There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t already been said about Django: the granddaddy of all web frameworks. I owe a large part of my engineering career to learning Django on a whim in 2012. Django was a surprisingly elegant take on MVC, written in a programming language that was far from mainstream at the time of Django’s inception. Most of us have surely forgotten what it was like to learn 1) programming language, 2) a framework, and 3) an entire programming paradigm, all at the same time. In the face of that challenge, Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-moss produced a phenomenal book dubbed The Definitive Guide To Django, which artfully articulated all of those things simultaneously. I believe the book is now either free or serves as Django’s official documentation. Without those who created Django and championed its mainstream popularity, our website of sloppy Python tutorials surely would not exist today.

To say a lot has happened since 2012 would be the understatement of the decade. Staying within the topic of software, some might remember the prophecy of Ruby on Rails eating the world. It was a popular sentiment which coincidentally took rise while Guido Von Rossen enraged the Python community with the announcement of Python 3 (which was, for the record, a completely necessary and reasonable course of action). My condolences to the families of developers lost to traumatic finger injuries, as they were forced to rewrite their print statements to include parenthesis. Pessimistic commentary surrounding the future of Python (and Django) was everywhere- even our elitist Hacker News overlords couldn’t help themselves from the phrase “Python is dead” (which I wholeheartedly hope somebody takes the time to create a meme collection of). It was a comedy of short-sighted hyperbole, or in other words, typical software engineer banter. That’s around the time when #TeamRuby collapsed harder than the Soviet Union. The timing of new NodeJS frameworks served as safe-havens for refugees: lucky JavaScript developers now have an infinite supply of soon-to-be-obsolete frameworks to spend the rest of their lives with.

So why start writing Django tutorials now? I’ve had a very public and notorious love affair with Flask for well over a year now… how does Django fit into this love triangle? Is this considered cheating?

#django #python #web-development