I wanted to try out some “modern” front-end development for a while, and I did. FastAPI is great. So is Svelte. But even though I found creating APIs that way to be a breeze, building a whole site that way felt much slower and heavier than using traditional server rendering. So I decided to give django a fair shake for a while, and I’m glad I did. Here’s how I currently like to get a site started with django, using Tailwind CSS for responsive layouts and styling, and mixing in alpine.js and HTMX to make the site feel reactive. I’m glad I gave the backend/frontend split an honest try, but this fits the way I think about sites better.