LinsenBlog

As much as I want to say I'm still new to this whole web development thing, I'm honestly not. I've been working with Django for over 5 months - I don't really have an alibi to say I'm a noob anymore.

With this continued experimental experience comes more and more frustration during the development cycle itself. I've noticed theres a few glaring and unavoidable issues that make web development much more difficult than anything I've worked on before, and here's why.

Debugging is insanely hard
Let me start this by saying that most of this post is going to be centered around developing with Django, so apologies if you're reading this and shouting "THERES A BETTER WAY!" continuously.

I've noticed that whenever I make a change to my Django (Python) code one of 3 things happens:

• The site stops working (returns an error code, usually 404 or 500).
• The site works but nothing has changed
• The site works but things are... off

How do I debug this? Well first, I should have tried all this on Django's provided dev server before running it live. Second, I need to enable debugging in my settings.py file. Third, I need to then restart any services hooked into Django that I have running since I modified the settings file. Fourth I may need to do some things before the exception/error is even triggered.

Aside: I know I should follow TDD, but these are things I fail to think about when making my silly little personal site.

Fifth, I need to then figure out if the error is in my Python code, some HTML, some template tags in the HTML, some CSS, or some code related to a service I have hooked into the site. Sixth, hope I can fix it. Seventh, enter fetal position and weep.

I know that was long winded, but you can see my point. There are SO many different things that can go wrong in web development and I didn't even touch on getting the damn thing working in a production environment.

Like mobile development, everyone accesses the site differently
So many different computers, devices, and browsers are used to access the web that accounting for them all is nearly impossible. THANK THE DEV LORDS for this little bundle of CSS and HTML called Bootstrap. It does do a lot of the work for you. However, on mobile devices, the site is still a little rocky in terms of the body portions of pages. Don't even get me started on users who still, for some unknown and completely insane reason, browse with IE.

ANYWHO, just be sure you know what you're getting into with web development. It's a lot of fun and pretty dang rewarding, but geez can it be annoying. \rant