Preface

Programming has always been equal parts art and science. It's easy to see the science in teaching computers how to do things, but once that's out of the way, we often try to embrace the artistic side. We spend our first few years learning to make code functional and the rest of our careers trying to make it beautiful.

Django started its life in much the same way, serving the day-to-day needs of a local news organization. In the years since its first public release, Django itself has grown more elegant and has helped its adopters to write more elegant code for their own applications.

This focus on beauty isn't unique to Django. Most Python applications strive for a notion of being “Pythonic”—an unwritten ideal that embodies the nature and spirit of the Python language itself. Having a vague goal like that may seem problematic; after all, how do you know when you've succeeded? Ironically, that's the point: there is no finish line. There's not even a measuring stick to tell you how close you are to achieving your goal.

The true goal is the journey itself, the lessons learned along the way, the discoveries that open your eyes to new ideas. Python includes a number of tools that make this process quite interesting, especially for those programmers coming from other languages. Django builds on that toolset, adding its own techniques for easing the burden on other programmers, making it easy to produce more beautiful code all around.

I first got started with Django shortly after it completed its “magic removal” phase, which was a long process of making the framework more Pythonic overall. I was new to Python at the time, and reading about the process and the ideals that encouraged it caused me to dig deeper into what made Django work. I was fascinated by the richness of the toolset at my disposal and quickly began my own journey of discovery.

What fascinated me most was how few people knew about some of the tricks that can be used to encourage Pythonic code for programmers using the framework. Every time I showed a new trick to someone, I joked that I could write a book about what I've learned so far. After several months of doing so—and several people encouraging me to drop the joke and do it for real—I finally took the plunge and contacted Apress.

I'm not interested in making a fortune with this book. My goal has always been to help more people understand the many tools available with Python and Django, in hopes that they too can have enriching journeys of their own. I hope this book will help bring Django to new people and new places, where it might have been previously considered inappropriate.

Those of us working with Django are often called Djangonauts with good reason. The “-naut” suffix has been used historically to represent sailors and is the same concept as in the word “nautical.” More generally, it often refers to those who sail into the unknown, such as astronauts and cosmonauts. It represents explorers and adventurers, those people brave enough to challenge what they knew before and dare to discover new things and new places.

I am a Djangonaut. What follows is my journey thus far.