Building a Community Site with Django in 40 Hours or Less
July 20, 2008 | django, trailmapping | 9 comments
All the recent hub bub about 1 week and 1 day application development, motivated me to see how quickly I could launch a website for myself. I, like many developers, struggle with building and releasing personal sites. Ask a web developer and they’re likely to tell you about a couple of sites they started and never finished. Time is always an issue, but the bigger problems are striving for perfection prior to launch and always holding out for that one “killer” feature. As time goes on, interest in the project wanes until it finally gets shelved.
The Plan
Prior to development, I set a few goals for myself:
- Launching quickly was priority number one. I set a goal of 3 days.
- Use as much existing code as possible. Even if it wasn’t a perfect fit, if it was functional, use it.
- Optimize later.
- Stop scope/feature creep at ...

