Django unchained!

The January Bangpypers meetup happened at the Apigee office. The organizers, as a part of trying to improvise and improve the quality of the meetups, decided to do a full day session on using the Python Django framework. The trio of Siva, Sayan and Haris were burdened with the responsibility of preparing the content and delivering the workshop. Siva put forward the idea of doing the tutorial in a step by step manner. He created the tutorial content on GitHub with a branch for each step. Find the repo here. Kartik accompanied the team to help out the participants.

Workshop

The workshop commenced at 10:30AM with around 25 participants.

Sayan kicked off by introducing Django, its features and its structure. He further dived down deep into describing the various settings as well sa workflow possible thereby imparting a solid structure to the participants. He wound up his instroductory session at around 11.15AM.

Next up, it was Haris who had to handle the first and second tutorials. Enlightening the crowd with the customary “Hello World” application, he started by explaining how the different parts of a Django project tied together. He explained and demonstrated by giving a hands on session regarding writing a “Hello World” app. He presented both the approach of directly returning a response as well as using a template in order to render the HTML. He finished off his session in about an hour.

Just before lunch break, Siva took the stage and introduced the flow and structure of the third tutorial. Once everyone got the idea of what was coming, the gathering took a break for lunch at 1:00PM and had some awesome pizzas sposored by Apigee. Everyone got back together at 1:45PM and the session commenced. He had explained each step of his tutorial one by one in this gist. This helped the participants a lot in terms of getting together their bearings once things went too far for them to follow.

Demoing and giving a hands on workshop covering each step one by one, he imparted a clear view of how Django worked, how they could do useful things and how to carry it on forward. The concept of views, forms, models, templating engine, MVT as well validation were covered with simple but non-trivial examples. He concluded his session by 3.15PM by giving a few advices on best practices to follow.

Sayan again took the stage in order to explain in detail the admin features as well about the templating. He went on explaining about how the admin would automatically generate fields for all the models written in a particular Django project to how the templating engine works. Its capabilities, features and best practices of using it. He finished off the last part around 4.315PM.

By this time, the audience were really interested to know more about and around the Python community. They had been really interactive during the workshop, following each line, asking doubts and making sure they learnt whatver was being taught. Towards the end, questions, both related to Django as well as Python started pouring in. It was a wonderful time where the instructors as well as [Krace][], the main organizer, addressed each of their queries one by one.

Questions regarding flask v/s Django, Django ORM, static files, templating engine, deployment, learning curve and a lot more were asked and discussed. The meeting was adjourned at 5PM and everyone parted to their own ways after exchanging good byes.