Ask HN: What's your Django side project?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23179873

by rasulkireev • 6 years ago

60 90 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For those who are developing with Django, what are you working on / building / learning?

I've been building https://builtwithdjango.com and learning how to integrate Stripe.

danjac2• 6 years ago

https://demo.localhub.social/

Edit: username demo/password testpass1

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

Doesn't seem to be reachable. Edit: nevermind, works now!

codegladiator• 6 years ago

Reachable for me

tsukurimashou• 6 years ago

give some demo creds as well

jamesdvance4• 6 years ago

Planyourmeals.com. about 2.5 years and counting when I thought it would take 3 months. Oh well still learning every day

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Oh, I can certainly relate! Each time I start a project I think it will take x amount of time ends up taking 10 times more.

Do you have a landing page? Or is it only possible to login / register?

jamesdvance4• 6 years ago

I'm literally working on the landing page this week :)

rsandhu2• 6 years ago

Podcast hosting service https://wisecast.fm

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

That's awesome! I am actually finalizing some editing for my podcast right now and hope to launch by the end of May.

I was planning to use Transistor.FM for hosting, but now will certainly consider using Wisecast to support a fellow Django maker.

rsandhu2• 6 years ago

Excellent! Currently, I am offering a free 60-day trial and would appreciate the support :)

augustflanagan4• 6 years ago

https://cronitor.io is built with Django.

It was a side project from March 2014 to March 2020, but as of last month it’s now my full-time job!

abbadadda• 6 years ago

Congrats!

WesleyJohnson2• 6 years ago

Looks there are CSS issues right now, just FYI. The bundle.<hash>.css is 404ing.

augustflanagan4• 6 years ago

The joys of bringing up new machines while simultaneously posting on HN. ;)

Thanks for calling that out!

danpalmer• 6 years ago

Looks great, I think I've read about this before!

Just FYI, the CSS for your homepage appears to be intermittently 404'ing. Could be a failed release and your static manifest being out of date on one or more of your running backend processes – we've had this before with Django.

augustflanagan4• 6 years ago

Ugh, thanks! Fixing now.

benja123• 6 years ago

Congrats! If you don't mind sharing what made you make the jump to full time?

augustflanagan4• 6 years ago

I've been working on e-commerce and consumer mobile products for the last 6 years. It's been a great experience, but I've always wanted to work full-time on a SaaS developer tool. More specifically, one that I want/need in my day-to-day job as a software developer.

Watching Cronitor grow the past few years, and seeing all the ways that people rely on it today, has been extremely rewarding. Working on it full-time means I can finally tackle some of the bigger projects that I've wanted to do, but haven't been able to due to time constraints. In other words, I get to make it even more useful now!

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Congrats!

nikisweeting• 6 years ago

Internet archiving tool, which is currently stuck in limbo between releases because it's a big architectural overhaul and I haven't had energy/time to pick up all the mental context from where I left off https://github.com/pirate/archivebox and

slow and steady wins the race I guess...

roknovosel• 6 years ago

I've been working on a small Django project called https://CodeSnippetSearch.net. It allows you to search through code snippets using natural language. Currently, Python, Java, Go, Php, Javascript, and Ruby programming languages are supported.

As with any cool project nowadays, CodeSnippetSearch is powered by neural networks (six in fact - one for each programming language). The project is open-sourced and you can read about the implementation details here: https://github.com/novoselrok/codesnippetsearch

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Starred! *

It's way too advanced for my current skill level but is certainly I am working towards. Nice job!

narrationbox2• 6 years ago

Not a side project but a full-time startup: https://narrationbox.com

Built with Django and Gatsby (the latter migration is still work-in-progress).

jamesdvance4• 6 years ago

Are migrating from react?

narrationbox2• 6 years ago

Not migrating from, migrating to. Our app is heavy on the media and ML side and manually stitching together templates, CSS, and preprocessing content were becoming unmaintainable. It is easier to have Gatsby Plugins deal with asset preprocessing and management.

holri2• 6 years ago

I am building an django webapp helping to organize the learning of a musical instrument.

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Do you have a demo link? I would love to check it out!

holri2• 6 years ago

Give me 1 or 2 weeks. I'll post the link here.

compumike• 6 years ago

https://www.circuitlab.com my initial commit with Django is 2011-09-22, last commit is yesterday!

(Though after a very positive developer experience working in Ruby on Rails when I worked at Triplebyte, I'd probably lean toward RoR for a new project.)

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

That looks cool. I have been thinking about restarting my hobby of "electrical engineering". When I start learning this will certainly be my go-to tool.

danjac2• 6 years ago

I haven't worked with Rails for quite a few years - how does it stack up these days vs Django?

inerte• 6 years ago

Cocktail recipe and execution tracking for home enthusiasts. I started 1.5 years ago when my in-laws were visiting, the local version with good modeling and Admin input took 2 weeks.

The public, user facing data input, and production deployment, is taking the other 18 months :)

You know the saying, it is 90% done, now we only have to do the other half.

But I recently restarted. As of yesterday the app actually runs on AWS Beanstalk, although with its attached RDS. I have a coworker now that’s really into cocktails so I feel like I am building the site for him.

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Can you share the link?

ericvanular2• 6 years ago

https://enviro.work is built on Django! It's an environmentally-focused jobs board for those looking to align their career with the climate crisis

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

I have recommended this to many people looking for such roles. Thank you for building this!

ericvanular2• 6 years ago

Thanks for your support! Feel free to join the community at https://collective.energy as well for more discussion about climate solutions

jvaqueiro2• 6 years ago

Also a full time startup, we're building a platform for controlling access to housing communities in Mexico.

Currently developing an API to create a mobile app with Flutter + Django!

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!

jvaqueiro2• 6 years ago

Hi! Sorry for the late reply. I'll have a public demo next week. Will let you know and provide demo login credentials.

radarsat12• 6 years ago

Lately I have been trying to cover more ground in popular Python frameworks since despite many years of using it, most of my experience is scientific programming, "short job" scripts, and a few CLI and GUI tools; now that I am looking for a job, I found that recruiters wouldn't believe me that I am a Python "developer" unless I can point to some web-hosted projects; so I decided to attack Django and Flask simultaneously.

I wrote a machine learning "deployment" microservice using Django, and wrote a client for it in Flask, with the front-end doing some nice d3 graphs of the output in JavaScript. Works great, although in the end I thought Flask maybe would have been a better choice for the service, and Django for the client! Not sure. Both running in Docker on separate machines, one a dedicated host, the other on Heroku. Frankly the whole thing was a pretty pleasant experience and only took me a week so I felt gratified that I made the attempt and now have something to point to when people ask if I can program in Python. (I won't post the link unfortunately as there is no way my server can handle the HN load; it's just for my own personal demonstrations while I'm working on getting hired, anyway. In the future I might move the model execution to tensorflow.js and then the whole thing could be an almost static site running on Heroku with some client-side processing handling the heavy stuff, but no time for that now.)

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Sounds cool, one of my goals of learning Django was to merge my interests in Data Science and Web Development, sort of Data Science as a Software (DSaaS).

Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!

radarsat12• 6 years ago

I don't want to post it publicly because of the potential load, I guess i can't PM on HN, you can send me an email (my username@gmail.com) or a message at the same username on reddit

weaponizedwords2• 6 years ago

https://www.dittobomb.com/ A platform for sending tweets to people in the mail.

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Hah, that's an awesome project. I'd say it is somewhat similar to Josh Shpigford's Laser Tweets (https://lasertweets.co/).

weaponizedwords2• 6 years ago

Hey, that's really cool! I love the style, it's beautiful.

cjr• 6 years ago

check out https://screenjar.com, easily request screen recordings from your users if they are stuck.

encoderer2• 6 years ago

For 6 years I’ve been building Cronitor.io with my best friend and business partner, August.

We started on Django 1.6 and I’ll admit: we liked it so much we stuck with that version for 5 years (ha ha).

Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all the new Django goodies.

August is working full time on Cronitor but for me it’s still technically a “side project” — for now!

Edit: sorry for the dupe! August already posted here.

japhyr3• 6 years ago

Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all the new Django goodies.

Can you share anything about how that upgrade journey went? What are some of the newer features that have been helpful for you? Were those features you knew would be helpful, or were you happily surprised?

encoderer2• 6 years ago

I didn't do much of the actual coding on that project but from my perspective the upgrade on our Django app went smooth.

We were excited to have Django Migrations (So long, South!) and honestly it's great to have access to current docs again.

We did have a snag with memory leaks in a threadpool in one of our non-django Python APIs. It was actually our worst outage in 5 years because it failed several hours after we deployed and we were no longer staring at our graphs.

(Maybe I can get August to write a blog post about how he accidentally sent a million emails to our personal inboxes while trying to clean that up)

pryelluw• 6 years ago

Im building the webapp for PyATL (python Atlanta group). Progress is slow but steady. Streaming it on https://twitch.com/pyatl (the stream might not be for everyone). Code is at https://github.com/pyatl/big-peach See it live at https://pyatl.dev Note that this is a super bare bones web app right now.

typpo• 6 years ago

I built https://www.spacereference.org, which compiles information on asteroids and comets from multiple data sources.

The Django project is open source here (https://github.com/judymou/spacedb) but most of my ongoing work is on the visualization rather than the Django side here (https://github.com/typpo/spacekit/).

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Wow, simply wow! Great work!

japhyr3• 6 years ago

Built with Django is a really interesting project. It looks good for me on Chrome, but I don't see any projects on Safari. I'm on Mojave 10.14.6, Safari 13.1.

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Thanks!

Yes, I am aware of the problem you are referring to. I've known about it for some time, but I can't do anything about it. I just don't understand why the images don't show up.

I've searched everywhere, but couldn't find the solution. I fanyone here knows how to solve it, I'd be forever grateful.

japhyr3• 6 years ago

I started disabling some of the css, and I was able to get the projects to start to appear. I have no idea what the root issue is, but I think you could probably sort out which css is problematic on safari, and either render the page differently on safari or choose a different layout that is more cross-browser friendly?

Here's a screenshot to show what I started disabling: https://i.imgur.com/BinJqAD.png

megaman821• 6 years ago

You have a two classes .overflow-hidden and .flex-1. The flex-1 class has the property flex: 1 1 0%. Since the flex-basis is 0, I assume the overflow hidden is just chopping it all off. Try a flex: 1 0 auto;

bkrishnan• 6 years ago

Started as a simple python script to scratch my own itch to track USCIS Visa Bulletins and my Green Card progress. Due to demand by friends and co-workers who had the same need, I used it as a learning opportunity and created a website powered by Django and Beautiful Soup: https://www.seekingvisa.com/

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Nice! It would be pretty relevant for me, but I just got denied my H1B. Will use seekingvisa next year :)

WesleyJohnson2• 6 years ago

I've started several over the years, but not actively working on any. Having a hard time with motivation right now.

- A Funko POP! collection tracker.

- A Disc Golf auction/news site.

- A qeepsake competitor.

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Can you provide some links please? :)

pk785• 6 years ago

https://mapsofmind.com

Django - channels - celery

Another project to be launched soon that uses a similar stack. Just waiting on stripe activation.

aweb2• 6 years ago

FYI, you website is displayed to me in French (makes sense, I am!). However, the problem is that the French translation is quite poor and I can't seem to find a way to switch to English?

Sorry, didn't want to criticize what seems to be a cool service but I thought you should know!

pk785• 6 years ago

Hey! Sorry for the late response. By default only English was available but I found a lot of my users we from France, so I added the French language support using Google translate - that's why the translation is poor.

I'll try to add a way to switch locale to English or do you think it's better to keep just English as the only language till I can get other languages translated professionally?

Edit: Added language dropdown on the top-right of the landing page.

jamesdvance4• 6 years ago

Thats an excellent landing page. Are you using React?

pk785• 6 years ago

Hey! I just saw your reply.

No, I don't use any framework (still haven't had the time to learn any) - it's just ES5.

boxed• 6 years ago

Related How? (https://relatedhow.kodare.com/) is a site to see how species are related.

It's still quite rough around the edges, mostly due to me being demotivated for not having a good way to host it. Now solved with linode+dokku which I am super happy with.

This is a site i have wanted for decades and I Googled after it every year for a decade before I realized I could build it myself with the data from wikidata.

Code at https://github.com/boxed/relatedhow

dlareau• 6 years ago

I've been working on my "Puzzlehunt Server" project for roughly 5 years now, and it is finally starting to see more traction than ever.

Link: https://www.puzzlehunt.club

Code: https://github.com/dlareau/puzzlehunt_server

The project currently serves as the main site for PuzzlehuntCMU, a group from Carnegie Mellon that writes and runs their own puzzlehunts, but the point of the project in general now-a-days is for any group that wants to run a puzzlehunt to be able to stand up a copy of the server and just go.

We recently just hosted a 24 hour, 1400 person, 400 team (5x the max number of users we've ever seen before) event a few weeks ago and thankfully everything held up fine.

pydanny• 6 years ago

Just pushed out the alpha of the 5th edition of our book, which is titled: "Two Scoops of Django 3.x".

Here's the product page: https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-3-x

Also working on a book writing app where the file generating service backend is monitored by a Django project. Launches soon!

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

Ooh! Very excited about this. Can't wait.

chipx86• 6 years ago

I build Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/, https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard), an open source code review tool built on top of Django. It used to be a side project to fill what was at that time a gap in code review offerings (not even GitHub was around at this time), but these days it's a full-time job.

Like @encoderer and Cronitor.io, we also stuck with Django 1.6 for several years! YAY! Turns out the jump from 1.6 to 1.7 was a painful experience, but we're finally on the modern.... 1.11. Yeah, we're not getting rid of our Python 2.7 customers for some time (still trying to get some off of Python 2.6). Enterprise software development is a different sort of beast.

Our https://rbcommons.com service is Review Board as a SaaS, and uses Stripe. Curious to hear what you're doing with Stripe integration on your end! We've been making heavy use of it ourselves.

We've also done some crazy, fairly-complex, maybe-niche stuff in Django, and built these out into some libraries you might find interesting to browse through:

1) Djblets (https://github.com/djblets/djblets) — A big ol' utility library for Django that provides:

* Foundations for loadable extensions (just like browser extensions) for Django projects

* Support for defining flexible integrations for third-party services (Slack, etc.)

* Avatar support (gravatars, file uploads, URL-based avatars, and custom backends)

* Datagrids (with user column customization)

* A foundation for REST APIs

* Dynamic site settings

* Stuff to make privacy/PII/consent a first-class citizen in codebases

* And just a ton of other things that we found useful in Review Board and wanted to make more widely-available.

2) Django Evolution (https://github.com/beanbaginc/django-evolution) — A precursor to Django's migrations support (and the reason we were on Django 1.6 for so long — the in-development version cooperates with migrations now). We inherited and maintain this project. It provides an alternate way to specify database schema changes, and has the benefit of just being far faster to apply migrations, through a built-in optimizer. This significantly reduces upgrade times for large installs (super important for many of our Review Board customers).

All open source, and might be interesting to look at, who knows. We've built a lot up over the years (we started by writing code against Django pre-1.0 SVN checkouts), and I still recommend it.

wilfredinni• 6 years ago

started a cheat sheet while learning Python and made a site in Django for it. 1 and a half year later and after landing my first real job, I'm still maintaining it https://www.pythoncheatsheet.org/ - https://github.com/wilfredinni/python-cheatsheet

ckinsey• 6 years ago

Working on Delegate (https://www.delegatehq.com/), a process management app for founders and managers. Django / DRF backend with Vue.js in front running on Kubernetes--awesome stack.

grantmcc• 6 years ago

I’m working on Postpone, a Django/Vue.js app for scheduling Reddit posts at the right time. https://www.postpone.app/

jplattel• 6 years ago

Currently developing an inventory management system with Django, looking into smooth integration for both physical & digital stores. Integration with WooCommerce & Shopify for example. The goal is to be as open-source as possible. https://github.com/organization-supply/organization.supply

mdeck_2• 6 years ago

I'm a lawyer. I found myself writing a lot of legal briefs—but didn't like the Bluebooking and cite-checking part (it's kind of like linting code, but for lawyers and their briefs). So, I used Django to create http://www.cite.ly, which automates the process of checking legal writing for Bluebooking errors and misquotations of case law through a web app.

We turned a 5- to 10-hour process into one that takes 10 minutes!

The app itself is in private beta at this point. We also rely on the software internally while externally offering a service where lawyers send us their briefs and we show them the errors that the software finds :)

23matt• 6 years ago

I'm a Swiss lawyer working as a court clerk and have dabbled with Django myself (automating documents using python-docx and python-docx-template). I find this interesting and was wondering if you could elaborate on how you built this.

mdeck_2• 6 years ago

The short answer is: mostly, a lot of regex. Yes, there’s also a lot more to it. Happy to discuss—reach out at michael@cite.ly :)

spectaculum• 6 years ago

Haven't touched it in a few months, but here's a fax machine (powered by Twilio) that runs on a Raspberry pi.

https://github.com/fastily/fax-machine

I challenged myself to make the operating costs as low-cost as possible. It costs $1/mo (for the Twilio number) and a couple cents per page.

th0th2• 6 years ago

I have been working on WebGazer (https://www.webgazer.io) since 2015 and even if the stack got bigger with time, it has Django in its foundation :)

It started as a simple website monitoring product and evolved from there. It enables customers to monitor websites, REST APIs and cron jobs on the same platform. I also added status page functionality (e.g. https://status.webgazer.io) some time ago.

I have a day job but I keep building and hustling at the side. We live off of paychecks from our day jobs but live for our side projects, don't we? :P

rasulkireev19• 6 years ago

th0th, just added webgazer to builtwithdjango directory :) https://builtwithdjango.com/webgazer

th0th2• 6 years ago

thank you!

pineiden• 6 years ago

Hi! I have two projects that i'm working with django.

First, on my job, on a public institution (scientific also), i'm developing a website to control and monitoring the status of a GNSS (GPS) network, the scheme of all the network and equipment, particular status, etc.

Integrated with celery to generate periodic reports and a view in what we can se the status in real time from every station. Uses last Django version (python 3.7), celery, rabbitmq, postgresql, redis, bulma css(and pure javascript on ui).

Is not published yet because i'm working on details, and maybe only will be disposable by the internal VPN https://gitlab.com/pineiden/dj-webo-collector

The other, is for a personal project with friends about teach technology to common people. https://gitlab.com/pineiden/web-curso-programacion https://www.cursodeprogramacion.cl/

And the plan is build a platform to support education plans, not only teach programming, also workshops or courses of any subjects.

So that, i learned a lot since around six years playing with django and now i think i can manage well.

BR!

mattstrayer• 6 years ago

Very early stages, but we just went live!

Note taking, simplified. From idea to go-live in seconds. https://www.lowercase.app/

rsinger87• 6 years ago

I made a webapp called "Disqors" (https://www.disqors.com/latest). It's backend largely runs on Django.

I connect online articles into discussion graphs and intersperse the top tweets about them. There are feeds that filter the discussions in different ways (exchanges among top authors, most discussed articles). It's also possible to see a specific discussion graph in its entirety, e.g. the discussion around Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" essay: https://www.disqors.com/discussions/36672

Ask HN: What's your Django side project?

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