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Mehran Kader
Mehran Kader

Posted on • Updated on

What should I be doing as a backend Django developer?

I am working as a backend Django developer for the past year (10 months or so), and mostly specialize in using the django-rest-framework to provide api endpoints for the frontend. My HTML/CSS skills suck, while I'm an absolute newbie in Javascript. I have worked with celery (for async tasks), have meddled around with a bit of logging using elastic, while I haven't worked with some of the advanced stuff like caching (I should be working on redis-caching soon), django-channels etc.
Currently I'm in a bit of a slump on what I should be learning next or how I should proceed in the near future (1-2 months). I have quite a bit of free time now (most of which I waste -_-) and would like to ask what should I be trying to learn, or if there are any books which I should read to broaden my experiences.
Books I've read on django/development in general:

  1. Tangoing with django
  2. Two scoops of django
  3. Lightweight django
  4. Test driven development with python - O'reilly

Any thoughts will be appreciated :)

Top comments (3)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

I think you should learn how the frontend works. You don't need to become a pro but don't ignore it either. Caching, channels (WebSockets) and frankly all web backend dev has an impact on the frontend and the experience of the user so you might as well know how that part works 😂

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matt profile image
Matt seymour

A bit late to the party but you have not mentioned your other experiences. So I would say get a good understanding of the full stack (you do not need to be an expert but you need to understand how things work). It will help you better understand and work with others on your team or those who interface with your code.

Next I would look into one of the following deployments using fabric, provisioning using ansible or docker or ... (insert provisioning tool) later look into the basics of caching and optimization.

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kmehran1106 profile image
Mehran Kader

Thanks for the output :D, currently I'm working on using the elastic stack (for logging), optimizing the server workers and will be starting on channels soon after. After that I'll look into provisioning and docker.