1. A few years ago, I probably would have made the mistake of actually hard-coding my connection strings, usernames and passwords. I'm pretty sure I did that on my first ever webapp, cause I didn't know any better. So, not defending my intelligence, or taking any offense at your statement. 2. But... That's not what's happened here. I'm setting the redis url inside Heroku's "Config Vars" section, and then reading it in with Django's `env()` functionality, as is appropriate. But the url has seemingly been changed from underneath me, for a reason I still don't fully understand.
Side-note: I used to be under the impression that CS was "harder" than biology, and that anyone who understood CS could pick up biology at will, if they decided. Turns out that's not the case, haha.