Comment by scottc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottc | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I just built my MVP in a Next.js monorepo. We built the mvp in a few weeks and actually landed some real customers with it.

But I knew doing it in Rails or Django would've been faster, but I haven't got enough experience with either.

Let's say I want to create my app in Rails (or django). I don't need it to be pixel perfect, but I do want some flexibility around the UI. ActiveRecod is fine. Can I just plug this into the admin and customize as I see fit? I know Django has a built-in Admin, does Rails?

FWIW, I have used Django (without the admin) and tried learning Rails several years ago but it was too overwhelming for me. Rack middleware, the ruby syntax, the conventions—all of it seemed over my head. But if I can learn redux, react, etc, I feel like I can do Rails too.

Do you have any recommendations on resources? I want to learn how to make something that looks really good, is convention-based, lets me plug in my custom code when needed, and lets me prototype fast as hell.

I can't speak much about Rails, as I've only played with it. But I've used a lot Django in the past.

Regarding the Django admin (in rails you have ActiveAdmin[1]) think of it just as a glorified database explorer. It is an internal tool for developers, product managers and maybe for your support team. It is in no way thought to be used by end users. Every attempt I've seen to use it as such was a catastrophic failure.

With Django, if you know plain HTML and CSS, with the tools I've mentioned in the comment you're responding to, you can build almost anything... For example, let's say you need a highly interactive client side table.... you can always just attach a Vue or a React component for it by using Unpoly compilers [2].

I'd say this stack is less useful the more your app needs to work fully offline... but if you don't have that constraint... I cannot think of anything that can't be built faster and safer. Just an example: Authentication is something very risky to do your self, and has ton of corner cases. In Django just plug django-allauth, configure a few settings and done! You have a rock solid battle tested well documented authentication system, which otherwise would take you months or years to get right (both featuer, and security wise). Check django-packages too [3].

And regarding learning resources, the official documentation is awesome. You have also popular books such as Two Scoops Of Django among others. And almost all video learning platforms have quite decent courses.

[1] https://activeadmin.info/

[2] https://unpoly.com/up.compiler

[3] https://djangopackages.org/

Hey, if you already are up with NextJS, you've BlitzJS which is a Rails-like framework for NextJS.

Hope you enjoy it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com