Comment by nadermx

Comment by nadermx 5 days ago

141 replies

Tangential, but I practically owe my life to this guy. He wrote the flask mega tutorial in what I followed religiously to launch my first website. Then right before launch, in the most critical part of my entire application; piping a fragged file in flask. He answered my stackoverflow question, I put his fix live, and the site went viral. Here's the link for posterity's sake https://stackoverflow.com/a/34391304/4180276

miguelgrinberg 5 days ago

You have made my day, sir. :)

  • LostMyLogin 5 days ago

    When I was in college I discovered the flask mega tutorial and fell in love with programming. Switched from an economics degree to software engineering and now work in the industry.

    Thank you for the work you put in.

    • barrenko 4 days ago

      Economist here, started to learn to code as an elaborate way to procrastinate on my master's thesis after I've quit playing videogames.

  • xp84 5 days ago

    Absolutely love seeing like a dozen people piling on Mr Grinberg to show gratitude for his work, and indeed the even little things he does to help uplift others in the field. It’s a good reminder that a small helpful contribution, or bit of teaching given at the right time, can be so valuable!

    • mathattack 4 days ago

      Please note the Buy Me Coffee button at the bottom of the post.

  • pablopudding 5 days ago

    I also want to say thank you for the Flask Mega Tutorial.

    When I started my first job as a Data Scientist, it helped me deploy my first model to production. Since then, I’ve focused much more on engineering.

    You’ve truly started an amazing journey for me.

    Thank you. :)

  • hangonhn 5 days ago

    Whoa! You're here! Well, I think a lot of us owes you a debt of gratitude. Thank you for all you've done for the Python and Flask community.

  • nessad 5 days ago

    I also want to chime in and say how you changed my life. I did the same Flask megatutorial and that led me to leaving helpdesk and becoming a support engineer. Years later, and I'm now in big tech. Thanks Miguel!

  • c0balt 5 days ago

    Thank you for the Flask Tutorial, it got me started in web development and down the line into systems development.

  • indigodaddy 5 days ago

    I came way late to the game, so went more the video side, so I have the same feelings about Pretty Printed, love his stuff.

    But just now checking out the Mega Flask Tutorial, wow looks pretty awesome.

  • pkphilip 4 days ago

    Amazing to see all of the people thanking you! Great to see that gratitude is still alive and well. You seemed to have touched a lot of lives through that mega tutorial! wow!

  • jaza 4 days ago

    I learnt a lot from your numerous Flask blog posts over the years. Your blog is often better than the official Flask docs. Kudos to you, Miguel!

  • frakkingcylons 4 days ago

    I also used your tutorial to get started with web development and helped me get my first job about 11 years ago. Thanks a lot!

  • mmasu 4 days ago

    I too started with your tutorial - thanks a million

  • Celeo 5 days ago

    I also got started in webdev and built a few sitesdl from your tutorial. Thank you!

  • naldb 5 days ago

    I also learnt a lot from your tutorial of Flask. Thank you.

wiseowise 5 days ago

> flask

Off-topic, but I absolutely loathe new Flask logo. Old one[0] has this vintage, crafty feel. And the new one[1] looks like it was made by a starving high schooler experimenting with WordArt.

[0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Flask_lo...

[1] - https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/_images/flask-na...

  • Stratoscope 5 days ago

    I hope they go Full Cracker Barrel on this:

    1. Original logo has country charm and soul.

    2. Replaced with a modern soulless logo.

    3. Customer outrage!

    4. Company (or open source project) comes to its senses and returns to old logo.

    https://media.nbcboston.com/2025/08/cracker-barrel-split.jpg

    (n.b. The Cracker Barrel Rebellion is sometimes associated with MAGA. I am very far from that, but I have to respect when people of any political stripe get something right.)

    • b00ty4breakfast 4 days ago

      the funny thing about the Cracker Barrel brouhaha is that the new one still looked like something you'd find on a pack of matches from a hotel bar in the 70s.

      • janc_ 3 days ago

        It looked like Cracker Barrel's own logo in the 1960s/1970 IIRC.

    • UltraSane 5 days ago

      The Cracker Barrel "controversy" seems to have largely been fueled by bots.

    • swyx 4 days ago

      ah, the New Coke Gambit

      • acomjean 4 days ago

        Ah New Coke… Oddly I liked new coke better. My most 80s possession is a new coke can with max headroom on it.

        They had both new and “classic” for a while co existing.

  • BreakingProd 5 days ago

    I was unaware of the new logo… and I am just realizing for the first time after many many Flask apps… that the logo is not a chili pepper.

    • w-ll 4 days ago

      This logo is bad.. not even talking about the mark, the fonts are wtf. Uppercase 'F' shorter than the lower 'l' and 'k', the 'a' and the 'k' bad, even the lower bar on the 'f' angle is just... eww. And then the mark. I dont get any of this.

      • latexr 4 days ago

        > the fonts are wtf. Uppercase 'F' shorter than the lower 'l' and 'k'

        Just like in the old one. That is not strange in the slightest, it is a very common feature of typefaces that the ascenders of lower case letters overshoot the height of uppercase. That is one of the ways to distinguish an uppercase i from a lower case L.

        > And then the mark. I dont get any of this.

        They look to be following the Material Design logo trend that was in fashion a while ago. Following trends in logo design is never a good idea, it makes them look outdated soon.

    • nkozyra 4 days ago

      Using a chili pepper as a flask could work, though, but not necessarily recommended.

    • jonpurdy 4 days ago

      I was going to post the same thing; glad I searched for 'chili' and found your comment.

    • doctaj 4 days ago

      I feel dumb - I thought it was a chili pepper, too.

  • Imustaskforhelp 5 days ago

    I didn't know that they have the new logo before reading your comment. Been 2 years since I last searched flask but yeah the old logo was vintage and I also preferred the old logo and the new logo feels mid/sucks.

    The old logo is much better.

    • actionfromafar 5 days ago

      New logo is instantly forgettable. Would disappear as an app icon on a phone home screen, forever mistaken for a bank app.

    • hackernewds 5 days ago

      Old logo is impossible to resize and present on any assets that aren't rectangular. Flask isn't a country podunk restaurant

      • wiseowise 5 days ago

        > Old logo is impossible to resize and present on any assets that aren't rectangular.

        Neither is the new one, because you have to be a madman to show this hideous thing anywhere.

      • philipallstar 4 days ago

        > Old logo is impossible to resize and present on any assets that aren't rectangular. Flask isn't a country podunk restaurant

        You're measuring it by irrelevant measures. This is like when all the terrible Western game devs criticised Elden Ring because it didn't have "good UX".

      • coldtea 5 days ago

        >Old logo is impossible to resize and present on any assets that aren't rectangular.

        Who the fuck cares? That never hurt flask from becoming a well beloved widely adopted tidy framework.

        And it's trivial to "resize and present" the old log on "assets that aren't rectangular"...

        >Flask isn't a country podunk restaurant

        Yeah, apparently by the new logo it's a generic mall fast food chain restaurant for people with zero taste

  • echelon 5 days ago

    Oh God, that's not it.

    The old logo is classic and bespoke. I could recall it from memory. It's impressionable.

    The new one looks like an unfunded 2005-era dorm room startup. XmlHttpRequests for sheep herders.

    • cap11235 5 days ago

      No, it looks like a disney channel show in 2008 that had one season

    • [removed] 5 days ago
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  • thaumasiotes 5 days ago

    Huh. What most stands out to me about the logo, old and new, is that it clearly depicts a drinking horn instead of a flask.

  • foresto 5 days ago

    The old logo would seem at home on a shelf of classic O'Reilly books. :)

  • saltcured 5 days ago

    I think it should not have a logo, so it is left to interpretation.

    Thinking about hand-rolled web services, I usually imagine either a stealth alcoholic's metal flask or a mad scientist's Erlenmeyer flask.

  • zestyping 4 days ago

    Goodness gracious, that font in the new logo is the most hideous font I've seen in a very long time.

  • varispeed 5 days ago

    New logo looks like a device some tribes' men use to cover their member.

  • WD-42 5 days ago

    What the…? I guess I’ve been reaching for FastAPI instead of flask these days because I had no idea this happened. Didn’t all the pallets projects have the old timey logos? I wonder what happened.

  • parlortricks 5 days ago

    yikes, that is not a great logo. it has also lost its essence

    • Stratoscope 5 days ago

      In fact, when I saw the new logo, the first thing that came to my mind was Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove saying "I deny them my essence."

    • travisgriggs 5 days ago

      But, this seems to me the gestalt of modern design. Less less less. Until it is no more.

      I also hate the new ones. And most of what modern design pumps out now days.

  • guywithahat 4 days ago

    Counterpoint: The old logo looks like it's for a piece of software that stopped being maintained 15 years ago

  • Terretta 4 days ago

    For [1] they picked clip-art of a crown molding cross section.

  • callamdelaney 4 days ago

    Yeah I yearn to go back to flask but the logo is giving me the ick.

  • coldtea 5 days ago

    The usual crap when either some "business" or some "designer" types come in

  • AlienRobot 4 days ago

    Is it just me or there has never been a single logo update in history that actually improved a logo?

    An once whimsical corner of web development has lost its charm due to arbitrary trends.

svieira 5 days ago

Nice story! My guess is that the site was https://yout.com/ given your profile. Does it still run Flask?

  • nadermx 5 days ago

    It's all grown up now. Runs on Django for the admin panel. Not that flask ever failed. Just became easier to manage the user base that way.

    • swyx 4 days ago

      because of Django admin? any downsides/notable warnings for people considering Flask v Django? any migration guide that's helpful?

      • devjab 4 days ago

        To limit the amount of languages we support I recently rewrote one of our backend services from Go (with SQLC) to Python. I hadn't worked with Python "web" for a while and started with Litestar and also their Advanced-Alchemy. Part of the reason was that their DTO's and dataclasses seemed like a good way to skip Pydantic. Anyway, once models became complext it wasn't easy to skip Pydantic and it also wasn't easy to deal with Advanced Alchemy. One afternoon I got so annoyed with it I rewrote everything with Django Ninja. It took me 4-5 hours that evening to recreate all the previous weeks stuff with Django because of how good the batteries included are.

        I'm not sure I'd ever use any other web framework than Django going forward, and I'm not using half of it (including the admin). I think Litestar is great by the way, Django is just so easy to produce with.

        • swyx 4 days ago

          ok so the recommendation is use Django Ninja? first am hearing of it.

      • nadermx 4 days ago

        Go with what you understand easier. No downsides to making an app in either, other than the logo.

        • nadermx 4 days ago

          After sleeping, this is my old man yelling at clouds moment. I'm glad they are trying something new.

signalblur 5 days ago

Thanks for sharing this story. It goes to show how much of a difference being kind and helping a stranger can make.

Hope I'm able to do the same for someone one day :)

lucb1e 5 days ago

For anyone else wondering whether to click to find what "fragged file" means: no, it's not about Quake and the linked page does not mention 'frag' at all. The question asks how to stream a file to the client in Flask as opposed to reading it all into memory at once and then sending it on. I figured as much (also because e.g. IP fragmentation) but first time I hear this alternative term for streaming

jbs789 5 days ago

Similar story here. Pleasant to work with too.

The accessibility of this material and also the broader python ecosystem is truly incredible. After reflecting on this recently, started finding ways to give back/donate/contribute.

rnikko 4 days ago

Same here with following the mega tutorial. Truly one of the goats.

ohduran 4 days ago

Same happened to me; I owe a career to having gone through his Mega Tutorial. Miguel if you're reading this, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Izikiel43 4 days ago

When I saw you were using readlines to read binary file I thought wtf at first, seems like he noticed as well.

robertlagrant 4 days ago

The other answer to your question there is why Flask is so good. One short file and you have a backend and a frontend!

pietroppeter 4 days ago

Yet another appreciation story for Miguel’s mega tutorial. In 2017 I used it to create our wedding site and learn a bit of web dev (my background is in data science). To motivate me to actually do it I used the strategy the fund the then occurring refactoring of the tutorial. I am still very fond and proud of that first time I actually went and funded some open source effort, it gives you back more than you might expect

tomhow 5 days ago

We fixed the typo in the first sentence: ow -> owe. Hope that's okay!

Edit: corrected typo in "typo".

Y_Y 5 days ago

Cool story, but was your life really at risk in that situation?

  • nadermx 5 days ago
    • Y_Y 5 days ago

      > Brazil Advances Criminal Prosecution of American Yout.com Operator

      Touché! I see sibling comments assuming I was being sarcastic (without mandatory sarcasm tag!), but what I was really hoping for was more backstory like this. I guess it depends on how you read things in your head.

  • jryb 5 days ago

    Not all statements should be interpreted literally.

    • shoobiedoo 5 days ago

      You just took the wind right out of his sails

      • Stratoscope 5 days ago

        And took the shine off his shoes and stopped him in his tracks.

      • antod 5 days ago

        Luckily all the whooshing has refilled them.

  • [removed] 5 days ago
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  • DANmode 2 days ago

    At risk of not being programming?

    Seemingly.

AtlasBarfed 5 days ago

Did you throw any money his way?