Jeremy Bowers jeremyjbowers

Where people struggle learning Django

Over the last 3 years or so I've helped a bunch of companies, small and large, switch to Django. As part of that, I've done a lot of teaching Django (and Python) to people new to the platform (and language). I'd estimate I've trained something around 200-250 people so far. These aren't people new to programming — indeed, almost all of them are were currently employed as software developers — but they were new to Python, or to Django, or to web development, or all three.

In doing so, I've observed some patterns about what works and what doesn't. Many (most) of the failings have been my own pedagogical failings, but as I've honed my coursework and my skill I'm seeing, time and again, certain ways that Django makes itself difficult to certain groups of users.

This document is my attempt at organizing some notes around what ways different groups struggle. It's not particularly actionable — I'm not making any arguments about what Django should or shouldn't do (at least

	import urlparse
	import oauth2 as oauth

	consumer_key = ''
	consumer_secret = ''

	request_token_url = 'http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/request_token'
	access_token_url = 'http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/access_token'
	authorize_url = 'http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/authorize'

	class ReloaderEventHandler(FileSystemEventHandler):
	"""
	Listen for changes to modules within the Django project
	On change, reload the module in the Python Shell

	Custom logic required to reload django models.py modules
	Due to the singleton AppCache, which caches model references.
	For those models files, we must clear and repopulate the AppCache
	"""
	def __init__(self, args, *kwargs):

	import json
	import requests
	from collections import defaultdict

	base_url = 'http://api.tumblr.com/v2/blog/inauguration2013.tumblr.com/posts/photo'
	key_param = '?api_key=Cxp2JzyA03QxmQixf7Fee0oIYaFtBTTHKzRA0AveHlh094bwDH'
	limit_param = '&limit=20'
	limit = 20
	new_limit = limit

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	"""
	Code which generates tumblr post outputs -- in CSV and JSON.
	"""
	import json

	from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
	from csvkit.convert import convert
	import requests

	description "uWSGI server for APP_NAME"

	start on runlevel [2345]
	stop on runlevel [!2345]

	respawn
	env ENV_THINGY=my_env

	script
	/usr/local/bin/uwsgi \

	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Upload a file to S3</title>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
	<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
	<h1>Upload a file to S3</h1>
	<form action="http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
	<input id="uploadedkey" type="hidden" name="key" />

	# -*- coding: utf-8

	from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
	import requests
	import re


	def scrape_index_page():
	"""
	Returns a list of URLs to scrape.

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	"""
	Start up a virtualenv and make sure you have the following libraries.
	pip install requests==1.1.0 urllib3==1.5 wsgiref==0.1.2
	"""
	import requests

	url = 'https://eservice.pssg.gov.bc.ca/LRA/'
	r = requests.get(url, verify=False)
	print r.content

	"""
	pip install beautifulsoup4==4.1.3 requests==1.1.0
	"""
	import requests
	from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

	url = 'https://eservice.pssg.gov.bc.ca/LRA/reporting/public/activeterm.do?method=get'

	data = {
	'registrationRole': 'all',