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Comment by joh6nn | Hacker News Reader

how much programming experience did you have before you started?

I took classes in Computer Science (in Java) back in college but detested programming and switched to Art & Design, so programming logic wasn't an entirely new concept to me. I also worked for 4.5 years at a startup doing Java, no programming, but had to read a lot of code so it kept me at least in the loop. Right when I started with Django and this project, I did Learn Python the Hard Way, which brought me completely up to speed about logic and all that.

Otherwise, I don't even do Javascript (it's a major weakpoint), and much prefer "visual" duties like HTML/CSS/design.

even with some prior exposure, that's a steep learning curve. putting the whole thing together by yourself in just 6 weeks is still pretty impressive. major kudos.

also, the site looks great. good luck with it!

I'm a designer (psd/html/css) going through Python the Hard Way right now, and I'm loving it. What was your main resource for learning Django?

Lots of random tutorials on the internet beyond what was mentioned in my blog post. One thing I forgot to mention is that there wasn't one resource that did everything for me — @kennethlove's tutorial got me about 30% of the way, then it was googling for everything else I needed and learning from StackOverflow/my awesome friends/etc. No Django application really did everything for me as well — every one I installed I had to override in some way to make it fit to my product.

So there wasn't "one" resource — it was a lot of scrappy Googling and asking for help for every problem that got in my way.

hi, had you an experience with relational databases before? did you have any difficultirs with the DB part of your beautiful site, or Django makes everything easy?

i am thinking that relational databases used today may be a problem sometimes..

I am completely clueless about databases. @shazow told me which kind to use when working on WIL locally (Django does make it easy, plus I have the add-on "South" which apparently does a lot of work for you as well), and DotCloud took care of my database problems when I launched.

thanks!

i am collecting stories about problems with altering schemas while prototyping and while in production (losing data, manual altering tables, relational dbs restrictions, many-to-many relationships and other complexities) but it seems it all went smoothly with the tools you had.

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