I am a Senior IT Consultant. As a freelancer I have done international enterprise projects for various global players. I really love open source software - and I always recommend using standard open source tools wherever possible to all my clients.

Unfortunately when it comes to “enterprise requirements” many IT managers tend to to purchase expensive and inflexible (but supported) proprietary third party solutions. Support by some external company seems to be very important – even much more important than a software that your employees like to use and understand.

“Buy before you build” seems to be a handy slogan to justify spending several thousand dollars on something that still needs to be integrated, customized and maintained for even more thousands of dollars.

Dear Managers, sometimes it is a lot better to write a small and simple tool – that just does exactly what you need and does it exactly how you need it done. The requirements of such tools are often:

• Easy to use web interface
• Easy to integrate rich custom forms
• Integrated Admin interface to maintain all entities
• User- and role-management
• Secure Code (e.g. validate all input, CSRF protection, etc.)
• Easy to maintain, easy to extend
• Modular design
• …

If sys admins write a quick shell script to automate some tasks – normally none of the above requirements will be fulfilled. That's where Django comes into the game. Django is a python framework for web development. And I think it is perfect to build those small Enterprise tools that every organization needs to automate some things here and there. You should build your internal tools like you would do it for an external customer – with a nice, intuitive user interface and with security as requirement from the beginning. Of course there are other similar frameworks out there – but I think Django is one of the most intuitive and fastest ways to develop such applications.

So sys admins – stop writing shell scripts for semi automation. Learn Django and provide your “customers” with easy to use user interfaces. And Managers, stop buying those expensive “3-letter tools” for simple tasks that nobody wants to work with – help your employees to build something with real value for your company.

I have seen many bureaucratic work-flows in companies that are pushing around excel files. For example a really simple task like ordering a new web-server can be huge nightmare, that could (and should) simply be automated ...

That's why I created a course to learn Django. I designed the course to be a kickstart experience for people that think that they have no time to learn something new. I also tried to make it as easy as possible to get started (no intallation of any software - just runs in your browser).

In 4 hours you will step through all the most important steps in the Django development cycle.

After taking the course you will know the most important things about Django - what it can do, how it is used and you will have a feeling for how easy it is to get started. Of course it is not possible to cover all aspects of Django in 4 hours ... this is not intended and it is also not necessary to get you started on the fast lane.

And finally - you will find the course here : Learn Python Django in 4 hours

If you have any feedback - please let me know ... I will update the course.