Jason Learns Django

And just like that, this little journey ends. What did I do/learn today? Today was all about deployments. Learnt how to use gunicorn along with nginx to deploy my website. Learnt how to hide my secrets outside my code. My first Django site is live! A few reflections. The project was both harder than I thought it would be, and took less time than I thought it would. I know Django now, but I definitely don’t “know” Django. This was an excellent introduction to the world of webdevelopment for me and has only whet my taste for more. I realised that I need to skill up my HTML / CSS. That is where I turn to next. All the art and the layout were already done for me in this project. I want to do those too. I need to do these study projects slower and keep aside sometime for play projects too. This is something I will definitely do next week onwards.

Today was a little easier. What did I do/learn today? Today was about doing contacts in the app that we are building. Registering visitors and stuff The basic flow was generating another app and doing views and models and wiring them up to pages So this felt like revision of all that I’d learnt over the past few days. Stuff makes some more sense now. I think I will be done in a day or two, but I know I have only scratched the surface of Django. I will need to build a lot more projects to gain fluency. That’ll be the plan in the coming weeks and months

Hard day again. I just cannot seem to focus and learn. It takes slogging and rewatching and retyping and oh, I missed a colon there. Do it again. And again. And again. And that is the only way, I seem to make any progress. Well, the learning at speed does not quite seem to be in my hands (or my brain 😂) What is in my control, and the best I can do, is to show up every day. ...

Life got in the way again. Remembered yesterday. So I took it easy. Gave myself 4 hours and the grace to quit if I wasn’t done. And somehow, by the skin of my teeth, I got done with the pending module. What did I do/learn today? I seemed to have taken a break at a natural place in the module. If yesterday was about wiring views, today was about doing search. Wrote lots of Django template code. Loops and variables and pulling data from dictionaries. Amazing to see reams of code in an HTML template just vanish, to be replaced by a few lines of code, that loops over data pulled from a database. Wrote lots of search functions for different parts of the site. Love the fact that I understand most of the Python I write. Am confused a lot about whether the stuff I use is Python powered or something Django gives me, but am not stressing over it. This I am sure will come with time Today was another slog day, but it was so much fun, watching various parts of the website come to life.

I thought last friday was hard. Boy, was I wrong. I had scheduled about four hours to do one of Brad’s modules everyday. And today was such a bear. Life happened. There were lots of interruptions. I tried to soldier on nonetheless. Eight hours in, and I am still only halfway through the module. That’s when I decided to give myself some grace and let it go. Note to self, stick to the time. Not the module. If the module does not get over, there is always tomorrow. (saying this, as I look at the pile of stuff, I’ve left undone today.) ...

Today was a slog. Life got in the way, so lost some scheduled time. So decided to work some more in the evening. What did I do/learn today? Learnt the basics of models, and migrations today. Learnt how to install PostgreSQL, so that I could simualate a production environment. This took eons, all because, I did not realise that I (or some other program I installed) had already installed Postgres in the past, and so I went down a rabbit hole of looking at logs and figuring out ports and why I could not talk to the database I wanted. Am slowly realising that I what working with Django actually is, is to take things that Django provides and then customise them to my needs. And Django provides a lot. Python is just the way I express what I want. Learnt how to write a model file and then use migrations to actually go alakazaam and make them real in my database. Learnt how to rejig the default admin panel, that comes with Django While the stock admin site is pretty function Brad walked me through customising it to add brand colours and adding / changing functionality. For e.g. adding in a search field, so I could search by names. I should be reading Django documentation and then playing with all the features. Time to call it a day. More on Monday. ...