Traipsing The Django Mountain
Well, it has taken me a few clicks on google and a few of cogitation to come up with my title. Having seen “Traipsing” in my title and “cogitation” in my first line you are thinking I am an English major but all credit goes to google. Yes, cogitating…using these words makes me feel so cool. As I was saying, cogitating whether to use “perambulating” or “peregrinating” or “traversing.” Looks like “Traipsing” won.
Traipsing the Django Mountain has been my most recent challenging experience. It has been me learning a python language framework called Django. I must add the learning is still ongoing. This framework is big, as someone new to it, I think it is big and lots of things to it hence the objectification to a mountain in my title.
First challenging shard was getting the resources. Like anything else you would want to learn, resources are key. I went about this by checking recommended tutorials on Quora, Stackoverflow, Reddit and google. Sieving through them online I had two criteria for the resources I needed. One, I prefer books as my first choice and not video tutorials or online tutorials because I wanted a resource I could indulge myself in when am dead broke to buy data. Two, the resource had to be detailed enough for my liking.
After narrowing down to four or so resources, mostly PDFs I downloaded them onto my laptop. Next, I perused through them to see of which to begin with. After settling for the “one”, I dived in head first. With the environment set up n the tutorial, I did that like a “bawsse”…read that as “Boss”, because I eat virtual environments for dinner and pip is a snack. The level of bragging herein is for hip-hop artists, I agree with you.
Then came the next shard, yes…challenge, the tutorial was talking about adding your app to a tuple in settings and I was seeing a list. The tutorial was saying use “django.conf.urls import patterns, url” but I was getting errors. After a few minutes of frustration, I cogitated that the current tutorial be ditched for the next in line. It was not long before I had used all the resources I had but still had not got a solution.
Then it dawned on me that all the resources I had in possession were using “Django=1.5” or close yet my Django installation was “Django=2.1.3”. Not to mention that most of them were using Python 2.7 and I wanted a tutorial using Python 3.5 or newer. I learnt that tuples had been dropped in “Django=1.9” and “patterns” too in “Django=1.8”. It was not long before I was back to square one, web scraping for new resources that could fit my picky taste.
Like I said I am still traipsing this mountain. I have learnt lots of things coming from a Flask background and new Python nit bits like the Oxford Comma among other things. I must admit the first time I saw the trailing comma in the “settings.py” file I said to myself, “This must be one crazy framework.” I still hold the same sentiments to this day. When I reach atop this mountain, I will let you know. Who knows maybe I will build the next biggest selling app with it. Until then, am still traipsing.
