Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/what-i-love-about-django Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193673 Points: 45 # Comments: 17

My goal at the onset of writing this essay was to celebrate the parts of Django that I, in Buttondown writ large, have found so useful and so enduring over the years. One of the challenges in doing this is what I would describe as a fundamental asset of Django itself: that it is just the right level of opinionated and structured such that it becomes, over time, invisible. And I found it hard at first to squint at our codebase and point to "quote-unquote" Django things, because the Django part of the application blends so smoothly into the aspects that are simply Pythonic or simply business logic. I do not look at Buttondown and see a Django app; I see a well-structured codebase with many things that have been solved by smarter people than myself. This, more than anything else, is what I love about Django. However poetic that might be, it makes for a short and boring blog post. So I put on a combination of thinking cap and x-ray goggles and really took a look at: what parts of Django brought us the most long-term leverage over the past few years? Django's middleware abstraction is incredibly simple, and thereby incredibly powerful. I think folks like me who really matured during the middleware-as-function versus middleware-as-class migration take for granted that, regardless of the actual Python primitive, Django middlewares are simple functions that act on the request/response lifecycle. All they need to do is adopt that protocol, and they can do whatever they want within it. It turns out this kind of request hook is extremely useful for a number of things: routing a request to the right newsletter based on its subdomain, capturing UTM and referrer attribution, setting Content-Security-Policy headers, recording pageviews, binding request context onto our structured logs, and — below — stamping the deployed build version. Here's the entirety of the one that stamps every response with the deployed git SHA, so a stale browser tab can notice a newer build has shipped: If there's one tool that I think the median Django developer should take more advantage of, it's middlewares. We shy away from polymorphic models, partially because we think they're a bit of a footgun, but more realistically because we just don't have many use cases that adapt well for them. However, every single model in Buttondown inherits from a base model. A trimmed version of it looks like this: