About five years, but I consider myself a beginner-intermediate still. I think that helped with writing the book because I'm still very aware of how non-programmers think and how to explain things in a non-programmer-y way.

The book comes with a template app — I call it a "collection of things", which should work with a lot of different unique ideas, like building a directory of django programmers, a store, etc.

And yes, the code is available on Github: http://github.com/hellowebapp