Today at work I had a task to write a new endpoint, and I absolutely didn’t remember how to do it. But it doesn’t matter, and below I’ll explain why.

I know several people who have been studying Django for more than a year and practicing before looking for work. But it was different for me - I studied Django for less than a month, and the most active period was when I was doing a test task. At that time, I had much more experience with Flask and FastAPI. I completed the task successfully, got praise and an offer. And the point is that development is not about frameworks and writing code - it’s about problem solving.

So, since then, not one year has passed and I haven’t touched Django, and the last 4 months before the new job I was heavily writing in FastAPI. I passed the interview and got on a Django project, with a transition to other FastAPI projects in the future.

Returning to the task, how to write an endpoint I managed to google and understand in 5 minutes, and this was only 1% of the work, because the main task was to extract data from storage that I don’t even know what structure they are and what’s stored there. For this, I need to understand what code is written for this, what docs are in Confluence and Jira about it, check what tests exist for this and whether there’s a ready structure in the code to return. Well, and sketch changes on the frontend so that data from the new endpoint are pulled and displayed.

And it was like this at all my jobs. Most of the codebase won’t be framework syntax, and in my opinion, there’s no point spending time learning details that change in different versions. It’s important to understand concepts, terminology, and how it all works. In a real project, the rest of the code will be custom integrations and self-written solutions, which is why developers are hired in the first place - because there are no ready solutions on the market for these tasks.

The ability to understand new things is the main skill, not Django. Or FastAPI. Or any other technology.