Transcript: How Django Experts Think

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Django Chat, a weekly podcast on the Django Web Framework.

I'm Will Vincent, joined as always by Carlton Gibson. Hello, Carlton.

Hello, Will. How are you?

I'm good. And this week, we're going to try something different. I thought we could talk

about how it feels to be a Django expert, or at least to be perceived as a Django expert,

because you and I both, with our various hats, are looked to by some folks as knowing what

Django is all about and I thought we could talk about the reality of what that feels like to give

beginners a sense of where this all leads and maybe fellow experts who don't feel like experts

maybe they'll agree with some of the points yeah because that that's the that's the biggest bit

right is fellow experts who don't feel like experts it's like there's two sides of it one

is when you talk about beginners I remember being a Django beginner and looking up to people who

were like you know maintaining the framework and they were superheroes and then yeah and you know

years later i suddenly find myself in the role of jango fellow and i maintain the framework and i'm

but i don't feel like a superhero at all i feel like i don't know what i'm doing 90 percent of

the time right well and it's and i think it's so there's two things i think one is programming is

just not a field where you ever feel like you have mastery it's not and there are a lot of fields that

are where you're doing you know i don't know jiro making sushi right after five years of making the

same rice every day. He can have a high degree of confidence. He knows what's going on. But

programming is just not a field like that. It's infinitely complex. And the more you know, the

more you realize what you don't know. So the imposter syndrome is you don't spend time on

what you know because you can just automate it. Or even a surgeon. I'm in Boston. A number of my

friends are surgeons. Surgery does change quite a bit, but you're doing the same procedure eight

times a day for 20 years you know you get a high I mean surgeons are confident and you could say

cocky because they're doing the same thing again and again and again there's that joke what's the

difference between God and a surgeon God never thought he was a surgeon yeah yeah well lots of

things about the medical profession but yeah uh but so program is just not one of those fields

um I would say the and I this comes to mind because I'm increasingly asked questions by

people who in some cases, I think know more about Django than I do. And yet they're looking to me

as an expert on Django. And I do know some stuff, but I'm highly aware of all the things I don't

know in part because I'm, I get a lot of great questions. And so I thought we could talk about

maybe let's like, what is, how did that journey from beginner to where we are now? And then we

can talk about how it feels now, because I think it's, it's more that I, I know what I, I know what

I don't know, but I also have the confidence and the scar tissue to be like, I could figure

basically anything out that's web related i mean this isn't quantum computing so no and i kind of

enjoy the hard challenges now because i've seen a lot of the stuff at least once so i kind of like

the super tricky things yeah i think there's something in that is the a couple of points

that you made that will come back but this idea that um you could take whatever problem came up

you'd be able to resolve it i think that's where the the after you you've got the years of experience

it's like oh no well you know i can i haven't seen this exact problem before but i've seen

problems like it and i could you know you gave me long enough you gave me the budget i could take

you don't have that total fear of i don't know anything people are going to find me out and i'll

never solve it because you've gone through that loop so many times that it's like well i'll get

there it may take a day it may take a week it may take a month but you know almost everything we're

dealing with is a solved problem i just don't know where it's been solved yeah and i don't know

there comes i remember being at a talk at some um ios development conference and and one of the

people giving the talk was very experienced developer and they were like look ultimately

there is no problem that i cannot solve because you know they get down to there'd be some work

they get right down to the debugger and they'd be patching a function in c yeah you know and it

doesn't get any lower level than that and now in the web you're not really doing that very you know

you don't get down that low you very rarely do you even find a bug in python that you have to work

around um though you found one yes my first so so okay so 15 years or something i've got my first

ever bug filed in um python so the you know i've been using django for all this time and finally

found a bug in for windows 3.8 python 3.8.0 there's a bug with async io blah blah which will

be fixed in 3.8.1 because i reported it was fixed the same day it was amazing but yeah you know in

in all that time i found what you know i found one bug in python actual bug yeah you found a few

jango bugs though over the years well yeah yeah but jango's like no i know built upon python yeah

built upon so like the higher things up so your your code is the most likely place where there's

some bugs but not your code but one's code is um the most likely place where there's some bugs

because it's built on top of everything else and it's not as tested and it's not as used and then

below that django and then below that python but normally the you look in your own code for the

bug right right well and that is the case that it's i guess it's the confidence to know that

you can solve anything um and you just sort of go i mean basically you kind of go fu computer i

i'll figure this out yeah there's no throwing the hands up you know you're i'm more we're more used

to well like yesterday um was it yesterday i was dealing you and i there's something an api

permissions thing and you know a reader flagged it i looked at it for an hour i couldn't figure

it out i asked you you know on a quick look you couldn't figure it out either at some point it

will be solved it's probably something silly but i don't know the answer right now but i'm also not

myself up about it because i'll you know i'll go take a walk i'll sleep on it it's solvable right

but when i was a beginner you know i i think the difference is how and how you get stuck so for me

now i don't get like stuck stuck for a week on something because i have more i can fix things

faster but also i know where to ask and how to ask when i'm truly stuck so i remember being stuck on

just like installation things with django or i don't know solar you know all these things that

don't even seem like what i'm actually trying to do that just are path variables when i was

really starting out yeah so you know which still i hope you know i just oh my god path variables

kind of freak me out environment variables and all the rest of this stuff well you're like bash

you have to be a bash expert before you can even get going we see we're back this is back to episode

one right what is django and how hard it is to learn but i think part of it is knowing when i've

knowing what a good faith effort is on my part before I, you know, put up the white flag and

ask for help. So like, for example, on this specific thing, I'm going to give it a couple

days, I'm going to look at it. And then I'm going to ask people because I know someone will

be able to quickly spot it. But I think it's, it's having the reps to kind of know when I've

done what I can, and I need to ask for help versus, you know,

because no one wants to ask for help all the time. If someone's asking me for stuff,

I don't want someone to ask me something because they haven't made an effort. It's clear to me

when someone hasn't made an effort. And I'm better at Googling than they are, probably.

But it's sort of like, where is that line between I've made an effort and I can explain,

I think this is the problem. It's something like this. That kind of tees up. If I'm going to ask

someone else, that's better than just being like, this code doesn't work, which I get that from

people and that's fine if i sometimes don't respond but you know so anyway so asking for

help is a skill that comes along with phrasing your question as well knowing where to look so

you know you're trying to run let's say you're trying to run a web sockets um app on top of

channels using redis with you know some grocery bag of front end cdn in front of you you know a

load balancer and a web server and you know and then you put up on the channels repo oh this is

isn't working you know yeah i see this in the content and it's like and it's like uh this isn't

addressable this isn't a this isn't a bug i can help you with so it's knowing how to ask the

questions as well and really trying to pin it down and that's something that beginners can

can focus on is have i have i explained this so that somebody can reproduce it so that somebody's

got a chance of helping me right and putting you know putting putting the logs putting the error

messages saying this is my thesis this is kind of you know my logic to get to this point yeah

because nobody wants to just be tossed a whole bunch of code and have to you know that's i mean

that's work work that's that's not fun for anyone um so that's that's a big part of it uh i mean

what else it's i think it's also like how do you get to this point i mean i'm you know over my

career as an educator i want to eventually be able to show people how to build probably like

10 different apps with django drf and other things because i do think it you just need the reps to

see the patterns to see that everything is crud and then you reach this point where it becomes a

little it's not to becomes a little bit boring but i think it's like any job after every five six

years you have to reinvent why it's interesting yeah for you and coding is especially like that

because it's you know we've talked about this in other episodes i feel like i could you and i could

build a prototype of almost any site quite quickly but we know what it takes to make it in production

and you know that's a big step function leap and so that makes it maybe less exciting to just

build stuff because you go oh god i'm gonna have to maintain it and there's bugs and

you know and a lot of it's the ui it's not the list view or the detailed view that you've built

and then you get oh i get a bit bored building a django detail view well you know okay is there

a different level of abstraction you can work at can you the why is it repetitive like in that case

can you create a class which you know encapsulates that what's repeated and then gives you a higher

level pattern right and that's what i think it's these subtle things when i see that give me

pleasure in meaning in code now right where i see a problem and if there's an elegant solution to it

even if it's especially in some ways if it's just a tiny little thing i go oh that's that's clever i

like that i you know even if it's some iteration of you know a detail view and a permission or

something or list view because and this is a talk maybe next year i'll give i mean everything is

crud and then you have list view detail view and sprinkle an auth and that's like big big picture

that's that's it yeah i mean we can i'm happy to dive deeper but i think maybe a couple years in

you go okay it is all crud with a foreign key and list view detail view you know and then it's

just sort of waterfalls from there but i mean at the end of the day you know so part of that too

is when people ask me sometimes they're stuck on a work thing or they want to work on or they have

an idea for an app and they're they're getting all these complicated layers of permissions and

this and that and i'm like but could you just use you know could you just use a detail view

right or someone was asking me something about a hospital app with all these different permissions

and logins and that and i was like well could you just use login and if the login doesn't work they

go to sign up like i think that would work yeah so it's like so you know you come full circle on

the simplicity yeah i mean okay yeah so what what's what's the episode about the episode's

about being an expert yeah and it's learning where the patterns are right so oh it is just

a detail view here and oh if i just use this permission you know if i just use the stuff

that django provides for like user passes test or something to to control the access here that

will work that will do well is there that saying that you know like a truly expert programmer or

there's some like graphic of you know given a problem like a beginner will just like dive in

intermediate person will i don't start stack overflowing and like a true programmer will sit

back go for a walk think about it and be like i've seen this before and just you know kind of

nail it yeah without getting so busy in the weeds but it is that pattern recognition and i think i

mean that's what's that's what's fun i mean i guess that that is sort of what is what does it

feel like to be an expert assuming either us is an expert it's seeing the patterns and going

yeah I've seen this before I see this as a flavor of something common because again it's if it seems

brand new to you it's not it's just you don't have the content this is why algorithms are so

fun actually I'm I'm probably going to write it I've sort of half written an algorithms book

because I find algorithms fascinating in that they're taught when you have no context like

your second undergraduate course and you're kind of like just memorize them and repeat it

but then as a professional you go oh my god like these are so useful if you know that they're there

and can reach for it because, you know, whatever performance thing you're trying to do, it's

probably an algorithm question, but you need to kind of know the algorithms, but you need

that mix of seeing the problems and then knowing there's a whole dictionary of answers out

there to use.

Yeah, I mean, okay, so I am constantly reading computer science books, have been for a decade,

but when I started, it was all like the Bash cookbook and classic shell scripting and all

these things.

And these days it's, you know, mathematics books or algorithms books or data structures books or, you know, these kind of things.

Why? Because they're dry.

They're really dry.

And, you know, but they help me get to sleep.

So anyway, but the point is that those things are...

I thought that's what Aristotle and the original Greeks were.

Well, exactly.

That kind of thing as well.

But those kind of texts are the ones that have the really transferable value.

But it's only, you know, 10, 15 years in that it's like, yeah, okay, you know, I really like reading those sorts of things.

When I started, you know, pick up an algorithm book, it's like this is totally meaningless to me because I was never – I was too busy trying to just wire some stuff together to ever think about the structure or, you know, is there a simpler implementation or, you know, the more interesting stuff.

Yeah.

Well, I strongly feel it—I mean, I am going to publish this book at some point.

I think it can—I think it doesn't have to be that way, because I think you don't have to make it a pure applied math book, which is—

what, you know, they are and make sense 15 years in. What you really want is you want sort of a

quick guide and a sense of understanding, oh, this would be served by a greedy algorithm. This would

be dynamic. This is, you know, to sort of be able to look at a problem and understand what bucket

it falls into. And then you can dive in and find the right one. I think that's the biggest takeaway

beyond knowing that there's a ton of algorithms. I mean, for example, like when I explain algorithms

and non-programmers i usually put it in the context of so there's searching and sorting

algorithms but at the end of the day you almost always want to get to a binary search so it's

really all about sorting algorithms i would say which i don't know which i've never heard anyone

say it like that but okay my take is that it's basically all about sorting and then what's really

cool is you have comparison sorts and you have non-comparison sorts so you say well if i don't

have to be 100 correct i can be you know a multiple faster in my uh sorting so it's like

well do i you know so you can ask sort of the architecture questions of like well is speed more

important or is accuracy more important what are the trade-offs and that's kind of what i would

like to be able to get beginners thinking like that even if they don't have all the math and

everything memorized because that's how that's how you and i would think about something right

it is all trade-offs, right? We say it all depends. It all depends, yeah. But how do you get to that

point where you can make a good decision? Right, but I think, yeah, okay, but I think this is where

you do need just an amount of exposure. So, you know, for instance, I don't know, the design

patterns books, OOP has sort of fallen out of fashion from when I started, but, you know, it

was always worth as a junior sort of slogging through the design patterns book or slogging

through the refactoring book in order to give yourself a vocabulary to talk with and then you

come up to a problem you'd be like oh this is a bit like the composite pattern and then it would

give you something to go and look up and it would give you a solution you'd be like okay i can model

it like that and it may not have been the best software in the world but it gave you a an answer

and the same with some algorithms if you know some algorithms or you know you know you know

if you're a beginner the algorithms aren't the place to look the place to go and read is the

that is the standard library um yeah manual and just go through each of the modules and sort of

have a look and see what functions are available and then and there is a great um book um what's

it called the python standard library by example it was um python module of the week was the blog

that was originally based on this became a book python standard standard library by example it's

a great book and it it's a really good way of learning some python and to see what's available

and all of a sudden say, oh, you know, I need to do this. Oh, well, look, there's a pretty print

module and you know, you can use it to, or there's a diff module and you, you know, which you didn't

know about. You'd never, you'd never even know to reach for it. How do you, how do you know to

reach for it? Like, let me give you an example. So I come from a liberal arts family and my family,

people read the dictionary for fun, you know? So what you're describing of going through the

Python, like standard library, that's like reading the dictionary for fun. I mean, I,

I read the dictionary for fun. Honestly, I don't read the Python standard library for fun

as much, but it is a similar thing. I think the question is more, you know, okay, if you're not

already wired for that, usually it's in the context of there's some problem that comes up,

maybe it's around time. And then how do you, how do you get to the right resource? You know,

this is where, you know, you know, cause time, time is complicated. Python has some nice packages

for it, but probably what you're going to do if you're a beginner is you're just going to go on

google you're going to find a medium post or something else or stack overflow that gives you

some code that sort of kind of works and you're not going to understand it and it may not be the

right solution but it's like a band-aid and then you move on and i think that's fine as a learning

tool but i guess we would encourage people to like go a little bit deeper like see how python

see if there's a built-in thing in the language see how it's created yeah at some point you got

to fill in the gaps right at some okay you know you can google you can find a thing you can paste

copy it off stack overflow paste it in and you can do that 50 100 times and you begin you're

getting there you're learning stuff but at some point you've got to fill in the gaps so this is

where things like um you know if you're talking about python there's a book fluent python which

yeah super you know amazing and it's it's massive it's like a thousand pages and i i read it on my

mobile phone in um on you know i never really i just knew it was taking a long time you know but

i was long i was i have it i have it yeah it's a but i was taking long bus journeys and i was

reading it took me months you know okay fine but i was learning loads of really cool stuff like

ah interesting interesting interesting and then i saw it in the physical copy and it's like wow

that's a doorstop but it's such a good book because it kind of fills in the background of

everything you need to know and then right when you come out of it you're there's another couple

i mean fluent python was one there was another one that well there's effective python i mean i

have actually a blog post on what i think are the best python books we'll link to uh there's well

there's python cookbook yeah which is learning learning python that's the um mark lutz i mean

i would say for well so for beginning python to me the top ones are the python crash course and

automate the boring stuff there's other ones those are the two kind of top ones and then if the next

step up i would say it's fluent python and the effective python um by uh brett slatkin is very

concise but just kind of mind-blowing in its quality okay but you know the thing is there's

only so many non-applied books that you can read you kind of need to balance you know okay here's

the theory and then here's let's build an instagram clone in python and django and sort of apply and

pick things up i mean this is what i think about as an educator i think about getting someone there

fast and then getting someone there you know i almost want to write a book that's like i could

do a whole book on a blog app where it's just like chapter one basic version chapter two like

they have 10 chapters and each time do it differently from scratch with more complexity

you know sanitize inputs was bleached do this do that but i think you kind of need it needs to feel

familiar before because if i just gave a complicated solution it wouldn't have any context for someone

yeah no that's exactly you've got it you've got to like not aristotle's got this line knowledge

has to be worked into the living structure of the mind and that's exactly it programming you can't

just pick up the you know the advanced solution and understand it that's the trouble with like

the the django cookie cutter type um project starter projects unless you are already there

they're too big they're too too all-encompassing you can't grasp what's going on and even if you

do grasp it's probably got nine lots of things that you don't want that you're not entirely

sure how to cut out and yeah well and this is you know coming coming to you know first principles

and simplicity as you advance in your career. I mean, I see more and more, yeah, just a basic

authentication flow. I could teach it five different ways. And it might be the most

beneficial thing to do that. Like, let's just keep doing it a little bit more complex or a

you know, at the end of the day, I mean, this is the mindset that you and I have, you know,

CRUD app, it's like, okay, what's the very first thing I think about? It's like, okay,

what are the, what's the schema? Get the models right. And then, okay, where's my list view?

Where's my detail view? Is there anything kind of tricky I need to do to get context data,

save, you know, maybe, maybe not. And then, you know, toss in the templates, the URLs and

good to go. But I can say that because I've, I don't worry about, well, how do I set up Postgres?

How do I configure my app structure?

You know, all these little details.

I guess it's the details that I view as just very downstream from, you know, the schema and the architecture side.

But you can't really get there until you've done it a bunch of times.

Yeah, and all that stuff, that's where the difficulty is.

It's like, you know, a beginner can start off, they can create a model, they can, you know, they might go a bit slower, but they'll get all that.

and then it there comes a point where the accumulate the accumulated knowledge that you

have to have to get this thing actually production worthy yeah yeah it's just too much and that just

takes time and that's just time on the coalface right and it's i mean it's i said it's frustrating

that it's not there aren't more resources on it and i kind of understand why because i mean i

wrote an entire book on this jingo for professionals but it could be 10 times as long uh as it is it's

almost 400 pages.

You know, there's a lot of sections

where I sort of take you as far as I can go

and then say, well, and here's where to go further.

But I guess it's that 80-20.

I mean, in that book anyways,

I tried to give you the 80 and show you where the 20 is.

I don't know, it's deciding

how much you want to polish the rock

that is your app.

Yeah, and also for something like a book,

there's no point going all the way

to the complete finished thing

because that stuff changes.

Whereas if you stick to the core stuff,

relatively stable it's like okay this is going to be more or less the same in you know a year

two years time whereas if you go right to the thing it's like oh but that's not the same that's

not the same that's not the same right well and this is why the you know foundational stuff becomes

more and more appealing you know all the way to like just pure applied math i mean things that

don't change that are i don't know eternal have more and more appeal yeah exactly so which so

which am i going to learn am i going to spend time learning the latest framework or am i going to

turn um spend time learning computer science fundamentals or you know programming language

fundamentals it's always going to be programming from the language fundamentals because that new

for you framework will have disappeared by the time yeah you know and but was those fundamentals

they haven't changed ever right but i think the problem uh the way it's taught in my opinion is

that they give you all the what you and i are excited about they give that to you in your first

like three or four courses and you have no context for it and it's a little bit in one year out the

other whereas i think there should be some sort of mix or well and actually what happens is that

you have a lot of people who in computer science programs half the you know an undergraduate level

half the folks have spent a number of years building crud apps and whatever and they have

a little bit of context so they can see how valuable it is they have that repetition and

then half are true beginners and it's just like what is this um so as a teacher you know you have

to balance both those which is hard but i i'm a big favor a big fan of context and theory together

um well i just wanted i wanted to raise one more thing right because you you um talked to the

beginning and this just ties back with what you were saying you talked at the beginning about um

how how it feels um and how beginners feel and how and how experts are more yeah it feels the same

um well no but how experts perhaps um are more real realistic about what they know maybe and

there's this there's this thing that i was just looking at it's the dreyfus model of skill

acquisition where you start as a novice you move to an advanced beginner and then you become

competent and proficient and finally an expert and one thing that there is at the beginning of that

of you know the novice advanced beginner stage is you perhaps think that you're

more advanced than you really are yeah yeah yeah and i think you know once you get to a certain

point you start to realize how little you do know and at that point you you're going to be more

successful just because you're you don't plow through blindly you're more kind of aware right

i mean i've seen that you know you'll see tweets and stuff that's you know a year or two in it's

like i don't know anything five years in i know everything and then 10 years plus the rest of

your career it's like i don't know anything yeah so it's yeah but i i so i guess i just want to

for beginners i want to say that it's it's a constant beginner mindset profession it's just

the challenges change a bit and the things that excite you you know things that excite me it's not

building a prototype of something because i know i can do that it's these more foundational things

are much more interesting but they certainly wouldn't have been when i was starting out

and it's ultimately this knowledge as you said of that you know expert almost anything we're

dealing with can be solved right and especially the older i get you know life is not like that

so it's sort of nice that code is like that there is some sort of solution but like yeah

but to keep this um there's this great book that i recommend to everyone called zen zen mind

beginner's mind and it's about keeping the the the mind of the beginner keeping open keeping

um you know aware of your that you're not don't or not being self-satisfied that you're there

and for me coding at its best is you know a very zen experience in that way because it's like

yeah i'm i'm really pushing my limits constantly and it's a lot it's an ongoing challenge and it's

an ongoing practice you know like tai chi or like tea pouring or like calligraphy or like any of

these other arts that they practice in the eastern tradition so you know it's kind of programming as

meditation you know yeah like let go of it all you don't know anything i guess last point i would say

is i find that you know what so what is it like being i'm almost 40 now i mean you're you're 40

what 40 41 42 next month 42 well you're 41 i you know again i'll use a doctor example right so

doctors are highly educated but they're kind of used to knowing what they're talking about

and it's interesting to see how i feel like programming keeps my mind pretty plastic and

that i'm constantly being humbled i constantly have a beginner mindset i just don't have any

laurels to rest on i don't i feel like i'm only as good as my next code and maybe not doctors but

But that's unusual as far as professions.

But I think it's, you know, I appreciate the challenge because it does, it keeps me kind of childlike, right?

It keeps me constantly frustrated, but also engaged and interested in a way that other careers, at least for me, I would be bored and, I don't know, calcify a little bit, I think.

Yeah, no, exactly.

For me, that's the, you know, that's the appeal.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I hope that's helpful for people.

little bit of a different episode but i think i wish i had heard something like that when i was

starting out so if it resonates uh let us know at uh chat chat django on twitter we're at django

chat.com and we'll see you all next week bye