What features did you want for your personal site that lead to choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a static site generator?

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lazarus01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I just wanted to learn how to create an enterprise grade web application. I read a book on Django last year and did a few tutorials and enjoyed it. I also deploy infra on gcp and it works well there. It cost about $60/month for baseline hosting with light traffic/storage. I will probably use it for an interface for some of my ml projects. I was also looking into dart/flutter a much steeper learning curve for me personally.

	▲	susam an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is pretty much how I began developing websites too. Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP. It could easily have been a static website, but I happened to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the default index.asp with my own and began building from there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default website included a server-side guestbook application that stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side applications. Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still exists but today most of it is just a collection of static HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for myself. The only parts that are not static are the guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL using Hunchentoot.