What I've learned during the past week - Python intermediate

After finishing all my projects I did under someone else's direction I finally started to fully work on my own one. This experience was both exciting and terrifying as everyone on the internet seems to code so perfectly. I started by creating a test application, allowing users to rent household items in their area.

Firstly, I wanted to make sure users will be able to find things they want to rent and at the same time to add their own items to rent to others. This required search feature, which I've never done in Django before.

Here I would like to recommend this site: Django Search Tutorial.

DjangoCon 2019 - Search From the Ground Up by William S. Vincent

This is what helped me a ton: both to create and understand such feature, allowing me to build nice search page for the clients. "Django search tutorial" is a step-by-step instruction with clear example on how the feature works. It allows reader to follow the whole process reading code fragments and descriptions.

The tutorial I found was perfect for my purpose. I only needed to adjust this to my own application, models and views. Thank to this site I've managed to learn how to build a new functionality and I can't recommend this enough for all intermediate Python learners out there.

Another challenge presented by my project was renting feature. After users search for items in their area, I wanted them to be able to click "rent" and reserve the item for the chosen period of time.

This functionality was equally advanced from my point of view - to this day all I've been doing was creating apps that could add some items to database or remove them. Changing their availability from "free" to "rented" for an exact period of time was something completely new for me.

Here's what saved my life - hope this will help others looking for similar answers as well: Online Car Rental System in Django with Source Code.

This Django project was something incredibly helpful for me. It had all the features I wanted to apply in my app as well: renting system, adding, modifying and deleting new entries in database. While it was built differently than my app and had a lot of functionalities I needed to completely change and rebuild, this project made me understand and actually build renting system in my own application.

Using my own knowledge and the incredibly helpful sources I found I managed to create my first application that can actually be helpful for multiple users in the future. While the idea of renting small household items to your neighbor may not be the brightest one, building this app is a perfect way to polish my skills and learn some new ones.

What I love about coding is that you can always get inspired by other people's work. I appreciate developers being so open about their ideas, sharing their inventions and allowing others to build from it.

If you want to check my work and add your comments (still there is a lot to be done though to reach the full potential), please take a look here: AgnieszkaGabka/RentMe.