What is a Friction Log?

I discovered them on a CSS-Tricks Article talking about these Friction-Logs, and I kinda liked the idea.

They’re basically blog posts talking about what problems one had trying to code something (in that case), but the Article explains more in details.

You can find all the Friction Log posts in the same category at Friction Log Category.

First Friction Log

List of all the little and big problems I had making this website since the start

Some of you may know it, but I learned Django doing this, and I also learned most of what I know about Python doing this, which means the start was pretty rough, I used a whole tutorial for everything I made at first, I started working on some custom stuff by myself only a few weeks back (date of creation of this post), so most of the stuff that were made by me were actually only the design and all the things that I modified as I was following the tutorials (still a big part though).

One of the problems I had (and still have) is that the Django documentation is EXTREMELY WELL MADE… how is it a problem? lol. The problem is actually that it’s so well documented that someone that never really used it will be scared and will have issues finding his way around, it’s well made but there’s so much content that navigating and finding exactly what you need in a world were you barely know all the terms you need (and since Django has a different base philosophy than most other languages on some little details), it sometimes took me a long time to understand what I actually needed to search to find an answer.

This may seem weird but it was often the case with most docs I read, they were made for people that had way more experience than me, for example there’s still stuff I can’t figure out about the MarkdownX plugin extensions, the documentation is well made but not exactly explaining what I need, because people using it are usually advanced and know what do this means, where to do it and why should they even do it, I usually know why I have to do it, and even what it means most of the time, but I have no clue of where I can find it.

I had a lot of database problems, I had to restart everything a few times, and once I managed to keep it for longer so I then decided that if I had a problem with my database, I’d try EVERYTHING I COULD before just deleting, because even if there’s nothing really extremely important on this website (of course it’s just for the fun lol), there’s still a crap ton of hours in all the posts, pages, and everything you could find on here (not only the code), losing everything now would actually make me pretty sad, even the other day I had a problem that I couldn’t figure out (I managed to do it after a while but I was really worried), and I was about to cry and then I figured a way to fix that I now use all the time because it’s actually pretty easy and saved the database at least 7 times in 5 days.

Probably more that I forgot, I’ll continue making these hopefully after each updates (because I don’t count on not having troubles lol, and having these troubles actually help me get better and understand stuff), so if I remember about older issues I had, I’ll just put them in the future Friction Logs