I filmed a short tutorial on setting up a developer config of Celery with Django. Celery lets you call Python functions as asynchronous tasks, to be run by a separate process. Production usage of Celery involves installing a queue service of some kind (RabbitMQ, etc) but for development use it is possible to just use the Django ORM to store tasks in the database and run the celery daemon as a program in the foreground ala Django's runserver command.