I’ve spent today hacking with Django (well, to be accurate, I’ve been hacking on Django intermittently with eating pancakes, playing with kids in the park, and watching the whole Sarah Palin gossip trainwreck ricochet across the Internet: I honestly now have no idea what the hell is going to happen in this election).
I’ve been tracking Django since forever, but held off from doing anything too serious with it until 1.0. I’ve got a work project that fits the bill quite nicely, and I figured that a few days before 1.0’s September 2nd estimated deadline would be good enough to start hacking.
It’s been fascinating working under a codebase that is under heavy but stable development as you work. I hit bugs that I’d find in the bugtracker, filed just a few days ago, and then find them fixed while I slept. I’d also have occasional disconnects where something I’d been using in Django a few months ago had been completely reworked (mostly the admin feature), and I’d have to scramble a little to work out what had changed, and what had remained the same.
Overall, though, I’ve been really enjoying it. The changes that were made, like being able to subclass database models, seem esoteric but end up being really useful (I am uncomfortable with idea of refactoring a database schema, but it’s made much more sense to me now I can fiddle with inheritance instead of bang my head against SQL). The documentation remains first class, and has kept up with all the changes. I’m not far enough through the project to give you a realistic summary of how good a fit it is for my use, but so far, it’s been fun, at least — and it’s definitely good enough for 1.0 status.