Building WeRemember in Public — Day 1: Django project setup

Sandro Hu — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:37:09 +0000

Issue #1 is closed. WeRemember has a running Django server — and every decision made here will affect every line of code that follows, so they're worth documenting.

What I set up

A minimal but intentional Django project structure:

uv as package manager — fast, modern, handles virtualenv automatically
Python 3.12 pinned via .python-version
Split settings — base.py, development.py, production.py living in config/settings/
django-environ for environment variables with an APP_ prefix convention
apps/ directory as a placeholder for future Django apps ## The decisions that matter

Why uv instead of pip?

One tool for everything — dependencies, virtualenv, Python version.

No more pip install, python -m venv, source .venv/bin/activate.

Just uv add and you're done.

Why split settings from day one?

It costs almost nothing now and saves a painful refactor later.

manage.py defaults to development, wsgi.py defaults to production.

Switch environments with DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE — no code changes needed.

Why the APP_ prefix?

SECRET_KEY and DEBUG are common variable names. Prefixing with APP_

avoids collisions with system or shell variables and makes it immediately

clear what belongs to WeRemember.

Why config/ instead of we_remember/?

Django's startproject creates a folder with the project name.

Renaming it to config/ separates configuration from application code —

a common convention that makes the structure easier to navigate.

What's next

Issue #2: full application containerization.

Django production-ready with Gunicorn and Docker — with a health check endpoint and a smoke test to verify it all works.

Post #2 of the WeRemember build-in-public series.

Short updates on X | Articles on dev.to | Code on GitHub

Building WeRemember in Public — Day 0: Why I'm building it and where it starts

Sandro Hu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:33:43 +0000

I've tried a lot of calendar tools. They all work. None of them feel right.

Not because they're broken — but because they're built like infrastructure. Grids, boxes, alerts. They remind you that something exists, but they don't help you stay on top of what actually matters. Using them feels like filing paperwork, not managing your life.

I wanted something that felt more like a smart friend and less like a database with a UI.

So I started building it.

Three ideas that shape every decision

I'm tired of tools that remind me that something exists without helping me understand why it matters. I want semantic search not because it's a cool feature — but because "dentist" and "annual checkup" are the same thing and no calendar I've used treats them that way.

I don't want to chase information across five different apps to prepare for a meeting or remember a deadline. The plugin system exists for exactly that reason: bring the context to the calendar, not the other way around. Your tools should talk to each other so you don't have to be the middleman.

And when WeRemember reminds you of something, it shouldn't sound like a system alert. A job interview tomorrow deserves a different message than a dentist appointment. A friend who remembers your life doesn't just ping you — they say the right thing at the right moment. That's the tone I'm going for.

What Day 0 actually looks like

No Django yet. Just three files: a README, a license, and a .gitignore.

That order is intentional.

The README came first because writing why the project exists before touching any code forces clarity. If you can't explain it in a paragraph, you don't understand it well enough to build it yet.

The license is AGPL-3.0 — not MIT. MIT lets anyone take your code, close it, and run it as a SaaS without giving anything back. AGPL closes that gap: modify WeRemember and run it as a service, and you must release your changes. For an open-source SaaS, that's not a detail — it's the point.

The .gitignore is invisible work. But without it, the first real commit becomes a mess of __pycache__ and .env files you spend an hour untangling.

Small things. Intentional ones.

What's next

Django project setup — uv, split settings, environment conventions. The foundation that makes everything else possible cleanly.

Post #1 of the WeRemember build-in-public series.

Short updates on X | Articles on dev.to | Code on GitHub

DEV Community: Sandro Hu

Building WeRemember in Public — Day 1: Django project setup

What I set up

What's next

Building WeRemember in Public — Day 0: Why I'm building it and where it starts

Three ideas that shape every decision

What Day 0 actually looks like

What's next