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Happy 20th Birthday, Django

djangoproject.com

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Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#161

Post by akoumjian »

I also started my career with Django using 0.96 in college and 1.1/1.2 with my first industry jobs. It was a really empowering framework and it is surprising to me that I still pick it up today for new projects when appropriate. I started attending the Seattle Django Users Group and discovered there were a decent number of "ex-pats" from the Lawrence Journal-World who were there as it was being developed.

Before I knew it I was helping organize the user group including our weekly coffee shop meetups in addition to the monthly lecture gatherings. There were a lot of local startups (including some very well known businesses and non-profits today) very actively collaborating on these tools. Django was really evolving the way a lot of companies used software and automation.

It wasn't only the engineering, the community ethos of Django both at the local and international scale (and the Python community as a whole) really made it possible to branch out and accelerate my personal software engineering journey.

Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#162

Post by i_am_programmer »

It feels surreal that every time a Django topic comes up on this site it's flooded with people praising it and proclaiming how much they love it.

I honestly found it to be the absolute worst Python framework I've ever worked with. I found it so hard to intuitively write code for it because it just does stuff for you in the background and you can't always see the execution order of code, especially when leveraging that default dashboard feature. I lasted 11 months in a role that used Django exclusively. I'm happy for people that built a career with it, but it just blows my mind people aren't more critical of it. Not that they necessarily need to be though.

Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#164

Post by frankwiles »

robertlagrant wrote: post #150
simonw wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the template language was strongly influenced by NOT wanting to allow arbitrary logic like PHP does. I was already a fan of Smarty - https://www.smarty.net/ - which did a great job of separating out presentation logic in PHP. I've been using Jinja for my own projects for a few years because I wanted more expressive Python code in my templates! I think we didn't quite get the balance right for that in Django.

I think a great combo would've been Django's features, packaging and most importantly documentation, but with SQLAlchemy and Jinja2 technologies underneath.

That would have been hard since both of those projects came out after Django, but just an FYI Jinja2 templates are supported and nothing stops you from using SQLAlchemy. Granted you lose a lot of the tight intergration that makes Django great to use.

Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#165

Post by frankwiles »

alberth wrote: post #148

Lawrence Journal World birthed Django, and now runs on Wordpress. https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Journal-World

Yeah after the acquisition I’m sure they moved everything to whatever the parent company was using which totally makes sense.

Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#167

Post by delbronski »

rick1290 wrote: post #66

Love django. Whats the consensus on best way to use django in 2025? I've been going the headless route. Django for the backend and using vite or nextjs on the frontend with openapi specs auto-generated.

I wanted to like HTMX and Alpine. But after a few medium sized projects with it I went back to vite/react for larger frontend. I found it so difficult to come back to old htmx/alpine code. If you got a complex UI to maintain I would personally recommend the React route. It is very easy to setup with Django.

Re: Happy 20th Birthday, Django

#168

Post by gitaarik »

i_am_programmer wrote: post #162

It feels surreal that every time a Django topic comes up on this site it's flooded with people praising it and proclaiming how much they love it. I honestly found it to be the absolute worst Python framework I've ever worked with. I found it so hard to intuitively write code for it because it just does stuff for you in the background and you can't always see the execution order of code, especially when leveraging tha…

It's probably because you never did the Django tutorial. Once you understand what what does, it's actually very nice, because you don't have any boilerplate. Django takes care of the boring parts, and you can focus on making the app. But at the same time you still have control to customize everything to your liking. And the docs are very good and complete, so you can always look up stuff if you don't understand it.
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