alt Hacker NewsNotes on starting to use Django
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Django is objectively the most productive "boring technology" I've ever worked with for developing web applications. They don't regularly add too many bells and whistles on every release, but they keep it stable and reasonably backwards compatible.
The Django ORM / migrations are still basically unmatched in happiness factor.
After spending a lot of my time on Django, it's fine for simple to moderately complex things. The ORM mostly good. DRF is fine for APIs. And the admin is super nice as well.
But once something gets significantly complex, the ORM starts to fall down, and DRF becomes more of a hindrance.
But if you're just doing simple CRUD apps, Django is perfectly serviceable.
Thanks for this! I wish there were more cross-comparisons like this out there of what it is actually like to use some of these frameworks, the note on Django being a little less magic than Rails makes me genuinely interested in it.
I always return to Django for any project. It's fantastic. Enough batteries are included with it that it is very powerful.
> I love being able to backup by just doing a VACUUM INTO and then copying the resulting single file.
Naively, I would probably just copy the sqlite file. Is that a bad idea?
Claude Code is also very good at building basic CRUD apps with Django.
Django aside, I think this is a really important point:
It's perhaps especially true for a hobbyist situation, but even in a bigger environment, there is a cost to keeping people on hand who understand how XYZ works, getting new people up to speed, etc.I, too, have found found that my interactions with past versions of myself across decades has been a nice way to learn good habits that also benefit me professionally.