91–100 of 191 posts
It's also somehow wound up being a north star of sorts when I find myself needing to reimplement behavior in other web stacks; I usually just go read how Django has done it, then adjust as necessary.
Hell of a run, here's to the next 20.
Out of curiosity, for people who have do projects in both Django and Ruby on Rails, which one would you prefer and why? I learned Python more than 10 years ago, but later chose Rails to be my first web framework to learn, as I also wanted to learn more about Ruby, hence the question.
I haven’t done a ton with Rails professionally - but in my mind, if I was doing customer facing CRUD I would reach for rails, I think the deployment ecosystem and development experience is a bit better. Django, however, is wonderful for internal tooling, or anything where you need to plug in Python libraries. GIS is a clear win for Django, as well as custom BI work or data analytics
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I think Phoenix is very close to Django at fitting that bill.
Now Phoenix and Elixir are two technologies I love! But theyre admin offering is lacking. (Which is ok today in modern development and things like pgadmin)
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> trying to build a complex front end using Django's ORM with physically separate per-user MySQL database servers. didnt they hear about sqlite, great for this setup
I don't think Django could have talked to sqlite over the network, or would have really solved any problems. When I say physically separate, I mean it in the pre-cloud sense: one front end server (Django) dynamically connecting to a database on a remote server (based on the user account), which had a database continuously logging streams of sensor data from local IoT devices. What I did was change the architecture to…
We had an in-person event in Lawrence, Kansas ten years ago for Django's 10th birthday. The videos of the talks from that event are here: https://pyvideo.org/events/django-birthday.html I celebrated the 20th birthday yesterday by writing up an annotated transcript of my talk from the 10th - it tells Django's origin story: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/13/django-birthday/
The Documentation as Empathy talk is one that I still think of often. It was fun to hang out with those guys after too. Lovely folk.
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How can you be an unrelenting critic of Python but love Django?
I don't think you can honestly and objectively criticise something you don't truly know. There's still no framework in e.g. Go that comes anywhere close to matching Django. It's pragmatic, doesn't do too much meta-magic (I still don't "get" Rails), lets you strip away any layers you don't need, etc.
As someone today who is an unrelenting critic of python. I have to say thank you to Simon and the Django community as a whole. Its a wonderful "batteries included" framework that has launched many successful projects, companies, and careers. Mine included. And I'd be lying if I didnt say I still use pgadmin as my benchmark for evaluating admin panels in other ecosystems. What you all created with Django is amazing. W…
How can you be an unrelenting critic of Python but love Django?
In a very real sense, I have Django to thank for my entire career. As an undergraduate, my first academic job in a research lab had me building websites to promote the research in a lab. Django was brand new, and I was uninterested in petty concerns like stability and security, so I did everything in Django. Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I…
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Wikipedia says Jacob was hired shortly before Simon's internship ended though. Not sure why you are trying to imply that Simon wasn't a co-creator. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-...
In general when an intern works on something before you get there, and then you do all the real work, the intern doesn't get co-creator status.
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How can you be an unrelenting critic of Python but love Django?
I don't think you can honestly and objectively criticise something you don't truly know. There's still no framework in e.g. Go that comes anywhere close to matching Django. It's pragmatic, doesn't do too much meta-magic (I still don't "get" Rails), lets you strip away any layers you don't need, etc.
I don't think Go is an apt comparison. Its philosophy is to eschew traditional frameworks in favor of relying on the rich standard library as much as possible, and on small external libraries when needed. This does lead to a duplication of effort and bespoke mini-frameworks that only technically have a fraction of the features of a typical framework, but the end result is much simpler, more understandable and flexible. All in a highly performant language with a great ecosystem, packaging, and tooling That said, Django is an amazing framework that has stood the test of time. Like many here, it was one of the projects that kickstarted my web development career. Kudos to the team and community, and here's to another 20! \o/