Django grokked

Published: 2013-01-17

Tagged: django

These past three weeks have been quite a wild ride. I started off with The Django Book and got to chapter 11 before I started hopping around other tutorials looking around for tips on how to build my own blog.

This journey was not unlike something from Jules Verne's adventure stories. I had a foundation of HTML and CSS from years ago, which needed some brushing up, and I'm really passionate about Python. Web-frameworks? Javascript? Nginx? SQL/NoSQL? jQuery? HTML5? All of those were huge white spots on my map a mere three weeks ago. Since then I've made my way through tutorials lush with outdated information, dealt with the savage tribes of Stack Overflow, burned and salted countless virtualenv's, and quite often found myself referencing the official Django documentation.

It was a helluva lot of fun. The best thing is that there's still heaps more stuff to learn and awesome things to build. Then write tutorials about it.

In the coming weeks I will be improving some components of this blog and learning more about Django in general. I'm also working on a cool project using the excellent lxml and Requests modules as well as SQLite3, but I'll focus on it in another post. Additionally, I'm taking part in the first SchoolOfData.org DataExpedition, which is likely to yield some very interesting insights about the collection, analysis, and presentation of data and it's a great opportunity to meet some really cool people.

Oh, and by day time I'm hunting for entry-level web-dev jobs in NYC, so any tips and pointers are appreciated.