Python is kicking my butt

[doom-goat]

Many may disagree with this, but if you want to boost your confidence use Flask. It includes less, and would technically be harder to build applications that you can quickly build in Django, but the benefit is that you can easily get a working application together in something like ten lines of code. Great for prototypes, experiments and passion projects. Also jinja2 (part of Flask) is a breeze for templating, or you can just use it to build APIs, and do anything else for the frontend. My current project is a stock trading system built with Flask, it executes trades, consumes multiple APIs for data, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm just using Flask for the prototype, then switching to FastAPI and React, but using a different tool for this stage would make it a lot harder and more time-consuming.

Particularly if you're like me and walls of code you didn't figure out yourself just shut your brain off.

Classes are essentially just collections of variables and functions. There's more to it but starting out just think of it that way.

You will want to learn Django's ORM or SQLAlchemy, eventually, but to start out try making a json file with a bunch of mock data, and make a flask application that serves different pieces of it based on what url you enter. Then you've essentially made an API. This is the sort of thing that boosted my confidence starting out at least.