I’m senior developer on a feature bloated civil engineering web app that has 2 back end servers (one just proxies to the other) and has 8k lines of stored procedures as the data layer and many multi k line react components that intentionally break react best practices.

I loathe working on it but don’t have the time to refactor legacy code.

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I have another project that I am principal engineer and it uses Django, nextjs, docker compose for dev and ansible to deploy and it’s a dream to build in and push features to prod. Maybe I’m more invested so it’s more interesting to me but also not waiting 10 seconds to register and hot reload a react change is much more enjoyable.

Pro tip. Don't use Django migrations. Manage the database first and mirror it in orm later.

Of our US $300,000.00 goal for 2025, as of July 13th, 2025, we are at:

- 25.6% funded

- $76,707 donated

:(

I love Django. I still reach for it for most projects. I really wish they would introduce a more modern frontend system though. I find it hard to go back to templates after using react. It’s easy enough to use Django and react, but it would be amazing if there was a more modern solution within Django for frontend.

I haven’t done a ton with Rails professionally - but in my mind, if I was doing customer facing CRUD I would reach for rails, I think the deployment ecosystem and development experience is a bit better.

Django, however, is wonderful for internal tooling, or anything where you need to plug in Python libraries. GIS is a clear win for Django, as well as custom BI work or data analytics

I am not impressed with Next.js or Lee's evangelism (yes, in the religious sense) of their platform. Being forced to develop in Next.js for a major project was the last straw, and convinced me to abandon the Javascript/Typescript/Node.js ecosystem entirely for future web projects (where I have the choice). Dev-fluencers and Next.js evangelists who gish-gallop and provide (non)-responses to serious developer problems with Next.js convinced me that Vercel is building an elaborate cash grab, on the enterprise scale, and securing vendor lock-in for many years to come. Don't tell me that Next.js is easy to deploy in Docker either - it's not, I wrestled with that implementation for months and it was fragile/broken in a way that I suspect a native Vercel-deployment is not.

The current stack I'm using is Django/Python, HTMX, Alpine.js, and TailwindCSS. Yes I know the middle two use Javascript under the hood, there is no way around that for client interactivity. But they do support the HATEOAS principal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS) which has been a breath of fresh air imo. The book "Hypermedia Systems" is also a great way to achieve the mental reset needed to abandon modern web frameworks and go back to things that actually work, in terms of web development.

Supabase ("enhanced" postgres) and slim services on top, generated by OpenAPI-compatible frameworks. FastAPI for those who need to build python-compatible API services.

We’re using Django Ninja. I candidly think Django is on its way out. Postgres backend.

Chatbot is custom, it predates the various dev kits so we ended up reimplementing a lot of that logic ourselves.