
Ask HN: What's your Django side project? - rasulkireev
For those who are developing with Django, what are you working on &#x2F; building &#x2F; learning?<p>I&#x27;ve been building https:&#x2F;&#x2F;builtwithdjango.com and learning how to integrate Stripe.
======
pineiden
Hi! I have two projects that i'm working with django.

First, on my job, on a public institution (scientific also), i'm developing a
website to control and monitoring the status of a GNSS (GPS) network, the
scheme of all the network and equipment, particular status, etc.

Integrated with celery to generate periodic reports and a view in what we can
se the status in real time from every station. Uses last Django version
(python 3.7), celery, rabbitmq, postgresql, redis, bulma css(and pure
javascript on ui).

Is not published yet because i'm working on details, and maybe only will be
disposable by the internal VPN [https://gitlab.com/pineiden/dj-webo-
collector](https://gitlab.com/pineiden/dj-webo-collector)

The other, is for a personal project with friends about teach technology to
common people. [https://gitlab.com/pineiden/web-curso-
programacion](https://gitlab.com/pineiden/web-curso-programacion)
[https://www.cursodeprogramacion.cl/](https://www.cursodeprogramacion.cl/)

And the plan is build a platform to support education plans, not only teach
programming, also workshops or courses of any subjects.

So that, i learned a lot since around six years playing with django and now i
think i can manage well.

BR!

------
roknovosel
I've been working on a small Django project called
[https://CodeSnippetSearch.net](https://CodeSnippetSearch.net). It allows you
to search through code snippets using natural language. Currently, Python,
Java, Go, Php, Javascript, and Ruby programming languages are supported.

As with any cool project nowadays, CodeSnippetSearch is powered by neural
networks (six in fact - one for each programming language). The project is
open-sourced and you can read about the implementation details here:
[https://github.com/novoselrok/codesnippetsearch](https://github.com/novoselrok/codesnippetsearch)

~~~
rasulkireev
Starred! __*

It's way too advanced for my current skill level but is certainly I am working
towards. Nice job!

------
encoderer
For 6 years I’ve been building Cronitor.io with my best friend and business
partner, August.

We started on Django 1.6 and I’ll admit: we liked it so much we stuck with
that version for 5 years (ha ha).

Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all
the new Django goodies.

August is working full time on Cronitor but for me it’s still technically a
“side project” — for now!

Edit: sorry for the dupe! August already posted here.

~~~
japhyr
> Earlier this year we did the mythic trek to Python3 and are enjoying the all
> the new Django goodies.

Can you share anything about how that upgrade journey went? What are some of
the newer features that have been helpful for you? Were those features you
knew would be helpful, or were you happily surprised?

~~~
encoderer
I didn't do much of the actual coding on that project but from my perspective
the upgrade on our Django app went smooth.

We were excited to have Django Migrations (So long, South!) and honestly it's
great to have access to current docs again.

We did have a snag with memory leaks in a threadpool in one of our non-django
Python APIs. It was actually our worst outage in 5 years because it failed
several hours after we deployed and we were no longer staring at our graphs.

(Maybe I can get August to write a blog post about how he accidentally sent a
million emails to our personal inboxes while trying to clean that up)

------
boxed
Related How?
([https://relatedhow.kodare.com/](https://relatedhow.kodare.com/)) is a site
to see how species are related.

It's still quite rough around the edges, mostly due to me being demotivated
for not having a good way to host it. Now solved with linode+dokku which I am
super happy with.

This is a site i have wanted for decades and I Googled after it every year for
a decade before I realized I could build it myself with the data from
wikidata.

Code at
[https://github.com/boxed/relatedhow](https://github.com/boxed/relatedhow)

------
pydanny
Just pushed out the alpha of the 5th edition of our book, which is titled:
"Two Scoops of Django 3.x".

Here's the product page: [https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-
django-3-x](https://www.feldroy.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-3-x)

Also working on a book writing app where the file generating service backend
is monitored by a Django project. Launches soon!

~~~
rasulkireev
Ooh! Very excited about this. Can't wait.

------
compumike
[https://www.circuitlab.com](https://www.circuitlab.com) my initial commit
with Django is 2011-09-22, last commit is yesterday!

(Though after a very positive developer experience working in Ruby on Rails
when I worked at Triplebyte, I'd probably lean toward RoR for a new project.)

~~~
rasulkireev
That looks cool. I have been thinking about restarting my hobby of "electrical
engineering". When I start learning this will certainly be my go-to tool.

------
rsandhu
Podcast hosting service [https://wisecast.fm](https://wisecast.fm)

~~~
rasulkireev
That's awesome! I am actually finalizing some editing for my podcast right now
and hope to launch by the end of May.

I was planning to use Transistor.FM for hosting, but now will certainly
consider using Wisecast to support a fellow Django maker.

~~~
rsandhu
Excellent! Currently, I am offering a free 60-day trial and would appreciate
the support :)

------
rsinger87
I made a webapp called "Disqors"
([https://www.disqors.com/latest](https://www.disqors.com/latest)). It's
backend largely runs on Django.

I connect online articles into discussion graphs and intersperse the top
tweets about them. There are feeds that filter the discussions in different
ways (exchanges among top authors, most discussed articles). It's also
possible to see a specific discussion graph in its entirety, e.g. the
discussion around Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" essay:
[https://www.disqors.com/discussions/36672](https://www.disqors.com/discussions/36672)

------
mdeck_
I'm a lawyer. I found myself writing a lot of legal briefs—but didn't like the
Bluebooking and cite-checking part (it's kind of like linting code, but for
lawyers and their briefs). So, I used Django to create
[http://www.cite.ly](http://www.cite.ly), which automates the process of
checking legal writing for Bluebooking errors and misquotations of case law
through a web app.

We turned a 5- to 10-hour process into one that takes 10 minutes!

The app itself is in private beta at this point. We also rely on the software
internally while externally offering a service where lawyers send us their
briefs and we show them the errors that the software finds :)

~~~
23matt
I'm a Swiss lawyer working as a court clerk and have dabbled with Django
myself (automating documents using python-docx and python-docx-template). I
find this interesting and was wondering if you could elaborate on how you
built this.

~~~
mdeck_
The short answer is: mostly, a lot of regex. Yes, there’s also a lot more to
it. Happy to discuss—reach out at michael@cite.ly :)

------
th0th
I have been working on WebGazer
([https://www.webgazer.io](https://www.webgazer.io)) since 2015 and even if
the stack got bigger with time, it has Django in its foundation :)

It started as a simple website monitoring product and evolved from there. It
enables customers to monitor websites, REST APIs and cron jobs on the same
platform. I also added status page functionality (e.g.
[https://status.webgazer.io](https://status.webgazer.io)) some time ago.

I have a day job but I keep building and hustling at the side. We live off of
paychecks from our day jobs but live for our side projects, don't we? :P

~~~
rasulkireev
th0th, just added webgazer to builtwithdjango directory :)
[https://builtwithdjango.com/webgazer](https://builtwithdjango.com/webgazer)

~~~
th0th
thank you!

------
grantmcc
I’m working on Postpone, a Django/Vue.js app for scheduling Reddit posts at
the right time. [https://www.postpone.app/](https://www.postpone.app/)

------
pryelluw
Im building the webapp for PyATL (python Atlanta group). Progress is slow but
steady. Streaming it on [https://twitch.com/pyatl](https://twitch.com/pyatl)
(the stream might not be for everyone). Code is at
[https://github.com/pyatl/big-peach](https://github.com/pyatl/big-peach) See
it live at [https://pyatl.dev](https://pyatl.dev) Note that this is a super
bare bones web app right now.

------
radarsat1
Lately I have been trying to cover more ground in popular Python frameworks
since despite many years of using it, most of my experience is scientific
programming, "short job" scripts, and a few CLI and GUI tools; now that I am
looking for a job, I found that recruiters wouldn't believe me that I am a
Python "developer" unless I can point to some web-hosted projects; so I
decided to attack Django and Flask simultaneously.

I wrote a machine learning "deployment" microservice using Django, and wrote a
client for it in Flask, with the front-end doing some nice d3 graphs of the
output in JavaScript. Works great, although in the end I thought Flask maybe
would have been a better choice for the service, and Django for the client!
Not sure. Both running in Docker on separate machines, one a dedicated host,
the other on Heroku. Frankly the whole thing was a pretty pleasant experience
and only took me a week so I felt gratified that I made the attempt and now
have something to point to when people ask if I can program in Python. (I
won't post the link unfortunately as there is no way my server can handle the
HN load; it's just for my own personal demonstrations while I'm working on
getting hired, anyway. In the future I might move the model execution to
tensorflow.js and then the whole thing could be an almost static site running
on Heroku with some client-side processing handling the heavy stuff, but no
time for that now.)

~~~
rasulkireev
Sounds cool, one of my goals of learning Django was to merge my interests in
Data Science and Web Development, sort of Data Science as a Software (DSaaS).

Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!

~~~
radarsat1
I don't want to post it publicly because of the potential load, I guess i
can't PM on HN, you can send me an email (my username@gmail.com) or a message
at the same username on reddit

------
augustflanagan
[https://cronitor.io](https://cronitor.io) is built with Django.

It was a side project from March 2014 to March 2020, but as of last month it’s
now my full-time job!

~~~
danpalmer
Looks great, I think I've read about this before!

Just FYI, the CSS for your homepage appears to be intermittently 404'ing.
Could be a failed release and your static manifest being out of date on one or
more of your running backend processes – we've had this before with Django.

~~~
augustflanagan
Ugh, thanks! Fixing now.

------
inerte
Cocktail recipe and execution tracking for home enthusiasts. I started 1.5
years ago when my in-laws were visiting, the local version with good modeling
and Admin input took 2 weeks.

The public, user facing data input, and production deployment, is taking the
other 18 months :)

You know the saying, it is 90% done, now we only have to do the other half.

But I recently restarted. As of yesterday the app actually runs on AWS
Beanstalk, although with its attached RDS. I have a coworker now that’s really
into cocktails so I feel like I am building the site for him.

~~~
rasulkireev
Can you share the link?

------
pk78
[https://mapsofmind.com](https://mapsofmind.com)

Django - channels - celery

Another project to be launched soon that uses a similar stack. Just waiting on
stripe activation.

~~~
aweb
FYI, you website is displayed to me in French (makes sense, I am!). However,
the problem is that the French translation is quite poor and I can't seem to
find a way to switch to English?

Sorry, didn't want to criticize what seems to be a cool service but I thought
you should know!

~~~
pk78
Hey! Sorry for the late response. By default only English was available but I
found a lot of my users we from France, so I added the French language support
using Google translate - that's why the translation is poor.

I'll try to add a way to switch locale to English or do you think it's better
to keep just English as the only language till I can get other languages
translated professionally?

Edit: Added language dropdown on the top-right of the landing page.

~~~
aweb
Hi! Thanks for taking into account my request, I appreciate it! Just wanted to
warn you that I unfortunately have a CSRF error when trying to switch the
language.

~~~
pk78
-removed comment-

Edit: It still appears to be an issue - I'll post an update here after I fully
fixed it.

~~~
pk78
Replying to my own comment to update on the issue: The issue seems to be
related to session-id and CSRF token not being correct. Unfortunately, I would
need to try a clean install (I probably messed with some Django settings) and
test again which I can't do right now due to other work that I have. So, for
now, I've just disabled fr locale totally - meaning, you will only see the
website in English. Since you mentioned that the translation is bad, I'm not
sure how helpful it will be to just leave a bad translation as default. Sorry
about this!

------
wilfredinni
started a cheat sheet while learning Python and made a site in Django for it.
1 and a half year later and after landing my first real job, I'm still
maintaining it
[https://www.pythoncheatsheet.org/](https://www.pythoncheatsheet.org/) \-
[https://github.com/wilfredinni/python-
cheatsheet](https://github.com/wilfredinni/python-cheatsheet)

------
bkrishnan
Started as a simple python script to scratch my own itch to track USCIS Visa
Bulletins and my Green Card progress. Due to demand by friends and co-workers
who had the same need, I used it as a learning opportunity and created a
website powered by Django and Beautiful Soup:
[https://www.seekingvisa.com/](https://www.seekingvisa.com/)

~~~
rasulkireev
Nice! It would be pretty relevant for me, but I just got denied my H1B. Will
use seekingvisa next year :)

------
dlareau
I've been working on my "Puzzlehunt Server" project for roughly 5 years now,
and it is finally starting to see more traction than ever.

Link: [https://www.puzzlehunt.club](https://www.puzzlehunt.club)

Code:
[https://github.com/dlareau/puzzlehunt_server](https://github.com/dlareau/puzzlehunt_server)

The project currently serves as the main site for PuzzlehuntCMU, a group from
Carnegie Mellon that writes and runs their own puzzlehunts, but the point of
the project in general now-a-days is for any group that wants to run a
puzzlehunt to be able to stand up a copy of the server and just go.

We recently just hosted a 24 hour, 1400 person, 400 team (5x the max number of
users we've ever seen before) event a few weeks ago and thankfully everything
held up fine.

------
typpo
I built [https://www.spacereference.org](https://www.spacereference.org),
which compiles information on asteroids and comets from multiple data sources.

The Django project is open source here
([https://github.com/judymou/spacedb](https://github.com/judymou/spacedb)) but
most of my ongoing work is on the visualization rather than the Django side
here
([https://github.com/typpo/spacekit/](https://github.com/typpo/spacekit/)).

~~~
rasulkireev
Wow, simply wow! Great work!

------
jplattel
Currently developing an inventory management system with Django, looking into
smooth integration for both physical & digital stores. Integration with
WooCommerce & Shopify for example. The goal is to be as open-source as
possible. [https://github.com/organization-
supply/organization.supply](https://github.com/organization-
supply/organization.supply)

------
nikisweeting
Internet archiving tool, which is currently stuck in limbo between releases
because it's a big architectural overhaul and I haven't had energy/time to
pick up all the mental context from where I left off
[https://github.com/pirate/archivebox](https://github.com/pirate/archivebox)
and

slow and steady wins the race I guess...

------
spectaculum
Haven't touched it in a few months, but here's a fax machine (powered by
Twilio) that runs on a Raspberry pi.

[https://github.com/fastily/fax-machine](https://github.com/fastily/fax-
machine)

I challenged myself to make the operating costs as low-cost as possible. It
costs $1/mo (for the Twilio number) and a couple cents per page.

------
ckinsey
Working on Delegate
([https://www.delegatehq.com/](https://www.delegatehq.com/)), a process
management app for founders and managers. Django / DRF backend with Vue.js in
front running on Kubernetes--awesome stack.

------
ericvanular
[https://enviro.work](https://enviro.work) is built on Django! It's an
environmentally-focused jobs board for those looking to align their career
with the climate crisis

~~~
toomuchtodo
I have recommended this to many people looking for such roles. Thank you for
building this!

~~~
ericvanular
Thanks for your support! Feel free to join the community at
[https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy) as well for more
discussion about climate solutions

------
narrationbox
Not a side project but a full-time startup:
[https://narrationbox.com](https://narrationbox.com)

Built with Django and Gatsby (the latter migration is still work-in-progress).

~~~
jamesdvance
Are migrating from react?

~~~
narrationbox
Not migrating from, migrating to. Our app is heavy on the media and ML side
and manually stitching together templates, CSS, and preprocessing content were
becoming unmaintainable. It is easier to have Gatsby Plugins deal with asset
preprocessing and management.

------
mattstrayer
Very early stages, but we just went live!

Note taking, simplified. From idea to go-live in seconds.
[https://www.lowercase.app/](https://www.lowercase.app/)

------
cjr
check out [https://screenjar.com](https://screenjar.com), easily request
screen recordings from your users if they are stuck.

------
jvaqueiro
Also a full time startup, we're building a platform for controlling access to
housing communities in Mexico.

Currently developing an API to create a mobile app with Flutter + Django!

~~~
rasulkireev
Do you have a demo link? Would love to check it out!

~~~
jvaqueiro
Hi! Sorry for the late reply. I'll have a public demo next week. Will let you
know and provide demo login credentials.

~~~
rasulkireev
Thanks!

------
japhyr
Built with Django is a really interesting project. It looks good for me on
Chrome, but I don't see any projects on Safari. I'm on Mojave 10.14.6, Safari
13.1.

~~~
rasulkireev
Thanks!

Yes, I am aware of the problem you are referring to. I've known about it for
some time, but I can't do anything about it. I just don't understand why the
images don't show up.

I've searched everywhere, but couldn't find the solution. I fanyone here knows
how to solve it, I'd be forever grateful.

~~~
megaman821
You have a two classes .overflow-hidden and .flex-1. The flex-1 class has the
property flex: 1 1 0%. Since the flex-basis is 0, I assume the overflow hidden
is just chopping it all off. Try a flex: 1 0 auto;

~~~
rasulkireev
Thank you so much for your help! I'll try this tonight!

------
weaponizedwords
[https://www.dittobomb.com/](https://www.dittobomb.com/) A platform for
sending tweets to people in the mail.

~~~
rasulkireev
Hah, that's an awesome project. I'd say it is somewhat similar to Josh
Shpigford's Laser Tweets ([https://lasertweets.co/](https://lasertweets.co/)).

~~~
weaponizedwords
Hey, that's really cool! I love the style, it's beautiful.

------
WesleyJohnson
I've started several over the years, but not actively working on any. Having a
hard time with motivation right now.

\- A Funko POP! collection tracker.

\- A Disc Golf auction/news site.

\- A qeepsake competitor.

~~~
rasulkireev
Can you provide some links please? :)

------
jamesdvance
Planyourmeals.com. about 2.5 years and counting when I thought it would take 3
months. Oh well still learning every day

~~~
rasulkireev
Oh, I can certainly relate! Each time I start a project I think it will take x
amount of time ends up taking 10 times more.

Do you have a landing page? Or is it only possible to login / register?

~~~
jamesdvance
I'm literally working on the landing page this week :)

------
holri
I am building an django webapp helping to organize the learning of a musical
instrument.

~~~
rasulkireev
Do you have a demo link? I would love to check it out!

~~~
holri
Give me 1 or 2 weeks. I'll post the link here.

------
chipx86
I build Review Board
([https://www.reviewboard.org/](https://www.reviewboard.org/),
[https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard](https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard)),
an open source code review tool built on top of Django. It used to be a side
project to fill what was at that time a gap in code review offerings (not even
GitHub was around at this time), but these days it's a full-time job.

Like @encoderer and Cronitor.io, we also stuck with Django 1.6 for several
years! YAY! Turns out the jump from 1.6 to 1.7 was a painful experience, but
we're finally on the modern.... 1.11. Yeah, we're not getting rid of our
Python 2.7 customers for some time (still trying to get some off of Python
2.6). Enterprise software development is a different sort of beast.

Our [https://rbcommons.com](https://rbcommons.com) service is Review Board as
a SaaS, and uses Stripe. Curious to hear what you're doing with Stripe
integration on your end! We've been making heavy use of it ourselves.

We've also done some crazy, fairly-complex, maybe-niche stuff in Django, and
built these out into some libraries you might find interesting to browse
through:

1) Djblets
([https://github.com/djblets/djblets](https://github.com/djblets/djblets)) — A
big ol' utility library for Django that provides:

* Foundations for loadable extensions (just like browser extensions) for Django projects

* Support for defining flexible integrations for third-party services (Slack, etc.)

* Avatar support (gravatars, file uploads, URL-based avatars, and custom backends)

* Datagrids (with user column customization)

* A foundation for REST APIs

* Dynamic site settings

* Stuff to make privacy/PII/consent a first-class citizen in codebases

* And just a ton of other things that we found useful in Review Board and wanted to make more widely-available.

2) Django Evolution ([https://github.com/beanbaginc/django-
evolution](https://github.com/beanbaginc/django-evolution)) — A precursor to
Django's migrations support (and the reason we were on Django 1.6 for so long
— the in-development version cooperates with migrations now). We inherited and
maintain this project. It provides an alternate way to specify database schema
changes, and has the benefit of just being far faster to apply migrations,
through a built-in optimizer. This _significantly_ reduces upgrade times for
large installs (super important for many of our Review Board customers).

All open source, and might be interesting to look at, who knows. We've built a
lot up over the years (we started by writing code against Django pre-1.0 SVN
checkouts), and I still recommend it.

------
danjac
[https://demo.localhub.social/](https://demo.localhub.social/)

Edit: username demo/password testpass1

~~~
Nextgrid
Doesn't seem to be reachable. Edit: nevermind, works now!

~~~
codegladiator
Reachable for me

