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Comment by lylejantzi3rd | Hacker News Reader

Can you think of a complicated app that utilizes Django to its fullest extent? I'm trying to get a better view of what Django is capable of and I find it's helpful to see both the simplest example possible and the most complicated example possible. "Design for the extremes" as Don Norman would say.

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Instagram's backend is a Django monolith "with several million lines of code and a few thousand Django endpoints" as of 2019, and the same architecture was used for Threads! They now run Django on a JIT-enabled fork of CPython, and leverage a ton of internal tooling for static analysis and strong typing.

https://instagram-engineering.com/types-for-python-http-apis...

https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...

https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/02/open-source/cinder-jit...

https://engineering.fb.com/?s=django

Django is also excellent for e-commerce with projects like https://github.com/saleor/saleor - or you can roll your own e-commerce system quite easily, which we've done at my travel startup.

23andMe is also a Django app, at least the logged in site[0] and the API[1]. The API actually started off with Django 0.96. I had the distinct pleasure(?) of upgrading it to Django 3.

[0] https://you.23andme.com/ [1] https://api.23andme.com/

Was the blog post titled Django3andMe? :)

Lots of interesting links; thanks!

Here in Seattle, Rover (a $1B+ market cap company) also uses Django extensively. As do lots of interesting local startups.

That is sufficiently complicated. Thank you!

Whats your travelling startup?

I generally try not to publicly link my HN activity to my IRL identity, but my email's in my bio if you have any specific inquiries!

To the larger point about Django and e-commerce, though, I'll share that we do a large volume of complex transactions where multiple funds flows for different parties need to be coordinated, so it's been vital to be able to have a dynamic data model to track the payables/receivables lifecycle of a given booking and add overrides/configurability to handle unique situations as they come along. Django's been a perfect match for that, the framework source code is very approachable (IMO much less "magical" than Rails in this regard while having the same level of expressivity and shorthand), and since it's Python, it works extremely well with data science tooling as well.

The wagtail CMS would be a good example of more complex systems built on top of Django. https://wagtail.org/

One of the many more complex sites we've used it to build is https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/ which tracks over 10k companies, 100k+ articles in 15 or so languages. We've also built internal dashboards, live updating forums, donations platforms and so on. Another interesting one might be https://www.achurchnearyou.com/ which is used by the church of England to provide "mini sites" for all their congregations around England, so several thousand church administrators use that every week.

Thank you! I'll give that a gander.

You can also use wagtail with django-distill!

Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

I've been involved with several enterprise applications based off of Django - leveraging signals, custom models, tasks, etc. to power insurtech and fintech applications.

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