What advice would Simon Willison give to a beginner Python/Django developer?
19th July 2013
My answer to What advice would Simon Willison give to a beginner Python/Django developer? on Quora
Build something and put it on the internet. Make sure you have an easy way to deploy new versions (Heroku is a good bet if you don’t want to figure out Fabric). Pick a project that’s useful to you—a simple blogging engine is often a good bet, or maybe something that aggregates together your posts from Twitter and Instagram and so on. Or come up with something a bit more creative!
The key thing is to have a real project that you can hack on, that solves your own problems.
More recent articles
- How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code - 7th February 2026
- Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly - 6th February 2026
- Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel - 4th February 2026