Comment by lazarus01

5 days ago

I just started building my own website today with Django. I’m doing it because I just enjoy doing it. Most of my work is in data and ML infrastructure and it is just killing me. Working on the front end has opened my mind to possibility and given me new inspiration.

I love hn and was inspired by all the devs who have their own site. I was drowning in work, but put the Django architecture together on vacation, started putting things together today and it’s been a blast.

I don’t enjoy social media and was thinking to posse intrinsically.

I appreciate this post and the authors perspective.

12 comments

lazarus01

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subdavis  5 days ago

What features did you want for your personal site that lead to choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a static site generator?

  • 1dom  4 days ago

    SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server.

    If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.

    I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static sites, but when you really consider the full stack and frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd party external services they're having to depend on, they'd have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just written themselves a custom backend from the start.

  • lazarus01  5 days ago

    I just wanted to learn how to create an enterprise grade web application. I read a book on Django last year and did a few tutorials and enjoyed it. I also deploy infra on gcp and it works well there. It cost about $60/month for baseline hosting with light traffic/storage. I will probably use it for an interface for some of my ml projects. I was also looking into dart/flutter a much steeper learning curve for me personally.

    • susam  5 days ago

      This is pretty much how I began developing websites too. Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP.

      It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications.

      Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.

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