Thoughts, tutorials and notes on software development.
After shipping my fifth Wagtail multisite app and copy-pasting yet another tangle of brand colour overrides, I finally extracted the theming layer into its own package. This is the story of why every Wagtail project ends up reinventing theming - and the small, opinionated library that stopped me from doing it a sixth time.
A blueprint system that turns Python dictionaries into complete admin pages - tables, filters, forms, actions, permissions, and menus - with zero HTML templates. How a decorator, a TypedDict, and a JSON contract eliminated an entire class of repetitive frontend work.
Django admin renders full CRUD interfaces from model definitions alone. Most frameworks cannot even dream of this. Here is why it changed how I think about UI, how it inspired a production schema-driven form engine, and why the industry sleeps on the best idea in web development.
What if every form in your Django application - create, edit, bulk update, modal, inline - was defined as a Python dictionary instead of a class? Two production systems taught me that forms are data, not code, and the difference is transformative.
What happens when you take Django's class-based views to their logical extreme? You get five URL patterns that handle full CRUD for every model in your application - no REST framework, no serializers, no client-side router. Just HTMX, convention over configuration, and a philosophical rejection of accidental complexity.
