Professional Djangonaut skills

A common question I see on the Django Discord¹ is “what do I need to know to get a job in Django?” This is a difficult thing to answer. The ultimate answer is, “whatever your employer wants you to know when they hire you.” But that’s avoiding the underlying question. I believe these people are asking what should I know to give myself the best chance at getting hired at a company that primarily uses Django. I think that’s something I can provide some guidance on. Or at the very least try to start the conversation so that we as a community can help the new folks out. So here are my list of skills:

• Learn how to deploy
  • Static files
  • Media files
  • Set up Sentry
  • Set up logging
• Writing and running tests
  • Data setup
  • Unit vs integration
  • End to end
  • Test coverage
• Debugging
  • Reading a traceback
  • Importance of logging
  • Need of a production-like area
• Digital citizenship
  • Asking questions
  • Answering questions
  • Filing tickets
• Data modeling
  • Relationships
  • Generic foreign keys
  • Normal form levels
  • Real world conversions
• Migrations
  • Schema vs data
  • Deleting migrations
  • Zero downtime
• Templates
  • Inheritance
  • Includes
  • Template tags and filters
• Views
  • Auth and auth > CRUD operation > create template context > render
  • Middleware
• Forms
  • Form vs model form
  • Custom validation
  • Form templates
  • Formsets
• Auth
  • Authentication and authorization
  • Permissions
  • Groups
  • Single sign on
  • Customize backend
• ORM
  • Select related, Prefetch related
  • Annotations
  • Subqueries
  • Update or create
  • Bulk create
  • Bulk update
  • Atomic Transactions
  • Select for update
  • Custom expressions for aggregates
• Database
  • Explain analyze
  • Indexes
  • Constraints
  • Materialized views
• Celery
  • Periodic tasks
  • Adhoc async tasks
  • Complex chains
  • Monitoring
• Common web app features
  • Feature flags
  • User uploads
  • Inbound email
  • Webhooks
  • Reports
  • Notifications
• Tricky Internet
  • Cookies
  • CORS
  • CSP
• AJAX
  • fetch
  • htmx
• API
  • DRF
  • GraphQL
  • OAuth
• Dev tools
  • Git
  • GitHub
  • Black
  • Flake8
  • Tox
  • Django Debug Toolbar
  • Django Extensions
• Reliability
  • Continuous integration
  • Database backups and restore
  • Set up APM
  • Set up observability
  • Set up site monitoring and alerting
• Teamwork
  • Creating pull requests
  • Code reviews
  • Asking questions
  • Evaluating an idea
  • Estimating work

Disclaimers:

• The order is somewhat structured, but ultimately doesn’t matter
• It’s been a while since I’ve worked at a large company
• I did a long stint of work as a freelancer with small companies or individuals
• I have a formal education in Computer Engineering
• My primary mission as an engineer is to deliver value
• Edit: I entirely skipped frontend concerns outside of interacting with the backend

I’m strongly considering turning this list into a syllabus and running a lab based course. The current version in my mind involves a 14-week course consisting of 3 hours of lectures a week and 3 hours of personal code review time. The trouble is that my napkin math shows that this would be a full-time job for me which causes all sorts of problems. But I feel very strongly that one-on-one mentorship and review dramatically increases a person’s engineering skills. If this is something that you’d be interested in let me know. I’d like to kick the tires on the idea.

If you thought this list was interesting, you may find my Unsung Developer Thoughts worth your time as well.