The class has proven to be very motivating.

Although my current role is MySQL DBA, I have been a professional web developer since 1995. I was really amazed by what I was able to do with Django by the end of this class. I have gone on to learn about Python in general.

I was able to take what I learned about Python and modify this open source script for uploading to Flickr so that I can use it as a plug-in to export from Bibble to Flickr in a batch workflow.

I have been reading Learning Python, and am really looking forward to using Python and Django both personally and professionally.

Training completed

I really enjoyed the week of training and the instructor, Juan Pablo. I was also happy to learn about things that django can do and look forward to working with it even more than I have. Hopefully, 1.0 will come along sooner rather than later.

Finished! Great Stuff

Done with class and very happy with how I spent the last week. I think the exercises were relevant and the explanations were clear and helpful. Would have like to have been onsite to be able to more easily follow up on lessons that we did each day. Other than that, I feel like we were given a toolset to base some great stuff off of.

Day 3 in the World of Django

So far so good - I'm very happy with the Django training we are taking this week. If this class is an example of the quality of service that Big Nerd Ranch provides then I'm cool with getting more training from them.

I'm a Ruby/Rails guy so it was great to see Django being used for something other then just the Admin and it gives a clear cut way for me to determine which tool I'd rather use for certain projects.

Our instructor - Juan Pablo - clearly communicated how to do many nice things in Django that I did not know you could do. Due to the limited quality documentation the framework has (so far) it's good to have a focused training that goes step by step through some real use cases. The Django training booklet provided is an awesome reference btw.

Hoping that the last couple of days will be as informative as the first few.

At the halfway point

I wanted to get a few days under my belt, so I could get a true feel for the class before contributing. After three days of the course, I have to say that I'm impressed.

What I came into the class looking for was more of an idea of the power of django and more of what you could do with it. Juan Pablo has done, what I feel, is a great job in opening those doors. I'm really excited about the remaining two days and I feel, again so far, that this course has armed me with more of a knowledge base to defend using django versus some other frameworks (which shall remain nameless) when working on projects.

Generic views

We finished up newforms today and also covered generic views.

I love, love, love generic views. The less code we have to write, (and thus the less code we have to test), the better and more effecient we'll be.

Juan made a really good observation/training point I hadn't thought of: the CRUD generic views all use oldforms.

I hadn't really dug into the CRUD generic views until the class and I had previously thought how easy/great it'd be to have generic CRUD views. But upon further reflection in class the CRUD views have two things going against them:

* They use old forms
* If your exposing a CRUD function to the public, then you probably need really fine grained control over that controller/workflow.

That said, the rest of the generic views are great, and I'm a huge fan of wrapping generic views if they only get you "part of the way" there.

Middle of the Week on Django

From the perspective of a non-programmer, this class has been an invaluable experience. It is immediately obvious that my inexperience with Python is a hinderance in completing the exercises. However, the concise instruction and thorough documentation provided by our instructor has helped me to understand what is going on behind the scenes. At this point I feel relatively comfortable about the inner workings of Django that we have covered, and am confident that with some independent study on Python, I would be able to successfully begin Django development. I am looking forward to the rest of the week and seeing how much more I am able to absorb.