Top all-time · #4688
Will Vincent
Personal blog · wsvincent.comprogrammingwritingcareer
Will Vincent's personal blog at wsvincent.com covers programming, writing and career. Since 2016, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Thoughts on Publishing a Technical Book (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers recommend Will Vincent's Django books and site as learning resources for beginners, and one commenter links his post on Python's small integer caching to explain the 'is' versus '==' behaviour.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Python Software Foundation Fellow, Developer Advocate, and writer on AI, Django, and software development.
Most-linked posts?
- /books/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-05
- /python-wat-integer-cache/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-02
- Thoughts on Publishing a Technical Book (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-17
What Hacker News says?
For me it's really learning Django with https://wsvincent.com/books/djangoforprofessionals really learning postgres with https://theartofpostgresql.com/ trying out typescript on a side project and migrating one project from heroku to docker + terraform
Comment linking /books/djangoforprofessionals
on “Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?”Submitted The Next WordPress as a story · 43 points
HN discussionYou can also check out William Vincent's books [0]. They're easy to read and follow. A nice blog to also include in your django learning resources bookmarks is Simple is Better than Complex [1]. [0] http://wsvincent.com/books/ [1] https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/
Comment linking /books/
on “Django 3.2”Submitted AI for the Rest of Us as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBrilliant blog Also a fan of these: https://wsvincent.com/ (and his books are excellent) https://realpython.com/tutorials/django/
Comment linking /
on “Django 2.2”Submitted Thoughts on Publishing a Technical Book (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA lot of these are pretty inaccurate, at least for modern Django. 1. I'm pretty sure that's not true if I'm correctly interpreting what you mean...You can do things like `path('myapp/', include(myapp.urls))` 4. Custom User models are now very straightforward (and recommended for non-trivial projects since it's easier to start with a Custom model that defaults to the default model for all options then modify it later…
Comment linking /django-custom-user-model-tutorial/
on “Django 2.2”Submitted Database Design Tutorial for Beginners as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSmall integer caching: https://wsvincent.com/python-wat-integer-cache/ The objects for small integers are built-in and static, but 17^2 is too big, and so new integer objects are created when the expressions are evaluated. "is" checks if two expressions represent the same object in memory. "==" checks for equality of values.
Comment linking /python-wat-integer-cache/
on “Why does `True == False is False` evaluate to False in Python? (2013)”Submitted Thoughts on Publishing a Technical Book as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>Is that really what's going on here? I'm in way too deep to be sure what's best for beginner programmers, but I feel like Python must surely optimise... For these particular numbers, CPython has one optimization I know of: Small integers (from -5 to 256) are pre-initialized and shared. See https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/long.html#c.PyLong_FromLong This is generally invisible to the python programmer, but leads to…
Comment linking /python-wat-integer-cache/
on “Functools – The Power of Higher-Order Functions in Python”Submitted Static Site Hosting with S3 and CloudFlare as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't use JavaScript very much, so keep that context in mind. As far as JavaScript the language goes, my biggest complaints are to do with the sparse standard library (leftpad should be something easy to do with built-in string formatting functions[0], not a 3rd-party library), unexpected behaviour (the map/parseInt thing[1] being one example), etc. The unexpected behaviour stuff is truly a case of needing to unde…
Comment linking /javascript-parseint-map/
on “Node.js Foundation and JavaScript Foundation Announce Intent to Merge”Three resources I always recommend for beginners: 1. The Django Girls tutorial (multi-language): https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/ 2. Will Vincent's books (also recommend his blog): https://wsvincent.com/best-django-books/ 3. Tango with Django: https://www.tangowithdjango.com/ Also, here's a somewhat more comprehensive list of Django learning resources: https://www.fullstackpython.com/django.html
Comment linking /best-django-books/
on “Ask HN: How do I learn Django?”On Django any of Adam Johnson or Will Vincent books are great https://adamj.eu/books/ https://wsvincent.com/books/
Comment linking /books/
on “Ask HN: Book suggestions about web development techniques”Will Vincent has a series of books for Django. I recommend Django for Beginners as a start. Two Scoops and Django for Professionals are great after you have a few projects under your belt. https://wsvincent.com/books/
Comment linking /books/
on “Ask HN: How to Learn Django in 2023?”Will Vincent's books are great to get you started and productive. Django is a very deep framework though so expect to keep learning for a while https://wsvincent.com/books/
Comment linking /books/
on “Ask HN: How to Learn Django in 2023?”Check out https://wsvincent.com He has a pretty good site on Django a couple books published with a third on the way.
Comment linking /
on “Best Django Blogs and Talks”
