[awhitty]

I rarely comment on HN, but I'm happy to come out of the woodwork to second this!

Django was my first exposure to Web development also around the 0.96 days. I couldn't have found my way into what has become a career without the friendly folks in the Django channels. What an incredible resource for newcomers.

I remember pasting full dumps of my models.py files into djangosnippets.org with vague descriptions of problems I was having, and folks I had never met before patiently sorted through possible solutions with me. Sometimes they'd nudge me away from an approach or suggest an alternative framing but they never judged me for what was probably pretty ridiculous code, considering I had no idea what I was doing.

Thanks to all the folks involved!

[antris]

Now that you mention pasting things into #django-dev, one thing that stuck with me was https://dpaste.com/

I think it was more closely branded as a "paste service for django community to use" than it is now, but I keep using it because it just works perfectly, without any captchas, ads, complicated UIs or other unnecessary fluff, the domain name is easy to remember and it's been up every time since around 2007 when I discovered it. Just paste, submit and share the link, and it always works as you expect.