How to build an alternate Django admin in only 10 years | En kodare

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2024-09-03 14:00:02

In “So you want a new admin?” Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes about the cost and manpower it took to design the Django Admin system. TLDR: The original version was built by a team of 5 people working tightly with users for over a year, then it has been polished for over a decade after that. He estimates $1 million dollars to design a new one.

After having built an alternative admin, I can say that his order of magnitude estimation for effort is pretty spot on, even though we took a very different route to get to the same endpoint!

Johan Lübcke and me worked on a big app that was at the time something like 10 years old. It was chock-full of HTML tables. Just tables everywhere. The procedure to make a new view started by copy-pasting an existing view+template and modifying it.

Always the same requests, always the same order. There was a lot of work required to build each of these features, so we didn’t do it all from the start. As the tables were rendered with html templates, there were also common errors like headers and columns not matching, because the access control code differed. You had to be very careful to change two places in the code and keep them in sync, a pretty clear DRY violation.