Happy 20th Birthday, Django

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.

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.

Two things are true for me:

* I think Django is an amazing piece of software, developed by a lot of clever, brilliant people.

* I don’t want to use Django.

I think Django is unmatched for building a Django app. That is, if you want to connect to a relational DB, make CRUD queries with its OR , and spit out the results in the exact HTML or JSON it supports, you’re going to have a great time. If you want to hit non-relational backends (including APIs), form your own outputs, or reuse the SQLAlchemy models you built for another part of the project, you’re entering a world of pain. Mark it zero and move on. Turns out most of my stuff is doing non-Django patterns. But if that were different, if I were building a traditional website on top of PostgreSQL and starting with a blank slate, sure, it’d be high on my list of options.

It’s a little clunky in places, but it’s fantastic at having a solution ready for almost any problem.

The one thing that still bugs me is that you have to wire everything together manually. But other than that, much better than most.