Welcome back to Polka 💃
- polka, nodejs
- 15-Aug-2020
Here I am! switching backend again: I am back to Polka JS 💃 The reasons are pretty much the same of my post of last March so now I am here to stay :)
I liked the challenge to write my own admin and not having to fight with some Django settings. I still like Django and Python but – as I initially coded this blog in Polka/NodeJS it should stay this way.
Some challenges in moving back: 1) Markdown vs HTML: keeping data in markdown in the DB is a bad idea. I hope I will learn my lesson. HTML is what you want, no other markup.;
2) Pagination (which was really trivial in Django and not as straightforward using Polka);
3) Changing various templates from Django Templating Engine to ESJ templates (Embedded Javascript);
What I 💚 more so far:
1) Can see my queries!! ORMs are really useful to some for a small website is nice to be able to see exactly what is going on;
2) Deploy with PM2 WOW - so much better than having to run the python process with screen (+ can use cluster mode if I need!)
3) Very easy to customize my admin which is 100% made by me. Django Admin is powerful and all but just changing the CSS was a true pain;
4) Freedom to use any editor on my admin!
5) Back in using my code which was a truly enjoyable learning process with Polka (so I use a minimalistic and a bit exotic lightweight framework and but still in NodeJS)
All seems very nice and fast so I am happy with the move. I took this occasion to switch the design from Windows 98 to Windows XP 😅 slightly more modern and still very cool.
My move was also a bit inspired by the book “Anything you want” by Derek Sivers. It is very brief but interesting. Full of interesting stories also about programming. Somehow having something small made by yourself is more rewarding than using a big framework like Django (which I still like! but…at least for now 💃 Polka is more fun!).