ROUNDTABLES ★ 60 upvotes 2020

Ask HN: What's your Django side project?

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @rasulkireev on Hacker News:

For those who are developing with Django, what are you working on / building / learning?

I've been building https://builtwithdjango.com and learning how to integrate Stripe.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @rasulkireev convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:

Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (90 total discussions):

CH @chipx86 Peer Contributor

I build Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/, https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard), an open source code review tool built on top of Django. It used to be a side project to fill what was at that time a gap in code review offerings (not even GitHub was around at this time), but these days it's a full-time job.

Like @encoderer and Cronitor.io, we also stuck with Django 1.6 for several years! YAY! Turns out the jump from 1.6 to 1.7 was a painful experience, but we're finally on the modern.... 1.11. Yeah, we're not getting rid of our Python 2.7 customers for some time (still trying to get some off of Python 2.6). Enterprise software development is a different sort of beast.

Our https://rbcommons.com service is Review Board as a SaaS, and uses Stripe. Curious to hear what you're doing with Stripe integration on your end! We've been making heavy use of it ourselves.

We've also done some crazy, fairly-complex, maybe-niche stuff in Django, and built these out into some libraries you might find interesting to browse through:

1) Djblets (https://github.com/djblets/djblets) — A big ol' utility library for Django that provides:

* Foundations for loadable extensions (just like browser extensions) for Django projects

* Support for defining flexible integrations for third-party services (Slack, etc.)

* Avatar support (gravatars, file uploads, URL-based avatars, and custom backends)

* Datagrids (with user column customization)

* A foundation for REST APIs

* Dynamic site settings

* Stuff to make privacy/PII/consent a first-class citizen in codebases

* And just a ton of other things that we found useful in Review Board and wanted to make more widely-available.

2) Django Evolution (https://github.com/beanbaginc/django-evolution) — A precursor to Django's migrations support (and the reason we were on Django 1.6 for so long — the in-development version cooperates with migrations now). We inherited and maintain this project. It provides an alternate way to specify database schema changes, and has the benefit of just being far faster to apply migrations, through a built-in optimizer. This significantly reduces upgrade times for large installs (super important for many of our Review Board customers).

All open source, and might be interesting to look at, who knows. We've built a lot up over the years (we started by writing code against Django pre-1.0 SVN checkouts), and I still recommend it.

RA @radarsat1 Peer Contributor

Lately I have been trying to cover more ground in popular Python frameworks since despite many years of using it, most of my experience is scientific programming, "short job" scripts, and a few CLI and GUI tools; now that I am looking for a job, I found that recruiters wouldn't believe me that I am a Python "developer" unless I can point to some web-hosted projects; so I decided to attack Django and Flask simultaneously.

I wrote a machine learning "deployment" microservice using Django, and wrote a client for it in Flask, with the front-end doing some nice d3 graphs of the output in JavaScript. Works great, although in the end I thought Flask maybe would have been a better choice for the service, and Django for the client! Not sure. Both running in Docker on separate machines, one a dedicated host, the other on Heroku. Frankly the whole thing was a pretty pleasant experience and only took me a week so I felt gratified that I made the attempt and now have something to point to when people ask if I can program in Python. (I won't post the link unfortunately as there is no way my server can handle the HN load; it's just for my own personal demonstrations while I'm working on getting hired, anyway. In the future I might move the model execution to tensorflow.js and then the whole thing could be an almost static site running on Heroku with some client-side processing handling the heavy stuff, but no time for that now.)

PI @pineiden Peer Contributor

Hi! I have two projects that i'm working with django.

First, on my job, on a public institution (scientific also), i'm developing a website to control and monitoring the status of a GNSS (GPS) network, the scheme of all the network and equipment, particular status, etc.

Integrated with celery to generate periodic reports and a view in what we can se the status in real time from every station. Uses last Django version (python 3.7), celery, rabbitmq, postgresql, redis, bulma css(and pure javascript on ui).

Is not published yet because i'm working on details, and maybe only will be disposable by the internal VPN https://gitlab.com/pineiden/dj-webo-collector

The other, is for a personal project with friends about teach technology to common people. https://gitlab.com/pineiden/web-curso-programacion https://www.cursodeprogramacion.cl/

And the plan is build a platform to support education plans, not only teach programming, also workshops or courses of any subjects.

So that, i learned a lot since around six years playing with django and now i think i can manage well.

BR!

DL @dlareau Peer Contributor

I've been working on my "Puzzlehunt Server" project for roughly 5 years now, and it is finally starting to see more traction than ever.

Link: https://www.puzzlehunt.club

Code: https://github.com/dlareau/puzzlehunt_server

The project currently serves as the main site for PuzzlehuntCMU, a group from Carnegie Mellon that writes and runs their own puzzlehunts, but the point of the project in general now-a-days is for any group that wants to run a puzzlehunt to be able to stand up a copy of the server and just go.

We recently just hosted a 24 hour, 1400 person, 400 team (5x the max number of users we've ever seen before) event a few weeks ago and thankfully everything held up fine.

RS @rsinger87 Peer Contributor

I made a webapp called "Disqors" (https://www.disqors.com/latest). It's backend largely runs on Django.

I connect online articles into discussion graphs and intersperse the top tweets about them. There are feeds that filter the discussions in different ways (exchanges among top authors, most discussed articles). It's also possible to see a specific discussion graph in its entirety, e.g. the discussion around Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" essay: https://www.disqors.com/discussions/36672

HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 60 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 90 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK:
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