The world needs more Django, IMHO, so I decided to create a podcast! This new podcast, Django Riffs, is aimed at beginners to help them learn how to use Django.
I plan to release a new episode every couple of weeks and explore one facet of Django at a time.
I’d love to hear your feedback since I want this podcast to serve the community and help new users understand Django, the framework that many of know and love.
There are more details in an announcement post that I wrote on mattlayman.com.
After listening to your three episodes during my time off I wanted to provide some feedback of what I liked and would love to see more of to hopefully help
you produce more content.
Things I Liked/Learnt
Single Topic style is perfect
Ordering Path mattered
Namespaces very useful to know!
Possibly Add
Interactive show notes to help retention?
Polls to see what areas for further episodes
Would be great to build a small project with the targeted episodes to get a sense of whole life-cycle.
I also am still relatively very new to Django and find the overwhelming amount of options and configurations possible with the framework somewhat daunting to
start somewhere. It would be a great benefit for myself with a sort of Roadmap of what the optimum path to learn Django (As I’m guilty of skipping sections where I shoot myself in the foot later).
Hope this helps and looking forward to more episodes!
Thank you for the feedback. I have a rough roadmap outlined defined in my GitHub project for my personal website, but I could certainly put things together into a roadmap on my website that people could follow. I’m not sure if I’ll follow that set on GitHub in order exactly, but a basic roadmap would be better than nothing!
As time goes on and more of an audience builds up, I’ll definitely reach out with polls. This will be especially helpful as I get to the end of my planned episodes.
I’m not sure. I haven’t changed anything and I haven’t stopped producing episodes . When I search for the show in Apple Podcasts, it appears for me. Here’s a screenshot of what I see:
I’m not able to produce weekly episodes because the of the level of research and time investment that it requires. Aside from that, I’m still going strong.
I’ve listened through all episodes 1-6 and am halfway through the most recent one. They’re just fantastic! I had some trouble following along in the first couple of episodes, where things got fairly code-heavy, but it was just as well because then I listened through them 2-3 times and got some healthy repetition. The format is very concise and to the point.
As a complete Django beginner I probably would have found it hard to understand things when listening because there is so much to keep track of, but at my current novice level the balance between being overly detailed and going confusingly deep is perfect. I wasn’t that experienced with Python in general when I started Django, so maybe someone who knows nothing about Django but a lot about Python would find the podcast good as a true first entry to Django. In either case, the way you’ve structured the podcast, building things bit by bit with one topic at a time, is very pedagogical and probably how I would (if I could) strive to explain Django to someone else.
It might just be me learning more about Django and things making more sense as I go, but my general impression is that the episodes have gotten better and better. The description of querysets in this last episode, what they are and how they relate to databases and efficient code, with concrete examples of the most commonly used methods, was really useful.
A very minor thing I noticed just now: I listen to the podcast through Spotify, and the links to the shownotes in episode descriptions don’t work. The reason is that the description sentence’s dot is included in the URL, e. g. https://www.mattlayman.com/django-riffs/7..
A theme I would very much appreciate is if you could discuss FormSets in the future, but I realize that this is a more advanced topic and will have to wait until more urgent stepping stones are done.
Thank you for such thoughtful and encouraging feedback! It really means a lot to me to know that what I’m putting out there is helping people.
I also appreciate you pointing out the links being broken in the Spotify app because Spotify isn’t handling the period properly. I updated all the episode show notes so that any link that also contains a period will properly redirect. That should hopefully ensure that links in Spotify will work going forward.
. When I search for the show in Apple Podcasts, it appears for me. Here’s a screenshot of what I see: