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+# About Django
+
+Without more context, one of the technologies I recommend to everyone is Django.
+
+Django is a Python web framework with "batteries included".
+
+Web frameworks can provide more or less tools to write applications.
+Typically, frameworks that provide fewer tools are more flexible and give developers more freedom to develop their applications in the best possible way.
+Similarly, frameworks that provide more tools tend to guide you towards a specific way to writing applications, and typically, require more work if you want to deviate.
+
+In my opinion, many applications you might need to develop are very similar and have similar issues, and solving them ad-hoc for each project is a waste.
+Therefore, I lean towards using frameworks that provide more batteries in most cases.
+
+(Certainly, there are projects that clearly need special approaches, or which deviate enough from any generic web framework.)
+
+In fact, most of the complaints described in this document are caused by Django having too few batteries, not too many!
+
+## The Django admin
+
+Besides including more batteries than most other frameworks, and being in general a well-engineered framework in my opinion, Django includes the admin.
+
+The admin is a declarative way to build administrative sites where some users edit data stored in the application database.
+
+Many similar tools exist, but I have not found any other tool that can do so much.
+
+* The Django admin handles multi-table relationships very well, including picking foreign key targets and editing related table data.
+  For example, if a person entity has a "parent" related foreign key relationship, the Django admin provides a search functionality to pick a person's parent.
+  If the person entity has a list of children, the Django admin provides a way to add and edit children from the person form.
+
+* The Django admin has a simple, but useful for many scenarios permissions functionality, where editing certain entities is restricted to groups of users.
+
+The Django admin is frequently a big boost during the early development of database-backed applications, and sometimes I can provide value during a big part of the life of an application.
+
+Additionally, traditionally when working with frameworks without an equivalent facility, the friction of adding an interface to edit a piece of data can be large.
+Developers pressed for time might opt to hardcode the data in the source code of the application, requiring code changes to modify certain behaviors of the application.
+When the friction to add a user interface to edit such data is low, developers can configure the admin to let those users edit the data directly without going through the developers.
+
+## Django problems
+
+However, there are still many common issues for which batteries could exist, but that Django does not provide.
+
+### Django has no support or documentation about packaging Django projects
+
+Most Django projects have dependencies besides Django.
+In order to develop and deploy Django applications, you likely must install other dependencies.
+Django does not include documentation nor support to do this.
+
+Many different approaches and tools exist to manage Python project dependencies.
+Understandably, endorsing one particular approach in Django could be controversial.
+So Django leaves the choice of approach up to users.
+Additionally, Django adds a few difficulties in Python project management, and users must figure out how to handle Django projects in their chosen approach.
+
+Several initiatives have tried to tackle this problem, notably:
+
+* https://github.com/radiac/nanodjango
+
+### Django settings are a partial solution
+
+Django provides settings to manage the configuration for a Django project.
+You implement Django settings by writing a Python module.
+
+For example, the default Django template includes the following snippet to configure the database connection:
+
+```
+DATABASES = {
+    'default': {
+        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
+        'NAME': BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3',
+    }
+}
+```
+
+Besides assigning a setting directly like in the preceding snippet, you can use Python code to assign settings.
+
+This allows you to tackle many common issues, such as setting up a different database connection for development and production, while keeping the production database credentials away from the source code repository.
+There are many similar issues that you must tackle in nearly all projects.
+
+Several initiatives tackle some of those issues:
+
+* https://github.com/jazzband/dj-database-url provides a way to configure the database connection through an environment variable.
+
+### Django does not explain a development database workflow
+
+Django provides migrations to handle schema changes.
+Migrations work well and are a valid solution to handle schema changes in production.
+
+However, while developing a Django application, you frequently need to make many temporary changes to the data definition until you find the right data definition.
+
+In my opinion, if you follow the Django documentation, then you might end up using migrations for those development schema changes.
+This is awkward and problematic, and there are procedures to develop database changes that work better.