That's interesting. Personally, learning Django to be comfortable with it takes quite some time for me. Translating the business process to code means you have to be comfortable with the framework, no matter what you're using. What do you often you feel you're stuck on?

It's not that I get stuck. It's just that, with Lotus Notes:

- authentication was already taken care of

- adding a field at a particular place was one step (rather than updating a model, updating a view and running a database migration)

- I could make small changes in production (ok, maybe that's not so good!!)

- adding events between different Lotus Notes apps on the same server was a snap

- the learning curve to become productive was just a few days

Of course, I'm not saying every type of app fits this model. Or even that every app that fits this model can be strung together with Lotus Notes functions and without using 'proper' code (Lotus Notes had its own variant of Visual Basic).

But for many use cases, you could do a lot in a very short time without very few lines of code.

Yeah, that's definitely a good fit. I think most companies would be much improved if they can find someone to help with those kinds of apps day to day instead of having to outsource a shiny app that gets unmaintained or takes too long to develop.

If all you need is a simple CRUD app then Django Admin + your model definitions is literally all you need.

In my experience, that's a 4 to 8 hour project.

Oh, and runs against a real database.