Since its release three years ago Django’s grown by leaps and bounds; it’s now part of a highly successful new generation of web development tools. However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the Django team. As any Open Source community does, we’ve needed to make a series of tough decisions along the way. These decisions have shaped Django’s internals, public APIs, and community.

1. Building Django
Jacob Kaplan-Moss
PyCon
March 29, 2009
http://jacobian.org/speaking/2009/pycon-designing-django/

3. History

4. LJW

5. Adrian/Simon

6. lawrence.com
Wakarusa 2008
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7. “The CMS”

8. Philosophy

9. Make development fast

10. Automate repetitive tasks

11. Best practices

12. “
The ink is never dry
on these babies.
”
— Adrian Holovaty

13. Choices

14. Open Source

15. BSD license

17. Pragmatism over Methodology

18. GoF?
MVC?
TDD?

20. Snake Oil

21. “ No silver bullet.
”
— Fred Brooks
Author of The Mythical Man-Month

22. The Real World

23. “ Build cool shit.
”
— Rob Curley

24. Ramifications

25. “What’s the need?”

26. No architecture astronauts

27. Reinventing the wheel

28. “Magic” over boilerplate

29. Web development is boring

30. It should be fun!

31. APIs should match behavior,
not show how they work

32. Ramifications

33. It can go too far.

34. Messy internals

35. More power in less code

36. Easier to document

38. “Full stack”

39. “Best of breed”

40. Why full stack?

41. Lack of choices at the time

42. “Glued together”

43. Ramifications

44. More control

45. Don’t repeat Zope’s mistakes

46. “ Innovation
happens
elsewhere.
”
— Bill Joy

47. Small pieces advance quicker

48. “Sensible defaults”

49. “Opinionated Software”

50. Ego is dangerous

51. You can’t possibly predict
what everyone wants

52. ... so listen to your users!
(this is harder than it sounds)

53. “One obvious way”
over “pluggable components”

54. Autumn
Modeling
PDB
PyORM
SQLAlchemy
SQLObject
Storm
ZODB

55. Choice is good for experts ...

56. ... but not good for new users

57. More beginners

58. “
Don’t make me think.
”
— Steve Krug

59. “
It seems ... that if choice is good, then
more choice is better. The paradox is
that this “obvious” truth isn’t true... a
point can be reached where, with
more choice, people are worse off.
”
— Barry Schwartz
“The Paradox of Choice”

60. Ramifications

61. Consistency

62. Make complicated things easy

63. Don’t reinvent the wheel

64. Set our own pace
Skip to end

65. Choices in the future

66. Long tail
or huge scale?

67. #2 Yahoo
#5 Facebook
#8 Wikipedia
#16 Photobucket
#19 Flickr
#20 Comcast
#23 Wordpress

69. Standard | Distance | Phone Number
Business Name or Category City, State, ZIP Code or Neighborhoo
Set as Default Location
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Baltimore Detroit Louisville Orlando S
Boston Houston Memphis Philadelphia S
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#643 BROWSE STATES
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Arkansas Florida Indiana Maine Mississippi New Ham
California Georgia Iowa Maryland Missouri New Jers

70. my
All Games
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75. “Enterprise”

76. Is this a competition we want?

77. Backlash

78. “Rails doesn’t scale”
s Maps News Shopping Gmail more !
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aid Rails doesn’t Scale?” Features

79. “Django doesn’t ...?”
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quot;django sucksquot; Search Pref
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80. Keep out the ego

81. Invite criticism
... and take it well

82. Make conscious decisions

83. Thanks!
http://jacobian.org/speaking/2009/pycon-designing-django/
<jacob@jacobian.org>

84. Photo credits
http://flickr.com/photos/noulakaz/418575599/
Lawrence Journal-World (with permission) http://flickr.com/photos/mawari/2091456761/
http://flickr.com/photos/lwr/78032315/
Free Software Foundation (GDFL license) http://flickr.com/photos/foox404/640768235/
http://flickr.com/photos/petereed/496392956/
Poul-Henning Kamp (Beerware license) http://flickr.com/photos/ppdigital/2327942088/
http://flickr.com/photos/ognam/252251866/
NASA (public domain) http://flickr.com/photos/summitcheese/197359430/
http://flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/412756798/
http://flickr.com/photos/mathoov/19172893/ http://flickr.com/photos/kandyjaxx/98984009/
http://flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/1681114312/
http://flickr.com/photos/trp0/127771914/ http://flickr.com/photos/andih/345556778/
http://flickr.com/photos/altemark/304078711/
http://flickr.com/photos/simon/351253/ http://flickr.com/photos/yuan2003/733770226/
http://flickr.com/photos/mworrell/266913194/
http://flickr.com/photos/number13001/247125164/ http://flickr.com/photos/ocms/2535068094/
http://flickr.com/photos/iainr/61917036/
http://flickr.com/photos/s_v_p/5869861/ http://flickr.com/photos/dannyman/958602998/
http://flickr.com/photos/dhammza/110422065/
http://flickr.com/photos/xerones/31671892/ http://flickr.com/photos/martinlabar/2832969149/
http://flickr.com/photos/hercules/118434343/
http://flickr.com/photos/kt/418938142/ http://flickr.com/photos/shyha/225517137/
http://flickr.com/photos/donkeycart/2477069275/
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