Sending Notifications to a Django Application using WebSockets

I work on an existing Django application, and during a recent hack week, wanted to toy with the idea of adding user notifications. There are definitely customer use cases for this, but it was also a good excuse for me to try out some new technologies! I was able to get a proof of concept working in a couple days, and had a lot of fun doing it, so thought I’d share what I built!

Goal: when a specific thing happens somewhere in the system that creates a notification for a user, immediately increase the count in their…