Simon Willison’s Weblog

How much Django should one know before going in for an interview for a developer position?

19th December 2012

My answer to How much Django should one know before going in for an interview for a developer position? on Quora

I’ve hired people for Django positions who didn’t know Django at all. If you’re a good web engineer you should be able to pick up Django in a few days, and be properly productive with it in a few weeks. Instead, I’m interested in testing your understanding of the key underlying concepts: HTTP, SQL, HTML and JavaScript, XSS, CSRF, scaling, cookies, web app security in general, web performance optimisation, unit testing, refactoring, model/template/view-or-controller—and evidence that you’ve solved problems relating to those in production environments.

If you know all of that stuff and you’ve previously worked with another stack such as PHP or Rails I can be confident that it won’t take long for you to become a productive and proficient Django developer.

All of that said, having a Django-powered side-project (or evidence of work on interesting Django projects at a previous company) are obviously going to help out in an interview a lot.