Will Vincent on Django, AI Coding, and Why Fundamentals Still Matter

We're going to talk about Django, but not just Django.

I think the way that we always talk about Django, I think there's so much more going on.

But I'm going to let Will kind of back up and tell us more about himself and Django and a little bit, not a lot.

And then we're going to dive into all the millions of questions we have.

Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, I'm still known as sort of the Django person, though I would say it's much more Python, web, open source, community, AI increasingly.

But, you know, Django is still the anchor, but it's much broader than that.

Let's explain

Django first for people like me who didn't know Django.

We got to start from the very beginning.

So people, I think, know Python's a programming language.

And then if you want to build a website, use a web framework.

And Django is one of them.

So why do you want a web framework? It's because a lot of what it takes to build a website is the same and really hard to do.

And so why do it from scratch when lots of smarter people have done it for you? So generally, you pick a framework per language.

In Python, that's Django, Flask, or FastAPI are the big ones.

And the quick difference is Django is batteries included, so it gives you everything in the box.

So all the things you're going to need, and then you configure it.

Whereas FastAPI and Flask are what's called micro-frameworks, so they're much smaller, in some ways faster to get going with, but then you're immediately pulling in third-party packages, things outside the framework itself for basic web functionality.

So connecting to a database, authentication, security, forums, I could go on and on.

But yeah, but I found my way to Django a long time ago and I've stayed there.

That's still like my home base.

But, you know, it's friendly.

And then the broader Python community is also super friendly.

You know, this is my, I guess my second PyCon.