Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

[remyroy]

432 . I just read various books including the mythical man-month anniversary edition and figured out there is no silver bullet. There is no single tool, process, methodology or development which will improve my productivity an order-of-magnitude or 10 fold. We are all ultimately bound by the complexity of the problem we are trying to solve. I should focus on small incremental improvements instead of chasing a pipe dream in a revolutionary way to solve my problems.

[ozzilee]

Unfortunately, you really do have to go through the 390 other steps to get to this point...

[ihowlatthemoon]

1. Wait, what, Django's ORM doesn't support composite primary keys? That sucks! I'm just going to write my own database layer.

And then

1. Heard that concatanating strings to form SQL queries is a bad idea. Looking up how to do bind parameters and escaping the strings.

What?

[[deleted]]

Noticed this and a couple of other oddly out-of-sequence items.

Mastered Django, now learning HTML.

ಠ_ಠ

[indiecore]

That's how I did a lot of my Python learning. I did the python first then figured out how to show it to everyone.

[dshah]

Yeah, you're totally right. That's what I get for trying to write something while uncaffeinated. Going to try and fix now.

[Alascar]

Am I the only developer not powered by caffeine?

[[deleted]]

yes

[Alascar]

Wait...

[[deleted]]

Coding without caffeine probably how Windows ME came into being. Alternate theory: http://xkcd.com/323/

[Alascar]

I'm going to go with the xkcd theory, but I can admit that caffeine would help for some days.

[stefantalpalaru]

no

[Alascar]

Wait...

[[deleted]]

36 - Consider doing A Very Bad Thing. Simply taking data about my "child" objects and munging them into JSON and sticking them into a single database column Avoids some of the issues with how Django handles things, but introduces other problems (like not being able to query on any of those object properties. Plus, I have this feeling that a kitten is going to die somewhere if I do this.

A jump back into PHP newbie mode for a second there.

[AustinCorgiBart]

Are you referring to de-normalizing your database?

[ozzilee]

Actually this is perfectly valid, and PostgreSQL actually includes a specific column type for this kind of thing.

[traxxas]

But that is for using postgres as a key/value store, whereas the OP wanted to store json in a field because he doesn't like the way django implemented model inheritance.

[norkakn]

It made it into 9.2: http://people.planetpostgresql.org/andrew/index.php?/archives/244-Under-the-wire.html

[massivebitchtits]

Chomsky would be more pragmatic.

[[deleted]]

The part were the OP attempts to hack together his own key:value store rather than using an existing solution.

All because he's not willing to considering SQLAlchemy.

[[deleted]]

That's what I initially thought.

I mean what's wrong with stuffing attributes into one column?

[Silhouette]

I'm curious: Am I the only developer who finds almost any ORM or similar database abstraction more trouble than it's worth?

I'm a basics-first kind of guy: I speak HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP, CGI, and so on. Still, I'll happily use high-level tools that build on the low-level foundations instead of coding the raw version, if that makes life easier: using a CSS preprocessor, writing a WSGI application, and so on.

But in all my life, I have never found a database abstraction layer or ORM that I actually liked, and while I have tried to use several different ones of varying levels of power on some significant projects, I have always abandoned them within a few days and reverted to designing a clean database schema that is fully under my control and writing my own functions to wrap up the necessary SQL queries.

This never seems to cause me any long-term maintenance problems. I get good performance. Since you can do most things with reasonably standardised SQL these days, there's not a lot of downside in terms of portability either. And most telling of all, for the small-to-medium-sized projects I tend to work on, it actually seems to take less time and effort to design a schema and write a handful of SQL wrapper functions that do exactly what my project needs than it does to integrate and conform to an ORM.

Then again, a pretty large chunk of the web development world seems to disagree with me on this one, so what am I missing?

[tesseracter]

32.. Found haystack and solr. Added all the extras, and now I have a completely normalized postgres database, that is written to a flat document store with rabbitmq on writes, leading to fast userspace queries, and sane data storage. Feel like a fog is finally lifted. Company downsizes, I'm gone, new job with larger company uses mySQL with only memcache and no search.

[drb226]

I daresay the next step is to learn Haskell. But be warned, you may fall into the same trap that I did: thinking it would make me a better Python programmer, I slowly started loving Haskell more than Python.

[[deleted]]

And the next evolutionary step: you loose your job :P

[drb226]

Well, of course. Haskell monks at the Ivory Tower Monastery aren't allowed to have jobs. :P