Let's not beat around the bush. This blog is definitely not the best-looking thing in the world. I don't have an ounce of design sense in me, and I really don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
So why did I devote the time and effort to build this instead of something far more simple, or just use any one of the existing blog sites like Medium, LinkedIn, or even WordPress? The answer is straight forward. For whatever reason, I have always enjoyed that struggle of learning/building/figuring out new things. So I did just that and built this simple blog to explore and better understand the process of developing and deploying a Django web app... even if it's overkill for a simple blog app.
The experience of building this has been just the right mix of challenging and rewarding, and at times I may have even channeled that elusive 'Flow' state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about when stretching skills in pursuit of increasing the complexity of one's self. (Note to self: seek out more of those experiences)
While I have written many Python scripts before, most were procedural by nature, and while I had previously heard of and read about many of the concepts of OOP & Django, such as the Model-View-Controller (or Model-Template-View) design pattern and the elements of a CRUD interface, I really had no clue about the practical details of applying these concepts, and I certainly had no clue how to configure, deploy, and troubleshoot a web app on a cloud platform (although this last one still largely eludes me).
I've very much been learning on the fly, and while that's usually really tedious & uncomfortable, it's also very enjoyable & rewarding -- I guess that's what 'falling forward' is all about -- C'est la vie!
As I continue to build this site, refine my existing competencies, and learn new things, I plan to write about my experiences here. As I do so, I hope my trials, tribulations, and potential insights will be of some value to you. And if not, oh well! Either way, if you're reading this right now I'm glad you're here.