This week I got quite an astonishing news.
About 6 years ago I created a kind of ERP with django for a client. It was quite a big application with many complex features and it was deployed on premise.
Not very long after I dissolved my company to go work for a large enterprise. Last time I heard from this application was from the company that manage the servers running it (and thus keeps my application up), they only said that they thought my application would be rewritten.
In the mean time, years passed and I changed job again.. and my new boss got to meet my old client.
When he asked them about the application, they said they still used it and they love it!
So there you go, a large application used by over 20 people on a daily basis.. completely unattended, not even monitored (anymore) and everything still runs smoothly after 6 years.
That's no small feat, but I'm not ashamed to say that the real hero here is django 🙂
All the good practices baked-in and around it led to something very stable and reliable and that's really rewarding.
This is a good story for those of us still relatively new in our django app development process. Thanks for this!
> completely unattended, not even monitored
Does the idea of a system rotting unattended somewhere not make anybody else itchy?
I completely agree that Django is stable, and a little ERP app, deep in the bowels of an enterprise is probably one of the safer places to abandon code… But we’ve all had clients who want PCI:DSS-level functionality but consider any attempt for me to charge for maintaining that as some sort of snake oil. “We don’t have to update our microwave every month, why should we pay you to update our storefront?”. Makes my head hurt.
What Django version is it running and how many known vulnerabilities it has?
I have created and manage several ERP type internal applications for my company. The first one I made, also about 6 years ago, is running on a completely private network with no internet connection. It still works perfectly and I haven’t touched it in years. It’s reliability has caused it to still get used as an example to continue to migrate more of our business software to web apps.
Although I love django, I don’t think it was that great 6 years ago. At least based on legacy projects I’ve had to work with.
What you should take from this project is that it’s _you_ who created something that stood the test of time. Django is merely a tool and I’ve worked on some old projects that haven’t held up. If it’s still going strong, it’s because you are a good dev who used good practices and wrote solid code.