Ask HN: What's your Django side project?

60 points by rasulkireev ↗ HN
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.

92 comments

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Planyourmeals.com. about 2.5 years and counting when I thought it would take 3 months. Oh well still learning every day
Oh, I can certainly relate! Each time I start a project I think it will take x amount of time ends up taking 10 times more.

Do you have a landing page? Or is it only possible to login / register?

I'm literally working on the landing page this week :)
Podcast hosting service https://wisecast.fm
That's awesome! I am actually finalizing some editing for my podcast right now and hope to launch by the end of May.

I was planning to use Transistor.FM for hosting, but now will certainly consider using Wisecast to support a fellow Django maker.

Excellent! Currently, I am offering a free 60-day trial and would appreciate the support :)
https://cronitor.io is built with Django.

It was a side project from March 2014 to March 2020, but as of last month it’s now my full-time job!

Looks there are CSS issues right now, just FYI. The bundle.<hash>.css is 404ing.
The joys of bringing up new machines while simultaneously posting on HN. ;)

Thanks for calling that out!

Looks great, I think I've read about this before!

Just FYI, the CSS for your homepage appears to be intermittently 404'ing. Could be a failed release and your static manifest being out of date on one or more of your running backend processes – we've had this before with Django.

Congrats! If you don't mind sharing what made you make the jump to full time?
I've been working on e-commerce and consumer mobile products for the last 6 years. It's been a great experience, but I've always wanted to work full-time on a SaaS developer tool. More specifically, one that I want/need in my day-to-day job as a software developer.

Watching Cronitor grow the past few years, and seeing all the ways that people rely on it today, has been extremely rewarding. Working on it full-time means I can finally tackle some of the bigger projects that I've wanted to do, but haven't been able to due to time constraints. In other words, I get to make it even more useful now!

Internet archiving tool, which is currently stuck in limbo between releases because it's a big architectural overhaul and I haven't had energy/time to pick up all the mental context from where I left off https://github.com/pirate/archivebox and

slow and steady wins the race I guess...

I've been working on a small Django project called https://CodeSnippetSearch.net. It allows you to search through code snippets using natural language. Currently, Python, Java, Go, Php, Javascript, and Ruby programming languages are supported.

As with any cool project nowadays, CodeSnippetSearch is powered by neural networks (six in fact - one for each programming language). The project is open-sourced and you can read about the implementation details here: https://github.com/novoselrok/codesnippetsearch

Starred! *

It's way too advanced for my current skill level but is certainly I am working towards. Nice job!

Not a side project but a full-time startup: https://narrationbox.com

Built with Django and Gatsby (the latter migration is still work-in-progress).

Are migrating from react?
Not migrating from, migrating to. Our app is heavy on the media and ML side and manually stitching together templates, CSS, and preprocessing content were becoming unmaintainable. It is easier to have Gatsby Plugins deal with asset preprocessing and management.
I am building an django webapp helping to organize the learning of a musical instrument.
Do you have a demo link? I would love to check it out!
Give me 1 or 2 weeks. I'll post the link here.
https://www.circuitlab.com my initial commit with Django is 2011-09-22, last commit is yesterday!

(Though after a very positive developer experience working in Ruby on Rails when I worked at Triplebyte, I'd probably lean toward RoR for a new project.)

That looks cool. I have been thinking about restarting my hobby of "electrical engineering". When I start learning this will certainly be my go-to tool.
I haven't worked with Rails for quite a few years - how does it stack up these days vs Django?
Cocktail recipe and execution tracking for home enthusiasts. I started 1.5 years ago when my in-laws were visiting, the local version with good modeling and Admin input took 2 weeks.

The public, user facing data input, and production deployment, is taking the other 18 months :)

You know the saying, it is 90% done, now we only have to do the other half.

But I recently restarted. As of yesterday the app actually runs on AWS Beanstalk, although with its attached RDS. I have a coworker now that’s really into cocktails so I feel like I am building the site for him.

https://enviro.work is built on Django! It's an environmentally-focused jobs board for those looking to align their career with the climate crisis
I have recommended this to many people looking for such roles. Thank you for building this!
Also a full time startup, we're building a platform for controlling access to housing communities in Mexico.

Currently developing an API to create a mobile app with Flutter + Django!

Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!
Hi! Sorry for the late reply. I'll have a public demo next week. Will let you know and provide demo login credentials.
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.)

Sounds cool, one of my goals of learning Django was to merge my interests in Data Science and Web Development, sort of Data Science as a Software (DSaaS).

Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!

I don't want to post it publicly because of the potential load, I guess i can't PM on HN, you can send me an email (my username@gmail.com) or a message at the same username on reddit
(comment deleted)
For 6 years I’ve been building Cronitor.io with my best friend and business partner, August.

We started on Django 1.6 and I’ll admit: we liked it so much we stuck with that version for 5 years (ha ha).

Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all the new Django goodies.

August is working full time on Cronitor but for me it’s still technically a “side project” — for now!

Edit: sorry for the dupe! August already posted here.

> Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all the new Django goodies.

Can you share anything about how that upgrade journey went? What are some of the newer features that have been helpful for you? Were those features you knew would be helpful, or were you happily surprised?

I didn't do much of the actual coding on that project but from my perspective the upgrade on our Django app went smooth.

We were excited to have Django Migrations (So long, South!) and honestly it's great to have access to current docs again.

We did have a snag with memory leaks in a threadpool in one of our non-django Python APIs. It was actually our worst outage in 5 years because it failed several hours after we deployed and we were no longer staring at our graphs.

(Maybe I can get August to write a blog post about how he accidentally sent a million emails to our personal inboxes while trying to clean that up)

Built with Django is a really interesting project. It looks good for me on Chrome, but I don't see any projects on Safari. I'm on Mojave 10.14.6, Safari 13.1.
Thanks!

Yes, I am aware of the problem you are referring to. I've known about it for some time, but I can't do anything about it. I just don't understand why the images don't show up.

I've searched everywhere, but couldn't find the solution. I fanyone here knows how to solve it, I'd be forever grateful.

I started disabling some of the css, and I was able to get the projects to start to appear. I have no idea what the root issue is, but I think you could probably sort out which css is problematic on safari, and either render the page differently on safari or choose a different layout that is more cross-browser friendly?

Here's a screenshot to show what I started disabling: https://i.imgur.com/BinJqAD.png

Thanks for giving this a try, this means a lot. Will try to play with CSS tonight!
You have a two classes .overflow-hidden and .flex-1. The flex-1 class has the property flex: 1 1 0%. Since the flex-basis is 0, I assume the overflow hidden is just chopping it all off. Try a flex: 1 0 auto;
Thank you so much for your help! I'll try this tonight!
Started as a simple python script to scratch my own itch to track USCIS Visa Bulletins and my Green Card progress. Due to demand by friends and co-workers who had the same need, I used it as a learning opportunity and created a website powered by Django and Beautiful Soup: https://www.seekingvisa.com/
Nice! It would be pretty relevant for me, but I just got denied my H1B. Will use seekingvisa next year :)
I've started several over the years, but not actively working on any. Having a hard time with motivation right now.

- A Funko POP! collection tracker.

- A Disc Golf auction/news site.

- A qeepsake competitor.

https://mapsofmind.com

Django - channels - celery

Another project to be launched soon that uses a similar stack. Just waiting on stripe activation.

FYI, you website is displayed to me in French (makes sense, I am!). However, the problem is that the French translation is quite poor and I can't seem to find a way to switch to English?

Sorry, didn't want to criticize what seems to be a cool service but I thought you should know!

Hey! Sorry for the late response. By default only English was available but I found a lot of my users we from France, so I added the French language support using Google translate - that's why the translation is poor.

I'll try to add a way to switch locale to English or do you think it's better to keep just English as the only language till I can get other languages translated professionally?

Edit: Added language dropdown on the top-right of the landing page.

Hi! Thanks for taking into account my request, I appreciate it! Just wanted to warn you that I unfortunately have a CSRF error when trying to switch the language.
-removed comment-

Edit: It still appears to be an issue - I'll post an update here after I fully fixed it.

(comment deleted)
Replying to my own comment to update on the issue: The issue seems to be related to session-id and CSRF token not being correct. Unfortunately, I would need to try a clean install (I probably messed with some Django settings) and test again which I can't do right now due to other work that I have. So, for now, I've just disabled fr locale totally - meaning, you will only see the website in English. Since you mentioned that the translation is bad, I'm not sure how helpful it will be to just leave a bad translation as default. Sorry about this!
Thats an excellent landing page. Are you using React?
Hey! I just saw your reply.

No, I don't use any framework (still haven't had the time to learn any) - it's just ES5.

Related How? (https://relatedhow.kodare.com/) is a site to see how species are related.

It's still quite rough around the edges, mostly due to me being demotivated for not having a good way to host it. Now solved with linode+dokku which I am super happy with.

This is a site i have wanted for decades and I Googled after it every year for a decade before I realized I could build it myself with the data from wikidata.

Code at https://github.com/boxed/relatedhow

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.

Just pushed out the alpha of the 5th edition of our book, which is titled: "Two Scoops of Django 3.x".

Here's the product page: https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-3-x

Also working on a book writing app where the file generating service backend is monitored by a Django project. Launches soon!

Ooh! Very excited about this. Can't wait.