leave well enough alone... except for the new feature specifications you've been assigned, which require the client to be able to send data back to the server in response to the received events, in as close to real-time as you can get.

You've built the web application of the century, and the users have rightly flooded to it. Cat pictures for everyone!

When it comes to user accounts, the standard litmus test is email validation. Besides the immediate benefits - of offering us a straightforward unique identifier for users, and making it more difficult to automate creating a mass of accounts on our service - by requiring that each account have an email address and interact therewith to confirm the addresses validity, it also offers us the chance to associate a known-working email account with a user account. This is important for transactional emails such as password resets or for potential two-factor authentication use... and if you're a little less ethical, for sending marketing desirable and informative emails about interesting products and services.