Introduction to Django talk

Last week I was asked by Stuart Allen to give a talk to the students in his first year “Problem Solving with Python” course on the topic of django, the python web framework. As I’m not lecturing at the moment I like to do these odd talks or cover the odd lecture just to keep up the skill set for when I start doing it again properly, so I agreed. Plus, I think django is ace and it’s always nice to try and brainwash students into using educate students about your favourite technology 😃

The talk was actually really well timed as the students are currently working on a coursework in another module (“Web Applications”) where they are required to develop a blog application using MySQL and PHP. This meant I was able to show off just how simple it would be to do it in django instead - so I gave a quick introductory talk then did some live coding and created a pretty functional blog application in about twenty five minutes. I think it annoyed quite a few of the students to see the difference in complexity between hand coding everything in PHP and having django take care of most of the boilerplate code. It may even have been a bit evil of me, but hey, that’s what I’m here for.

The slides for the talk are attached to this post (Introduction to Django Talk), although they’re of the “you need to be there to get the details” style of slide design, so they may not be that useful. Thanks to Mike Cantelon for his django keynote theme, and the lovely flickr users who uploaded photos with a CC license so I could reuse them.