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6 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2009–2026
1:02:44 · 125K views · Sep 16, 2008
Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.
Recommended as a brilliant, hilarious talk, though not the most educational.
11 comments from Hacker News
Maybe I'm delusional, but even as someone who has worked pretty extensively (4 months of full stack Django development) with Django, posts like these things make me want to stay away from Django. I read this post, and I see bandaids. I see bloat, and I see warts. I don't want to build on a codebase that needs 5 extensions out of the box to be sane. Granted, I know this is not the real story with Django. It is a rather lovely, if rather rigid and stubborn framework (at least it was when I was writing with in circa 1.3). And it is powerful. But, and this is my point, it seems to me that there is almost no reason I would use Django over something like flask for anything but the most basic of apps. Any time you need to do "serious" work — beyond cookie-cutter stuff — you're going to need to seriously extend Django (or any other web framework for that matter, in my experience/humble opinion). And then it gets ugly, and you're better off building from the ground up on a minimal codebase than trying to contort an existing one to do what you need it to. Actually, most of my thoughts have been summed up 5 years ago by one of Flikr's lead architects (iirc) at DjangoCon '08 in a brilliant (and hilarious) talk: this video
This is a wonderful in-depth article and the PostgreSQL team deserves a lot of kudos for the work they put into this. I'm looking forward to using it. The thing I find interesting that MySQL offers is multi-master and circular replication. Cal Henderson noted that Flickr uses multiple masters replicating to slave servers in their setup during DjangoCon 2008 (a great presentation if you haven't seen it: this video ). Granted, multi-master setups aren't needed for most sites and PostgreSQL's new WAL replication and the fact that it makes sure that the WAL is written on the slave before the transaction is committed on the master means that data integrity should be top notch. It's exciting to see PostgreSQL's development progressing so well.
Excited about these! The ones from 08 were amazing, if you have just gotten into django, I would recommend going back and listening to some of them. Favorites are anything by Malcolm, including Inside the ORM: [LINK] James' talk on Reusable apps: [LINK] Cal's Why I hate Django: this video Technical Design Panel: [LINK]
Lawrence Lessig does presentations like this [1]; I've always been a fan. A great example of this type of presentation done well is Cal Handerson's keynote at Djangocon in 2008 [2], "Why I Hate Django". Previous discussion on this presentation here [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK]
Cal Henderson "Why I Hate Django" DjangoCon 2008 Keynote - this video . Not that it is the most educational talk, but it's really funny (edit: added youtube link).