Some more things about Django I've been enjoying

Summary

Hello! I’m on a funny journey right now where I’m trying to learn how to make websites in a sort of 2010 style, where I have an SQL database and render some HTML on the backend. It’s kind of an interesting journey because it doesn’t necessarily feel “easy” to me to make websites in this way: I never learned how to do it in the 2000s or 2010s, and there’s a lot I need to learn. So here are some Django features that make building this kind of site feel more achievable than when I was trying and failing to use Go’s standard library or Flask. And I’ll talk about a couple of issues with Django I’ve run into. Previously the toolkit I felt confident with for making websites was: static site generators (like for this blog) static sites that do some fun stuff with Javascript (like this sql playground) simple Vue.js single page apps with either a Lambda as a backend or a Go backend (like mess with dns) I really liked this frontend-heavy approach for these super simple applications but when I started thinking about making something with a lot of different pages (instead of literally just one page), I didn’t feel so excited about the options I saw that involved a lot of frontend code. So I figured I’d try the backend. Writing a backend-focused site that uses as little JS as possible feels the same to me in a way as writing a single-page JS website that does as little on the backend as possible, even though they might seem like opposites. In both cases I’m just trying to keep as much of the logic as possible in one place. Now for some thoughts about Django! I learned that I can define a “query set” class in Django with a bunch of methods with different WHERE statements I might want to use while constructing a query: Here’s how I use it in my view code once I’ve defined what all the methods mean: Events.objects.approved() .for_tab(tab) .with_festivals(tab_params.festival_slugs) .is_free(tab_params.free) .is_outdoors(tab_params.outdoors) and here’s how I define the methods: class ...