Newsletter launch: Wholesome Django 🥰 💻

February 7, 2021

I wrote my first blog post towards the end of 2019 and since then everything I have written reinforced my belief that writing is really fun and therapeutic. 

In the initial days, I wrote just to keep a record of what’s going on in my life. A personal journal of sorts. However I have come to realise that writing is a lot more fun if it provides value to another person's life. This was when I started writing about  Python/Django development. 

I wrote my first post about building a CRUD application in minutes using Django and received a decent amount of traction as proven from my google analytics and google search console data. However I had no way of knowing if my content actually helped people or not.

Why start a newsletter?

It became clear that the only way to find out if I am helping folks is to see if they are willing to subscribe for content that I will be posting in the future. That was when I decided to start a newsletter.

Something was missing though. I was pretty sure I wanted to help people learn Python/Django development but what unique element should I bring to the table? Why should people give their valuable time to reading my blog posts?

Inspiration for the newsletter

Last sunday I wrote a blog post about how a many-to-many relationship works and how Django handles it. I posted this on the subreddit /r/django and the outcome was overwhelming.

I received ~ 90 upvotes, 3 “wholesome content” awards and several comments like these

While I was reading these comments, the missing piece of the puzzle suddenly became as clear as day. 

I want to write content that warrants reactions like these, content that not only helps somebody learn something new but also activates at least one of their sense organs and leaves them with a wholesome feeling in their heart.

In short, I want my subscribers to explore the joy of learning while I explore the joy of sharing my learnings. This is more fun than writing tutorials which folks might consume just because it is the need of the hour for them to learn that particular concept.

With this thought, my newsletter Wholesome Django came into existence.

Format of the newsletter

I will be publishing a new edition every Sunday and it will contain

  1. Some thoughts I came up with during the course of the week.
  2. A collection of everything I have written that week related to Python/Django development.
  3. My experiences with running a team of engineers at DelightChat which are worthy of sharing.

Please do subscribe to help this initiative gain some momentum 🙏