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The best thing about Django is its documentation. It is one of the best (if not _the_ best) documented projects I have ever used. Example: Let's say you are rea

The best thing about Django is its documentation. It is one of the best (if not _the_ best) documented projects I have ever used. Example: Let's say you are reading about Django authentication related stuff and somebody links for further clarification to https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/auth/default/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/auth/default/. Bam! You immediately know it's outdated (emphasized by the headline) and switch to https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/auth/default/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/auth/default/. This might seem minor, but I highly appreciate such attention to detail. And I really like the official page's layout, look and feel which concentrates on information, rather than stupid, flashy animations. Ha, looks like I'm getting old.

uptownJimmy 11y ago
Absolutely in agreement. I am 2 years into my app dev career, all of it spent pushing .NET around in the enterprise. But I need to expand my skill set, I need to continue working remote, and I'm interested in OSS in general. Honestly, Python and Django seem like heaven compared to the other language/framework ecosystems I investigated. Not gonna name any names there... But the documentation for Python and Django is A++. It's just really, really good. I can't praise it enough. The whole setup is elegant, intelligent and accessible. I really appreciate that.
- wikibob 11y ago
  I'm in a bit of the same boat lately, deciding between updating my skills to the treadmill of JS frameworks, or Rails 5, or Django. Have you found any good leads on Django remote work?
  - uptownJimmy 11y ago
    I did a cursory survey, and saw that remote Django jobs existed, but I didn't do any due diligence. I figured I'd learn the stack first. ;) My rough impression is that Rails remote jobs are relatively thick on the ground, but that any OSS dev stack will be better represented in remote job postings than any enterprise stack. So since I prefer Python to Ruby, and Django to Rails, I figured I'd take a leap of faith. JavaScript is simply not going to be my main dish, not for the time being. Things are just too crazy there. I don't have time to play whack-a-mole with my career skill set.
silviogutierrez 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. Django's documentation has ruined me. I took the high quality for granted. Now when I use any of these tiny NodeJS/frontend modules, I'm surprised at how barebones the documentation can be. Such an excellent project, community and set of docs. By far my favorite framework.
kough 11y ago
Absolutely agree. And when you're really pushing the edges of the documentation (hard to do, but happens on occasion – like reasoning about authentication plugins, or model loading behavior) I've found the source code to be incredibly high quality. By that I mean: well commented, consistently styled, variables have descriptive names, etc. Definitely some of it can look a little crazy but if you clone the git repo and look at the revision history the intent of each commit is well documented and/or linked to a specific bug in their tracker. An absolutely incredible project.
lazyant 11y ago
One anecdote: I found something in the documentation that was outdated, I submitted a ticket and within hours two contributors were not only fixing it but discussing how to improve the underlying issue.
goblin89 11y ago
Whenever Django documentation quality comes up I like to recommend the related series of posts by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. It details much of the underlying reasoning that made Django docs so good, but it’s written as general documentation-writing advice and can be applied to any software project.[0] I was surprised, though, by removal of the documentation for all versions preceding Django 1.7 from under docs.djangoproject.com recently. (It’s available now on Read the Docs.) The argument was that spending DSF funds on supporting docs for legacy versions can’t be justified, if I recall correctly from when in came up in the core dev mailing list. It seems to me maintaining documentation is becoming less of a priority now. [0] jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/

uptownJimmy 11y ago

Absolutely in agreement. I am 2 years into my app dev career, all of it spent pushing .NET around in the enterprise. But I need to expand my skill set, I need to continue working remote, and I'm interested in OSS in general. Honestly, Python and Django seem like heaven compared to the other language/framework ecosystems I investigated. Not gonna name any names there... But the documentation for Python and Django is A++. It's just really, really good. I can't praise it enough. The whole setup is elegant, intelligent and accessible. I really appreciate that.

wikibob 11y ago
I'm in a bit of the same boat lately, deciding between updating my skills to the treadmill of JS frameworks, or Rails 5, or Django. Have you found any good leads on Django remote work?
- uptownJimmy 11y ago
  I did a cursory survey, and saw that remote Django jobs existed, but I didn't do any due diligence. I figured I'd learn the stack first. ;) My rough impression is that Rails remote jobs are relatively thick on the ground, but that any OSS dev stack will be better represented in remote job postings than any enterprise stack. So since I prefer Python to Ruby, and Django to Rails, I figured I'd take a leap of faith. JavaScript is simply not going to be my main dish, not for the time being. Things are just too crazy there. I don't have time to play whack-a-mole with my career skill set.

silviogutierrez 11y ago

Couldn't agree more. Django's documentation has ruined me. I took the high quality for granted. Now when I use any of these tiny NodeJS/frontend modules, I'm surprised at how barebones the documentation can be. Such an excellent project, community and set of docs. By far my favorite framework.

kough 11y ago

Absolutely agree. And when you're really pushing the edges of the documentation (hard to do, but happens on occasion – like reasoning about authentication plugins, or model loading behavior) I've found the source code to be incredibly high quality. By that I mean: well commented, consistently styled, variables have descriptive names, etc. Definitely some of it can look a little crazy but if you clone the git repo and look at the revision history the intent of each commit is well documented and/or linked to a specific bug in their tracker. An absolutely incredible project.

lazyant 11y ago

One anecdote: I found something in the documentation that was outdated, I submitted a ticket and within hours two contributors were not only fixing it but discussing how to improve the underlying issue.

goblin89 11y ago

Whenever Django documentation quality comes up I like to recommend the related series of posts by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. It details much of the underlying reasoning that made Django docs so good, but it’s written as general documentation-writing advice and can be applied to any software project.[0] I was surprised, though, by removal of the documentation for all versions preceding Django 1.7 from under docs.djangoproject.com recently. (It’s available now on Read the Docs.) The argument was that spending DSF funds on supporting docs for legacy versions can’t be justified, if I recall correctly from when in came up in the core dev mailing list. It seems to me maintaining documentation is becoming less of a priority now. [0] jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/