Learning Django: A Journey from Intimidation to Understanding
Here is the link to: Writing your first Django app.
To my surprise, the tutorial didn’t begin with creating a model (which I expected), but instead started with creating a view. This was new for me.
Views always confused me. With models, I at least understood their purpose: creating database tables. But views? Between render, REST APIs, and other confusing terms, I always felt like I was just blindly copying code.
Following the tutorial, I finally began to grasp the purpose of views. For the first time, I created a basic HTTP response that displayed “Hello, World” in the browser—all without touching a model. That small success felt huge.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve realized something important during this process: In school, we never learned how to do any of this (or maybe we did. There was a class about flask but I feel like I forgot all about it). While I’m grateful for my education at UMGC and the opportunity to finish my degree online, I often feel like I’m missing the feeling (is feeling the right word??) of having someone sit next to me and explain these concepts in real time.
I feel like the biggest lesson I learned wasn’t about views or URL patterns, it was about not being intimidated by documentation.
It turns out, the documentation isn’t just a wall of text to struggle through (or maybe it is), it’s a guide written by the people who know the framework best (duh). If you’re like me and tend to skip the docs in favor of videos, hey, maybe don’t do that, read the docs (I tried to go back and read docs for flask, maybe it’s because it’s almost 1am, but the text are just blurring)!