Hacker News Reader

For context I'm someone who spent nearly 20 years doing almost exclusively python dev, attended the first DjangoCon in 2008, ran the Django community blog during its formation heyday back in the mid 2000's and built tons of Django modules, apps, sites etc, have commits on the Project from way-back, tech edited Django books, etc...

Did rails for a short while in 2010-2012 and absolutely hated it then spent 2012-2020 doing mostly Python/Flask dev for huge fintech companies on AWS.

I now use Javascript/React/Nextjs on Firebase/Google Cloud. So much less hassle, tons more libraries and what seems like an exponentially larger ecosystem. There's still weird shit with transpiling typescript to javascript etc... but overall I enjoy JS dev much more these days.

Be aware that firebase or aws are only good until you have actual traffic. So in many cases you just loose time you spent understanding their managed infra. I would advice to go with Linode. As a bonus you get to lean new techs that are not tied to crazy managed pricing :)

If the traffic to your app is generating a significant Firebase bill then you have probably moved from MVP to successful app territory. Would you rather start managing more infra or focus on keep building features that add value to the app?

I would be interested in hearing of any instance where Firebase costs created financial hardship.

Any tutorials for handling next js and a private server ( like linode)

As a long time python dev, I’m now not certain why I would use python for a web app, over typescript on Next, other than familiarity. Sharing types between the server and client, and only having to manage _one_ software ecosystem is great.

Some potential reasons:

1. The data layer, if you want a high-quality ORM and migrations

SQLAlchemy + Alembic (or Django ORM + its built-in migrations) are battle-tested systems that I trust will scale to large teams and not break my data.

If you're more of the persuasion to write raw SQL, or to just use a SQL query builder, Python is less of a draw these days (although SQLAlchemy's query builder is quite nice and can be used independent of its ORM).

2. Ties to the data science + machine learning universe

If your back-end intersects with these in ways that are not cleanly separable into services, Python might be a good (or the only) option. Even if you can cleanly separate, you're effectively committed to managing Python on the back-end.

3. Stability

For good and ill, the JavaScript ecosystem churns far more rapidly.

4. Familiarity

To your point: there's nothing wrong about optimizing for creature comforts and/or velocity from just having done it before and fired the foot-guns.

---

I agree that using a single language provides an advantage at the API boundary. Curiously, my experience is that most modern javascript frameworks (like NextJS) don't have a lot to say about how to structure this in practice. Maybe that's fine, but I'd love to see some opinions emerge in the ecosystem.

Amongst other things, I typically want to:

- Share types (typescript `interface`s, etc.) between the front-end and back-end (while avoiding accidentally bundling back-end code into the front)

- Have run-time types (via `zod`, `io-ts`, whatever) for (at minimum) API request structures so I can validate my inputs

- Have a story about how API validation failures are shipped back to the client (and how the client exposes them to the users, e.g. error messages when filling out form fields)

- Differentiate between API types and my underlying data model (the `User` in my database is somewhat to very different from the `APIUser` I ship to my client)

In the python universe, Django, Flask, and FastAPI all have well developed opinions about run-time types, validation failures, and API types vs. data models.

On 1 - I've worked at startups using Django ORM and banking companies using MSSQL stored procs. I don't understand why anyone would ever go the stored proc/raw SQL way unless they absolutely needed the performance. And if you do need the performance, you can always dip down to that level from whatever ORM you are using.

Most of the queries I've done using Django can be optimized at the application code level to be fast and efficient without even touching SQL. There were a few instances at the two Django shops I've worked where we optimized one or two queries by writing raw SQL, but the number of times I've seen that in a codebase can be counted on one hand.

The SQL/stored proc method, on the other hand, doesn't come with any way to do migrations or version your database by default (AFAIK). So now you have to write migration code and come up with some kind of versioning system by hand.

Wish I had more experience with SQLAlchemy/Alembic. I've tried using it on little things here and there but since I've always known Django, that's what I usually go with.

What to you use for ORM/database migrations with Next.js apps?

I had a similar journey but with Rails and ended up in a similar place.

React+Nextjs on Firebase makes the deployment and scaling steps so much easier than on Rails. I'm very conscious of the platform risk of depending so much on Firebase but gosh darn it they've spoiled me.

It’s funny that only in our industry “time tested”/“battle tested” is called old school and frowned upon. No wonder we see software bloat everywhere.

Eh, I think experimental physicists and medical imaging also lean towards newer tech.

No area of health work tends towards new tech. It's disallowed by regulation.

Eh.. you'd be surprised. Medical Imaging isn't as radical as you may think it is (I spent 7 years doing projects for the exploitation of medical images).

I’ve had the pleasure of annual echo cardiograms my whole life, and moved around a lot, and at least my experience has been visible hardware/software/imagine improvements almost annually.

In any event I wasn’t saying all medical imaging is state of the art, I was saying it is another field where people prefer newer tech.

Absolutely fair. The vendors have gotten much much better tech "in the room" as it were - CT's are lightning fast anymore, US is clearer and can do more on-the-fly analysis than ever before (e.g. highlighting bloodflow dynamically and capturing tons of data in microseconds), etc. Every modality has grown tremendously so my comment wasn't nearly fair enough in acknowledging that.

Downstream is getting better with items such as AI advancements and more sophisticated mechanisms to transfer data between systems both on-prem and cloud-based, however utilization of all of this tend to be stifled a ton by the standard issue of tech moving faster than policy. My frustration/disgruntlement is due to this issue more than anything.

Thanks for the insight and the reminder that my bubble of experience isn't the world - seriously.

Anecdotal, but a co-worker’s parent works at NHIS and I’ve heard they’ve adopted Kubernetes.

JS frameworks are also battle tested. "old school" is not necessarily a bonus because the common paradigms have shifted.

Using Django with React is not as easy as a full-stack framework like Next.js. Modern tech stacks are now generally moving towards either full-stack JS frameworks like Next.js, Remix, Astro, etc and/or serverless with things like railway.app, fly.io, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, Supabase, neon.tech, etc.

Many features of "old school" frameworks are becoming redundant or are being replaced by options with better DX.

I do not want to start a flamewar, but most of the things you mentioned Next.js, Remix, Astro, fly.io etc are not even 6 years old. Django is running production ready code since about 2006 and has more shelf life. I was not downvoting JS but in terms of longevity and robustness, Django has that going for it.

Did a big migration from Flask to Django for my main side project for all of these reasons earlier this year.

I love Django. It's criminally underrated.

Side project if anyone's interested in peeping it: https://www.fpgajobs.com

I’d imagine many are curious like me … are you making any money on this? I have a similar Niche job site I’m thinking of

Fellow EE here and love what you do! Loved your post on scraping.Btw, I thought you used Flask. Looks like I was wrong.

Thanks for the kind words. It’s probably time for me to revise that a bit, or write another one. I’ve learned a lot more yet since I wrote that.

I used to use Flask, but I changed over to Django at the end of 2022. Super happy I did. It wasn’t painless, but the benefits have been totally worth it.

What were the benefits switching over to Django from Flask?

Batteries included admin console with easily configurable model views.

Built in migrations. Can’t possibly overstate how much this has helped ease deployment. Most of the live debug and prod edits I had to do on the older app were due to db migrations not being shipped with the app.

A baked in ORM with lots of backend optimizations like pagination that keep your queries fast, plus convenience functions for model creation and retrieval (long live get_or_create)

There was a learning curve to all of this, and the complexity of all this in the tutorial scared me away at first, but having seen how the other half lives with Flask, where there are no guardrails for anything, I really appreciate having a framework that solves these kinds of challenges for me.

Interesting, appreciate the reply. Wouldn't hurt to add it to the repertoire.

One more big benefit: you can figure out how to do almost anything with Django with the right combination of Google and Stack Overflow searches. Not so for Flask.

Ok, well, maybe there are some answers, but it’s always like “Install, configure, and integrate this third party plugin”. Ain’t nobody who’s side-hustlin’ got time for that.

IMO for early stage startups, proven tech is almost always a better bet than the hot new thing. Your goal is to capture market share quickly, not wrangle beta tech into place.

Is there a multitenancy package?

Is it this one?

https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/multi-tenancy/

I know there is a paid one.

Yes this is the one. Or one could also use the https://django-tenant-schemas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. I don’t want to plug any paid options for obvious reasons but they are posted here regularly

Agreed, although I'd really like to throw in type safety, because the lack of it made my life needlessly complicated. Is this feasible with Python?

Type hints in Python are nice, by pale in comparison to truly typed languages. If you want to feel like your language’s type system significantly improves your development experience and the safety of your code, don’t pick Python.

What would be a nice contender for someone who is otherwise happy with Python? I love that I can use it for darn near anything.

It’s not enforced at runtime, but otherwise I feel like typing is in a pretty good place in Python right now. If you’re diligent about using Pyright or MyPy as linters it makes life a lot easier.

Type hints in python also work great with vscode (and probably other IDEs) as it can offer better autocomplete suggestions for things like function parameters.

The one thing that Django is missing is the ability to attach a User object to a session without a full-fledged RDBMS. I wish it was structured like the Session object which you can in your own backends for.

This is unlikely to ever happen though since so much is tied to it like the permissions system and the admin. The ORM itself is central. I wouldn’t use Django unless your project depends on an RDBMS.

Even if not using a database, I will always reach for Django over a Flask or FastAPI. Yes, there is more boilerplate when just offering a few memory views, but there is so much ecosystem built around the tooling that the expense is worth it. Just making a form or sending an email from Flask requires a third party library which will never receive the level of maintenance as first-party Django. As an example, the often recommended (still mentioned on the Flask Mega-Tutorial) Flask-Mail package last had a commit in 2014.

Fair. I'd probably reach for it too if I had any kind of frontend required, even if that were just HTML and forms. For server-only applications I'd probably go with FastAPI these days and I'm actually looking forward to an all-in-one framework that encompasses FastAPI as the core.

one thing I'd like to see in Django is something similar to InertiaJS [1], just being able to use VueJS for the view layer is amazing and passing data from the backend to the frontend without having to build complex api systems is a godsend. Maybe I haven't done enough research but is there something similar in Django world ?

[1] https://inertiajs.com/

Still a bit raw on the edges, but IDOM [0] looks interesting and has a Django integration [1].

[0]: https://idom-docs.herokuapp.com/docs/index.html [1]: https://github.com/idom-team/django-idom

interesting, is this something similar to htmx ?

https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia-django

Reactivated [1] looks similar in spirit, but using React on the frontend. I haven't tested it yet but the idea is very interesting.

[1] https://www.reactivated.io/

do you still use builtin views/templates ?

Yes! Trying to keep it as simple as possible! Might try this whole HTML over the wire after I have made some dough. Not now tho. My customers don’t give a damn about my stack