Comments on: Selling clients on Django

By: carl

carl — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:03:00 +0000

Well well. I am sold on django to but there are good reasons for a company not to pick it over other not as good solutions. One could be the number of ppl who are able to support the solution later, lets face it a whole lot more ppl know mysql and php over postgres and python ( not at all saying myself they are better). From a company standpoint that is an important aspect. Another thing also . Saying that google uses technology X mean absolutely nothing. Instead its more a question of what technology they dont use or somehow are involved in.

By: Rodrigo

Rodrigo — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:20:53 +0000

I whip up an admin mockup (based on their requirements) and show it to whoever will be updating the site (usually marketing). Hasn’t failed yet, and that includes huge clients with enormous Java and dotnet biased IT departments.

By: Another python Blog » Python / Django Engineer (Flatiron) « New York Career Resources

Wed, 13 May 2009 03:05:55 +0000

[...] Selling clients on Django | ninjacipher [...]

By: Richard House

Richard House — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:51:08 +0000

The precise answer to you question, is “it all depends” on what the people you are talking to value.

I haven’t come across many clients that want Django specifically. What I tend to find is that business clients want solutions quickly and cheaply. Focusing the sales pitch on these features rather than the technology is likely to get more traction with the business folks. Once you have got their engagement with the value offered, then overcoming the support questions aren’t too difficult given the will, as other comments have pointed out.

If you are talking to technical staff who just value maintaining their PHP jobs, then you would be wasting your time pitching anything but a PHP solution.

By: Julian

Julian — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:39:56 +0000

- if you’re searching *good* php-programmers, you have to sort out
80-90% of the 1000 people who say they can do the job.

- if you’re searching *good* python-programmers, there are maybe only
100 people who say they can do the job, but probably 80-90% of them can
do the job. so, the probability to get a good python-programmer is much
higher. and quality is what your customers want, right? and searching is
what your customers don’t want, right?

By: Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:41:54 +0000

Most of my freelance clients are small-ish, but Django sells itself for me. Once I show them working samples that leverage Django admin, that pretty much seals the deal.

I also have some good ports to Django from .NET and Rails where hundreds or even thousands of lines of code were saved (.NET) which makes for a pretty strong case to leverage what Django has to offer.

My freelance clients are trusting me to deliver a solution that is easy to maintain, scalable and will deliver good ROI. After working with many web frameworks as languages over the past 13 years, Django is, hands-down, the best web framework that I’ve ever used, and Python quickly became my language of choice.

The fact that there are also large entities like Google and Nasa are leveraging Python and Django, certainly doesn’t hurt its reputability. Usually throwing in “Google uses it” is all it takes. There’s also support for Java integration through Jython, and that can make using Django even more attractive.

For programmers, Python and Django both have learning curves FAR below that of something like .NET, .NET MVC or even Rails for that matter. Django is extremely well documented and doesn’t take a stack of books to learn over the course of six months. In fact, when I first got started with Django, I hadn’t touched Python in a decade – I didn’t have to, it’s simply that easy to learn – and write very good, clean, re-usable, maintainable code.

My hat’s off to the Django core team for giving us this wonderful framework. And to all of the clients out there, don’t be afraid of using this technology over something like Sharepoint or even Alfresco, which I think is one of the better CMSes out there.

Give Django a chance. You’ll be glad you did.