Maybe my ramblings last week didn’t make sense, but work this week seems to be proving me right. When I was assigned to rework our corporate blog into a Django module, I thought it would be easy. I don’t know all the ins and outs of Python, and had never built with Django, but the Django docs are great, and after a couple weeks, we had a shippable version, complete with a backend for updating/adding new blog entries.
But I’d used all the default Django functionality. A parallel project (not mine at this point) was working to re-do our entire admin app to use Django and Angular. There are cool libraries to make this easier, but we also have to use Django 1.6, so it integrates well with the legacy database (mssql). So those cool libraries are out. So is the bulk of my app- the models still make sense, but instead of having a nice simple admin.py file that generates the form to create a new blog, I’ll have to create my own.
But it’s not all bad. I got to see how useful the default Django setup is, and will now get to dive a little deeper by writing more complex code. We’re also using Angular’s $http module, which is interesting and seems pretty powerful, so learning more about that won’t be too bad either.
Of course, it would have been nice to not waste a couple days trying to shoehorn my existing app into the new structure, but it really seemed like there would be an easy copy/paste way to do it (I know- terrible practice- don’t judge me!).
Next week- jumping back to a different project: making my job easier! I finally decided to make a couple small enhancements to our monthend reporting process that will automatically do some of the work I spent years doing manually. PHP and SQL and output to CSV- buzzwords and jargon for everyone!
The DevBlog 