Tim Almond

A few weeks ago, I sat down and spent about 75 minutes watching a video presentation about Django by Jacob-Kaplan Moss. In case you don’t click the link, it’s a Google TechTalks presentation called "django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines". There’s a moment in the presentation where Jacob describes it as (I recall) "stupidly fast".

I’ve just spent 100 minutes with django. In those 100 minutes I:-

• Installed django
• Created a database via PHPMyAdmin and a user
• Created the database model (it’s very small) with 2 tables of my own design, including a foreign key.
• Webserver up and running where I could record information into the database via a web browser interface with security, foreign key dropdown and basic field validation.

Let’s look at that "stupidly fast" comment. I’m not saying that what I’ve built is a full-scale production ready system. But, it could start collecting information. I’ve had to do projects that needed building "stupidly fast". Things where the users would live without bells and whistles so that they could start collecting information right now. Or things that would only live for a matter of weeks (seriously) so keeping the cost down really mattered.

I hope that no-one thinks that I’m painting Django as a toy, wizard-based solution. It’s much richer than that. What I’m saying is that it also gives you a whole lot of functionality that allows you to get moving very quickly.

Right now, it just feels great, and I’m going to keep exploring.

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Tags: Software Development, Python, Ubuntu, Work, Django //