Django 4.0

But that triggers different accounting/taxes paths that can be problematic. Not everybody is a freelancer.

Gensim is fantastic. Just used it in tandem with FastText to get a machine learning app running for one of my clients. Thank you for it!

I'm thinking about using Starlette directly. It doesn't look that much more verbose than FastAPI and I already disagreed and bypassed a few FastAPI features. I wonder how much work would it take to hook the Pydantic models with their SchemaGenerator.

I recently built a fairly simple backend with a GraphQL API (fairly basic but bespoke e-commerce functionality, a few related models and a few queries/mutations) using Django, and then rewrote it in Rails, as a newcomer to them both (I knew bits of both languages but nothing really of the frameworks).

The reason I switched is more or less entirely that I hit performance issues with the Python Graphene library being really slow at returning larger datasets, and couldn't find a solution in a reasonable time frame.

My impression was that Django has a much more powerful and pleasant ORM – your migrations are derived from your models, so if you want to add or remove a field (for example), you update the model class then the migration command works out what it needs to do to make the database match the models. Rails works pretty much the other way – you create explicit migrations to add/remove columns, and the database is the source of truth - your model classes don't even have explicit accessors in the code for the fields you define in the DB. I found the Django way more logical, and I found things like many-to-many relationships much easier in Django, but the Rails way isn't too bad once you get used to it.

Rails is well known for being heavy on the "magic", which is quite expressive once you get used to it but I find it hard to know where to look if I want to e.g. know what methods a model has, whereas Django felt a bit more explicit in this regard. Personally, I find Python a more pleasant and easier to read language than Ruby, which has so many ways to express the same concept in different ways, but I am actually warming to Ruby.

If you're interested in adding type checking, it seemed that Python has better and more mature options here.

Ultimately though, for what I wanted (which was to build a backend with sensible defaults out of the box and really write as little code as possible), I think Rails is a better fit. The ecosystem of libraries seems more mature and better documented (I hit quite a few issues with Django related libraries which took a lot of Googling and some hacks to solve). The Ruby GraphQL library is much nicer to work with and much more performant.

The amount of code I have to write is generally pleasingly low (though I'll admit it's quite spaghettish already, I have been learning Ruby as I go and I can totally see how a large codebase could become a mess), and it's easy to Google for most stuff, and the defaults seem pretty sane. I will say on a slight tangent that I recently enabled GitHub Copilot, and am finding it surprisingly quite useful in a Ruby project, where I often struggle to know/remember the right syntax!

So... that's my experience. Ultimately it came down to a niche-ish requirement (performant GraphQL API) to force my hand, but I think I'm pleased with the end result. Both are impressive frameworks and I don't think generally you could go too far wrong, but for me Rails just feels that bit easier and more mature for bashing out a solo project.