Transcript: Django in 2025

Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat 2025 edition. I'm Will Vincent, joined by

Carlton Gibson. Hey, Carlton.

Hello, Will, and happy new year.

Happy new year. Yes, we are recording on January 2nd. It will come out a little bit later.

But yeah, there's no guest on this episode. We're just going to talk about what we did

over the break, talk about goals for 2025. There has been some interesting news for both

of us, and talk about Django, the whole bunch of Django news. And so this is just a back

into the swing of things episode.

Just a warm-up one. Get the shoulders.

Yeah, just a warm-up, you know, feel what it's like. I'll say I'm in a new space, so

the sound might be a little bit different. I'm in the same co-working space, but I'm

not in my padded soundproof room that any guests have seen. This is a private office,

in quotes, that has nothing in it.

So the sound is a bit echoey, but that will be changed.

You need to move in the library to make it more...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. As you have. So, Carlton, how was your break?

It was awesome, Will. It was awesome. I booked off two whole weeks, and I finished sort of

slightly early. I finished like Wednesday lunchtime on the week before. So I've had

two and a half weeks off, and it was just like, oh, so needed, so needed, so needed. It just gets

the days get short that, you know, it's a long time from summer. It's like, ah, no, a proper break

has been amazing. And I didn't do that thing where I was like, no, I'm going to work on,

I'm going to work on side projects and pretend that I'm resting. I actually rested, so.

Well, because you are, I always forget that Boston, so I'm in Boston. Boston is Rome. So

even though you're warm, you are a bit more north. So it does get darker. I mean, here it gets dark

at four o'clock, I think, you know, on the December 21st or so. Yeah, and it doesn't get, it's the

times that get me. I don't, yeah, it's something like that. It's not, it's not particularly late.

I'd have to look it up, but it's like quarter past eight and before the sun's coming up in the

morning. And it's like, no, no, I don't want that. Cause I, you know, especially cause I get up

in the working week at 6.50 and I open the curtains and most of the year I have light at

that point. It's like, ah, lovely daylight. And I can, but those, those sort of two, three months

over the winter or the winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere, it's like, ah, just horrible.

It's horrible. I just need more daylight. Yeah. Yeah. Well, same. So, well, that's good. I

remember you mentioning to me that you, you were, you know, I was like, Oh, how are you going to do?

Cause I was still in that mindset of like, Oh, so much to do, which I'll mention, but I ended up

not really doing much. Um, so I think that was good, but yeah, breaks are needed, right? Cause

it's like, you feel on the one hand, it's like, there's so much piling up, but then is the world

going to spin? Probably like, you know, it's hard to quantify the benefit of checking out a

little bit, but obviously there's a benefit, but we've talked about this a billion times, right?

It's, it's the marathon, not a sprint thing. It's like, yes, I can work over the Christmas,

but at that point, where do I, where's my energy reserves for the next cycle? And by the, you know,

the last few weeks before the end of Christmas, I was really feeling that, no, I need a, I need a,

I need to stop at this point. Um, and if you don't do that, it's, it's not sustainable and okay.

You can, you can always push that one time, but when do you, when do you recoup it, right?

That, that, or I made the extra effort, but when do you buy it back? Well, very rarely. And so

it's really important to maintain some discipline about the self-care because without it, the whole

thing falls over. I think I've, you know, I've, yeah, well, yes, you've, you've done talks on

as much. And I think that's the thing as an adult too, like when you have to care for others and

responsibilities, you know, if you're, you know, if you're in college or something, you know,

you can sprint to finals and then you can just, you just do nothing for two weeks.

You know, but as an adult, like your day off is a lot less restful than, you know,

what it is when you're 20. There's that. Yeah. But 20, 20 is like a glorious time, right? I mean,

the town should be burning as you leave them when you're 20. That's just, that's the rules.

That's why you're in Spain. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, I had to leave,

but there's posters of me around. That's the thing that I can't go back. Um,

there's this phrase, youth is wasted on the young. I don't know. The young,

seem to do a good job of using it. So, but when I love the way you said, when you're an adult,

because when you're 20, you're meant to be an adult, but you're not really right. It's,

it's when you get a bit older. I think you all fit in at different times. Like, I feel like I'm

way more, uh, rebellious in a way than I was when I was 20, like, which is hard to imagine,

but you know, when I was, I was, I was so serious. I mean, I'm still serious, but like,

I was very like, gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this. And then, you know, and then you

grow older and you're like, oh my God, like I had all these breaks, you know, that's an adjustment,

but there's still this sense of like up into the right, at least for me. And I think a lot of my,

you know, academically minded friends, but at a certain point, like there is no up, you know,

once you get into your thirties, like there is no objective up into the right, like it all becomes

trade-offs hopefully if you're maturing, you know, it's like personal professional, like, what do you

like doing? Where do you want to be? You know, I think hopefully it's a little bit less of the,

you know, answering questions.

Questions about, you know, what are you up to? It's like, you know, it's just kind of more like,

well, what do I really want to do? You know, do I, do I want to maximize prestige or money or

education? It's like, well, you know, no one, you know, you really internalize, I think in your,

in your forties, like no one cares, which is, which is great, you know, cause I never did care.

You know, it's just like, they don't care. And then you realize that

you don't care as much. And so hopefully you can be a little more to your true self.

And it just relieves a lot of that anxiety. And when you're making decisions, you know,

and I, we probably see this weird, you know, you were PhDs and I, you know, I don't talk about it,

but I have like an Ivy league MBA. And so you're surrounded by these people who are,

who are very smart and hardworking, but a lot of them don't know what they want to do.

And so the obvious thing is you just chase the, the money and the prestige or whatever. And then

you, you know, but at some point you have to pay the, pay the piper and maybe not, maybe just like

you're in a big house with a lot of money and you're happy and you have no soul to begin with.

There are some people like that, but you know, it is some very famous people at the moment,

but they don't really look happy, do they? Well, I don't know. I hope not.

It just, I saw a good to go by the other day. It said something like capitalism isn't even

working well for these people. They're clearly not happy. Right. And it's kind of true. It seems,

it seems, I hope so. I don't try to keep politics mostly out, but yes, I think it's philosophy,

right? It's finding yourself. It's that existentialist question about choosing your own

path and discovering what it is.

To be you and to, it takes time to get to that. That, that's the point about still being a child

when you're 20 is that no way do you find that when you're 20, you don't find that it takes

years to find. Yeah. And if you don't take the time to listen and all that stuff, you know,

so part of, you know, we're patting ourselves on the back here. Part of, I think the appeal of

taking a break of sorts as you come back and it's like, well, like what, what am I doing? What do I

want to do? And then, you know, it's like, well, yeah, like, you know, I still like Django, you

know, like I still like coding, you know, it's cause yeah. When you're running on fumes, you're

just sort of like, I just want to get through this. And then yeah, you need that. Like, okay.

Like, you know, just a reset in a way of like, what do you like? What do you not like? You know,

like I came, I was at my in-laws for a week and a half and came back and, you know, cleaned a whole

bunch of stuff, just threw out a bunch of stuff that like, I knew I needed to, but I just, when

I'm stuck in the space, it's hard to do that. And so it's just like a cleansing of them, of the

way. Yeah, no, absolutely. So anyway, so breaks. Um, one thing we have to mention, we were talking

before, so we both, so you've gotten me hooked on these lectern notebooks. We'll put a link,

which are fantastic. And last year we accidentally picked the same color. Um, this year we have

different colors, but you've gone a step further now. So it's not just the journal. You've gone

double. You've got the planner. What are the words? Well, it's a, it's just a notebook. So

the, the, the, so for years, several years, it took, I've tried every notebook, every

diary out there and it's, um, I've settled on this B5 page, um, weekly views. You've got a week,

the week on one side, you've got a page of notes on the other. And I, I just live in these and

I've had one of them now, four years, five years running now. And I'm just so adored. I've had

bigger ones. I've had smaller ones. No, B5 is the perfect format. And then this is your true

self crystallized in a journal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I literally live in, in this, this planner,

this agenda. I mean, like every page is full to the brink. I, I, my work, my working week is in it.

And it's a tool. Um, and then I had a, an A4 notebook of theirs, which is very, was very

high quality. It was just too big. And I, I was like, oh, it's taken me quite a few years to get

through it, but they're expensive things. So I couldn't just like be like, no, no, no, I'm not,

I'm not going to use it. I had to use it because it's too much to just be like, oh no, no, no,

it's not good enough for me. No. So I finally finished it. And so I treated myself to a B5

notebook and it's got little dots on the pages and it's got numbers. It's got a bit at the front

where you can write what you want and it's, oh, I'm just in love with it. And so I've got the

notebook and the diary, the same size and they both, it's a good portable size. You can take

it to the coffee shop and you get it out. It's big enough to write in, but it's not so big that

you can't put it on the table and have a cup of coffee and et cetera. So anyway, I'm just literally

in love with my notebooks at the moment. And you know, when, when you've taken the time over

Christmas and you've relaxed and you've got some mental space to have a nice artifact to write

into, to put your thoughts into and your plan.

It's just, oh, it's just a wonderful experience. It's anyway, welcome to.

Yeah. Well it's, you know, tooling, tooling matters. Like I, I think you're like me. I try

to be very judicious and minimal in my tooling. Like I'm not excited about every new tool, but

you know, the, the handful of things that I use, I really want them. I really want to like them

and use them. And so, you know, notebook, keyboard, um,

laptop, I was mentioning to you before we started, I got a new, I upgraded my personal laptop.

So it's just a MacBook pro. Um, but mine was a number of years old and I went on the Apple site

and I saw that you could, uh, you know, I could get a, still get some money back. So I was like,

okay, I'll upgrade, um, shipped it to New Hampshire to no sales tax. Whoops. I had to drive up there

in a snowstorm. But then, uh, as they do, they, they, they were like, oh, your laptop was too

banged up. So now basically they didn't offer me.

What they said they would. So now I was like, you know, instead of $1,200, they're like,

how about $200? And I was like, Ooh, no, no, that's a thousand dollars. Like, Ooh, Ooh. So

it's going to be a family laptop for the next 15 years. And, uh,

Right. But it's a good laptop, right? Cause you've got the same one you, or you had the same one that

I had, which I believe you've got the M1 2021. Yeah, no. And then of course I was like, well,

why did I even do it in the first place? And then my new, so tooling, I think tooling,

not so much guilt, just like annoyance. It's less, it's less guilt. It's more just like,

you're like, there's, there's this, um, there's this Reddit mildly infuriating. Like I, I try

really hard not to go on Reddit, but I love the mildly infuriating subreddit. Cause just all

these things you're just like, Oh God, I'm not alone. You know, it's like someone parking

slightly or someone just these, it's like, I don't know, maybe Seinfeld kind of stuff where

in small amounts, I love it. So that's, that's my laptop saga. But, but that being

said, having good tools matters just, I think, but you and I both don't go overboard because

then you're just wasting time. It's like, cause a new, there's a new way to do the same thing.

I know it has to be a lot better to warrant it. Yeah. So can I ask, I mean, um, so I've,

we had, so we got the, I don't know what it was. It's the M1 pro max thing. It was the,

like the, the, the biggest one when it came out and it had, I don't know, 64 gigs of RAM.

I'm just using it for programming and I'm still,

I'm still like enamored by it. And it's still a great laptop for me. And it's still the best

machine I've ever owned, but you making videos. And I guess that's where it starts.

I'm going to be doing videos. And then I have a lot of, I ran out of hard, uh, hard drive space.

I had two terabytes.

and I needed, I was, that was the real thing that put it over. I was like, so part of that is this

audio video takes up a ton. I also have, I have like 700, what is it? Gigabytes of like personal

family photos and videos. Like it's not all mine, but like my, my father passed away. So I now I

have like my dad on my laptop, you know, like, which I haven't fully gone through. So I was just

like, you know what? Like if something is worth just keeping and I have this whole system as you

do. So I have external hard drive, so external hard drive, laptop, and then cloud. So I'm like,

I don't want to lose this stuff. Yeah. Right. So anyway, so the external hard drive, but yes,

the videos more, more to come on videos. So anyway, so mildly, you know, worth it. Mildly

annoying, you know, what's a thousand dollars between friends, you know, between you and the

people at Cupertino. Oh my God. Yeah. This is why they're so profitable. Don't, don't,

don't wind me up, Carlton.

Um, but one thing, but before we get into like real work stuff, so you were on the socials

yesterday. So you have been rereading there's, there's this book working in public that we both,

both read, both really loved about open source. Um, what, what, what was, what were you beating

the drum about? You had, you had to came at it with a new angle a couple of years on and maybe

post break. Well, and post, I mean, I guess I must, it must've been pre COVID that it came,

it was published. I think so. Right. And so it, and I remember reading,

reading it back then and I was just enthused by it. It's like, it kind of, if you read

the opening chapters of working in public, it kind of described like working in Django.

You felt seen, you felt seen. You're like, Oh yeah, this is a thing.

It was amazing. And, and so anyway, I remember being really positive about the book and then

in the last six months or so, I've heard a few critical reviews. Um, you know, the author's

personal opinions might've gone a bit sort of left field in the subsequent time.

She's gone way off the reservation with other stuff. Yeah.

Okay. So, but, but that didn't necessarily affect the court, the book. And I was like,

Oh, this is a bit sad because I enjoyed the book, but then I saw a, I saw from, um, Christopher

Nauberger. Uh, yeah, I'm not going to try to pronounce it. Yes. Yeah. He did really

good, really good talk. We'll link it. We'll link it in the thing about, and criticizing

it at the book in terms of how it didn't account for the kind of, um, Python model. It kind

of puts forward this model of a stadium approach to, to running, um, um, open source projects.

And it kind of makes this argument.

That it's a necessary development of the way GitHub and all the rest makes it so that the

only sustainable model is this stadium approach where you've got a few kind of like stars

and then a big audience watching them do. And that's not how it's done really in the

Python world. And it's not really how we think of development in Django. We think of it as

being community-based as being a federation or a club, um, being a commons that we're

building together. And the argument.

The argument in working in public kind of is telling the story of how that commons is

eroded by things like GitHub and eroded by, um, the, the, the, the growth of, of open

source so that more and more, um, projects become available, but people are less and

less engaged with them. And I, and as I'm rereading it, I'm like, wow, this is just

in contrast to reading it four years ago, as I'm rereading it, I'm like, this is describing

a hellscape, really a dystopian hellscape.

I think that was, that was your quote. I saw that.

And I was like, okay, fine. I'm gonna like, cause you had a thread, I think with Jeff,

but I was like strong, strong words.

Yeah.

But it really is. And it's, it's like, you know, uh, I can't remember the exact

quotes that I pulled out. I pulled out a few on the, on the, the, I'll put it in the notes

for anyone here.

It's like, you know, if you're, if you're, if it's not fun anymore, you're is absolutely

no nothing to be gained from maintaining a popular project. It's kind of, and there are

points in the book, which it, it, the book is kind of making as a sort of positive thing.

Hey, isn't this great?

That we're devolving this way, which as a member of the Django community, I look at

and think, but if that's the exact thing we're trying to avoid, that's what we in Django

fight so hard against. And so I, from in January, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll finish reading it.

I'll finish writing it. Probably my stack report for January will be a kind of write

up on my take of rereading, um, uh, rereading working public after this time and after watching

Christopher's talk and a few other things I've heard.

Yeah.

I mean, there's always that question of like, you know, what's changed, how much it is, is

the landscape and how much of it is, is you, right? I mean, I remember her, she w I mean,

she, when she wrote that book, she was, she was in Silicon Valley. So I think it was pretty

rah rah. And there was a sense of people didn't know how open source worked. Right. So it,

it, it went, it has details, but I think it's more designed for people who are like, what

is this open source thing? Um, and I was, when I read it, I was impressed by the, by the

depth and the commonality.

You know, she spoke to a lot of the things that we felt in Django, which it felt like,

Oh, that was unique to Django.

But it's like, no, there is this thing around popular open source projects, but you know,

extending it out now where, you know, GitHub has really monopolized things. Right. And

then, you know, people buying stars and then is, is it just like, is it just like LinkedIn?

Is it just something you're putting on your resume? You know, you can buy stars, like

it's a little bit of a perversion. And then at the same time, the bag is being held by

these tiny people, you know, supporting monopolies that, you know, it's not just that they're

stealing the code. They're also like making money off, you know, GitHub on it. And so

I mean, there's a lot still good in it. And the descriptions it gives of open source is

still accurate in many ways. And then, but there's this kind of celebration of a thing

that four years later, we're looking back and think links. There was one line about

how GitHub did to open source, what things like Facebook and Instagram did to the web.

And isn't that great? And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's the exact thing we

don't want. And it's like, Oh, okay. So I've got a lot to, I'm still, you know, I'm still

going through it. I'm still reading it. And I, it'll take me a little while to put together

my thoughts slowly. But as I was reading it, I was just increasingly found my jaw dropping

and sort of, sort of, Oh, and eventually I just cracked and had to post something on

the social, but I had been off. I'd been, I'd been, I'd, you know, poked in occasionally,

but I'd from the Wednesday where I finished my work, I, I, I'd sort of stopped at lunchtime

and then I had to knit back on because there was some, there was some, there was some,

there was some Django news.

Someone was wrong on the internet. And yeah, no, no, no, no, it wasn't so much that it

wasn't so much that someone was wrong. It's that there was a Django, a pub, the steering

council.

Okay. Well let's let, all right, let's just, let's just jump to that then we're going to,

we're going to talk now about our professional stuff. So congratulations, steering council

member, top vote getter, Carlton. You know, so you were, you weren't totally sure that

you wanted to do it, but then you like talk about the process for you.

So why, when I stopped as a fellow, I kind of mentally said that I might, you know, I

might go back to a leadership role in Django being, let's be clear, the fellows are the

most, have the most significant leadership roles in Django. They, they are the driving

force behind the project and they are, they're just involved in so many decisions that they

are essentially.

They're there for everything. Everything passes through the fellows.

Yeah. And it is the most influential role in the whole of Django. And it's not meant

to be a leadership role, but it, but it is, it just de facto is.

And so when I finished, I was very much like, no, I want to step away from that. And I'm

not leaving Django in any way, not leaving Django, but I didn't want to be in those leadership

roles. So I thought I might run for the board in the future. I might run for the steering

council in the future, but it would be like after the 5.X cycle and after this 6.X cycle

coming up. And so maybe 7.X I might, you know, see where we were then, but that was what

I'd mentally said. And then of course, because we had all the issues with the 5.X steering

council and it being short-handed and the election there didn't go well. And then there

was a big talk and then I still wasn't sure. And, and then somebody who I won't name explicitly

reached out and said, Hey, and I was like, okay, all right, I will run. And I put my

hand, my hat in.

Well, I remember you, you asked me and I'm sure a couple of other people too, just sort

of like, oh, I'm thinking about it. And I think my, you know, my take to you was, well,

I know you have opinions. It's just, do you feel like you have the energy to, I know you,

do you feel like you have the energy to do it?

It's hard to shut me up. So yeah.

Don't be spouting off about various things if you're not going to go and a little bit,

but yeah, I think, yeah, you, you got in the push and hopefully had enough of a break.

And then, and it's also the steering council historically, and probably in this new iteration,

it's not being a fellow. Like it is, yeah, it's not a full-time thing. You're not being

paid. At the same time, there are these overriding things we've talked about in the podcast and

the community that it does feel like some, you know, some changes need to be made. That's

why some people step down. So it's, yeah.

Probably more important than ever to have committed people on it.

Yeah. And I, I wouldn't have run if I didn't feel I'd got something to offer. And

I think it is a delicate time for Django. I think there's a lot of new enthusiasm and

we need to make sure that that's channeled effectively and Django is a big beast and

it's hard to steer. And if we push in the wrong way, there will be resistance and we

will spend an awful lot of time just fighting.

And achieving very little. Whereas if we can just angle ourselves, right, we can probably

work around the concerns that people will have and find that we can make progress much

more effectively. And so the reason why ultimately I ran was I think I can be helpful in that

discussion. I feel I can be helpful in those discussions. And my experience as a fellow

and others felt the same way.

So you've got, you know, that's the thing that I was surprising to me is I didn't realize

we're now at 400.

We're at 400 individual members of Django, which is, which is great, which is a lot.

It was under when I, when I got in, you know, brought in and was on the board, we are under

200. So that's a doubling in four or five years. And you know, it's as with all growth,

it's good in that it more people, you know, more people can vote, you know, so more than

half of the people voted. It also means instead of being something where reasonably at a Django

con us or Europe, you can decide things. It's not the case, but you know, the people who

you know, the community is not just people who have the ability to go to these conferences.

It never was, but I think that's a, that's ultimately a strength, but it brings growth

challenges in a way that, you know, the community is global and you know, 400 people is a lot

to manage as the, you know, first ring. And then I suppose the, you know, the board and

the steering council and the fellows and that's, and that, but that's it. Right. And then there's

just the online forum, like, no, I think, I think, I think we need a bit more structure.

Like the, I mean, this is coming out of my reading and working in public again, but one

of the problems that we're going to have is we either find a way of breaking the work

up into smaller groups that can operate individually, or we're going to reach these kinds of communication

barrier problems where we, we see this in Django at the moment where we try and reach

consensus, but there are so many voices and so many opinions and so many legitimate concerns,

competing legitimate concerns.

That we reach impasse very quickly. And if we can't find a way of modernizing, we're,

we're not, but that's the challenge I think we have to solve.

Yeah. You can't just say no all the time to people who, yeah, ultimately you have, something

has to be done. And I think most people, well, I don't know, maybe that's not true. I, when

I worked in companies and in organizations, it's better to make a decision and then maybe

say, Oh, that was the wrong one rather than not make any decisions and not make any changes.

Cause then everyone's unhappy.

Yeah.

You're just sort of hypothetically things to death. And so along those lines, we have,

this came out in November, but there's a new board or there's new four new board members.

And there was a lot of, I think 19 or nine, was it 19 people went out for the steering

council was the board. There was a lot of, there's a lot of people for both which was

great to see. I feel like there wasn't always aware. I mean, I don't want to just paraphrase

everything as when I was on the board, but I feel like most people didn't even know there

was a board.

Sure.

Like, I feel like the awareness.

Has grown a little bit about, you know, how Django is actually run in these issues. And

in a way that, um, you know, so we have a lot of people and a lot of people who come

in, you know, with mission statements saying, this is what I want to achieve and like clear

goals. And it's, it's moved a little bit from keeping the lights on to, no, we want

want to you know the number of people want to have an executive director you know i'm not not

everyone but like that's that's a very clear thing that the board is going to discuss and maybe do

things on as opposed to let's just not go bankrupt you know yeah well yeah i mean i think there's two

there's two aspects one is the change in the generation the change of the gender the guard

changing of the guard so to speak like there's the whole new wave of people globally that are

involved in jango and then there's that combined with the bad timing of i mean covid was never

going to come at a good time right global pandemic would two years shut down and all the rest that

was never going to come at a good time but there was almost like a perfect storm of people older

hands stepping away exactly as at the moment when the covid hit and it's like oh are we going to

survive well okay yes now and now we've got fresh impetus and it's nice to see um so many people

stand by the board and then the people who are elected

they're going to do a great job and the same with the steering council i think there's 11 12 people

for the steering council and any of those any five would have been just like yeah we'll be fine

we'll be fine this is this is all positive so yeah you know i'm excited i'm excited i always say i'm

excited for about where we're going but i really am i think it's a good time yeah and just while

we're on the topic there's a whole bunch of events that have been announced that are coming up so

that's online conference django con europe in dublin april 23rd django con us was just announced

yeah and don't forget django on africa is in august right in tanzania yep so we've got august in

august in um tanzania for django on africa and then september for django on your us right yes

and then dublin coming up so lots of events and i think uh the call for proposals for django on

europe is open

about to close it's open as we're recording whether it's it's whether it's closed by the

time the show goes out i can't say this is the thing you know when we started we're like we're

both trying to restart our brains or like how professional do we need to be here like what

what's going on when i think after five years we don't need to be professional that's fine

all right so let's just um so it's you will like you've got no wait i got some i do have some news

um but you um so stack report this was like your big your big well you have paths but that's sort of

your professional thing that's not for public consumption but stack report is your big 2024

yeah the work project's going well um i'm still i'm still having the time of my life from there

and all i'm trying to do really is keep that's maturing nicely and we've got with two years in

nearly we've got a year to go we need to get um we've got runway for that year we need to get

some more customers in that year and if we do we've got a proper business so that's quite exciting

um i can't say any more than that the year sounds like you can just kick

your feet up and go to your partner and be like all right sell this bad boy well

recently the baton has sort of shifted for me building out features to him

needing to say there's a minimum amount before he can really do but i've still got like a massive

right you know it's like no project is ever like there's always a million more things that you want

to build than you could you've got time for so i'm exactly in that place but it's enriching nicely

and there's some really exciting things that i'm getting to build and things that

have been on the pipeline that you think oh yeah i don't want to want to work on that and extracting

those slowly but surely into you know upstream into neapolitan or into django or into channels

and see where those go um and i would be much further ahead if if i could clone myself two or

three times but i can't so you know these things happen as the time now but i'm really enjoying it

and that's going well and then the sort of side project for 2024 was the stack report which is my

newsletter which is a premium thing it's a you know five bucks a month or you know 50 a year if

you want to and that's just a nominal thing people always like do do github sponsors and i was like i

hate github sponsors like it's not for me so i wanted to do something where there was a kind of

actual thing you got and what you get is the newsletter and it's been really well received

and it's been going really well and i'm excited to be writing um each month it's given me a kind

of discipline to that writing it's given me a kind of like because i've got subscribers

i'm committed and it out it's coming regularly and i'm having i'm having a good time with it and so

um yeah that's that was really nice to a a launch it and b for it to be so well received

yeah and i think there were some talks i was watching i'll put a link to it that

gosh i'm forgetting the title of it but someone who'd worked on um oh god was it puppet one of

the orchestration tools he had this amazing talk about you know free versus not talking about

soccer and kubernetes and all these things and like everything doesn't have to be free i guess

is the point like and in fact like and then you know for someone like you like you do so much for

the community and things like to have something that's paid like it's not changing your life

money but it's enough to give you the discipline it's enough to feel like oh these are people who

you know they really want to read it right like i do think it's important to have a couple things

where it's like this is this this is a paid thing and then i have all these other things

like you can't just into you know because then if you get burned out it's like well okay i'm

like i'm gonna stop doing stuff you know like i don't know finding that balance i i i see more

and more people especially writing who are like you know i'll take a hundred paid people over

a thousand free ones and trying to monetize that elsewhere and i think that's ultimately healthy

like if you have a niche if you have things you care about saying and if people care about it like

you know it doesn't everything doesn't have to be free i guess i mean because certainly everyone

else look at the llms everyone else is hoovering up our free stuff and charging for it you know

there's some balance there that requires a recalibration or a rethink you know periodically

and it's not about the money because like you know there are like there aren't i've got a few

subscribers but not many but it's a way to support all the things but it just yeah it cleans its own

face rather than me being out of pocket to do a newsletter i can do a newsletter like me at least

like this podcast until recently speaking yeah yeah exactly exactly um but yeah and i don't know

i mean all the open source stuff and again

keep harping back to this traumatic experience of rereading working in public but like you give

away so much and the value is constantly degraded and the it's like without the community aspect

without the buy-in from people there's nothing that makes it worthwhile and so to have a small

community around the newsletter is a really nice thing and people can reply and they can get and

you know have conversations with them and it's it's a bit it's a pleasure to be able to write

slightly longer form slightly more considered i took you know i think about it all month and i

write it and yeah it's it's it's just enjoyable in a way that if i were to just put blog posts out

it wouldn't be and it's and you have stuff to say i mean i've i've felt recently that i've looked

looked back over a year in reviews sometimes i there's a lot of public facing stuff and sometimes

there isn't so much right sometimes there is i feel like yeah what do i have what do i have to

say or what does someone have to say about a thing like i feel like there's some periods you're just

like well i want to share a lot and then sometimes it's just absorbing and taking things in and um

you know like speaking for myself like i don't think i have a i couldn't do a monthly newsletter

not on programming you know you just do a weekly newsletter right but i'm not yeah i just do all

the work and none of that yeah but you know but there's i know there's periods of life and maybe

anyways it's good that there's clearly a lot of things you know we talk about things in the

think like oh there are these things changing and and someone with experience and thoughts um you

know that's what i want to read right especially these days you don't want to just read noise you

know someone who has a take and has a considered opinion even if you don't agree with it at least

it's something you feels like you know eating your vegetables and i like vegetables right it's not

like a painful thing all right anyways so good well done but like this well anyway this year i

managed to um there was a kind of amongst other topics but i managed to get out a kind of four

software on how i how i plan and how i uh you know how i write software and how i how i'm able

to free how i was able to freelance um profitably for you know best part of two decades why was i

able to do that well because i could i could come up with a quote and nine times out of ten i'd hit

the quote right and you're you know you're like your user model you know post which you know you've

been talking about for a long time that that generated a lot of things i mean that led to i

led to me doing my talk it led to actual changes and in django itself things that you know i still

have a ticket to add uh user um yeah what is it called profile models to um you know so it has

real yes well done and yeah and anyway the the core one as well and this year i've got thoughts

already lining up well what am i going to do it on the this year i've got thoughts on um

like some more software engineering topics about you know hey why it is you know people django why

why do i still use django well because it's the perfect starting point right but then how do you

grow it and this is when we had hinnick on the podcast and we touched on some of those but to

like look at i always say the um i've been for years i've um i've hated the uh soft delete flag

you know when you've got deleted flag and i just think that's an anti-pattern i think causes a

number of problems that you know people don't like and i've never had the time to sit down

and write up exactly why it is that i think it's an anti-pattern what do you sorry just quickly what

instead um i so i would um have a um an event life cycle event events for models and so if

you need to reconstruct the um a delete you delete the model but you've got the history events in a

log which you can then reconstruct the life of the model from so you don't keep a deleted model

in the database but you you're able to um or you've got an audit log of this entire history

basically um and do you use that there's that django life cycle package right is that no i i

don't i use a kind of um almost a an event sourcing approach which then what's nice about

it is you you can grow from um basic django models into audit logged models and then you can go all

the way to event sourcing if you need to if you get to the sort of scale where you can't write

um you can't do these transaction bound rights to an active record because you just got too much

traffic or too much contention or you know you've got um uh competing requests that you need to

in a non-racy way so you need to go to one of these command query request separation

you know okay all right i want you don't yeah you can grow to that now but for me to write that up

it's been something that i've had on the back burner for years but literally i've never had

the time to write it up so you know yeah having the newsletter is a way that i'll be able to write

that up over a few course of a few months so that's exciting anyway and i do think you know

there is that old you know adage you don't really you know why do you write you know you write to

thoughts was that you know various people have said words to that effect but it's true i think

yeah yeah no exactly it could by if you can't write something down the process of writing

something down clarifies what you do in fact think yes yes so uh we've been banging on for

a little bit so quick quickly on me so i have a new job i guess that's the big news and something

i've been doing in the background which has contributed to not maybe seeming like i'm

publicly doing all that much

which is starting monday january 6th i've i'm joining jet brains pie charm as a developer

advocate so i'm very much looking forward to this actually i've i've long planned to go back

to keep all my stuff um but move it a little more into maintenance or on the side role and

you know get back in the swing of things and the jet brains crew i've known for enough for quite a

long time so i'm looking forward to working with them and i'm very excited to be working with them

and i'm very excited to be working with them and i'm very excited to be working with them and

i'm very excited to be working with them and i'm excited to be working with them and i'm excited

this role. So I'm planning to stay a little bit longer than cheated. I have no goals or probably

anyone wants me to be a Django fellow. So I don't have a lot to say about it because I haven't

started, but it will be working, doing, writing videos, podcasts, I think still going to conferences,

being part of the communities, being the web communities. It might expand beyond that to

Python is big in data science, ML. There's other people who work on that. We shall see.

So I'm hoping we're going to get you as a little mole into the ML, Django's mole into the ML world.

Well, I definitely, yeah, I definitely, there's definitely some of that. I mean,

that is the big fish these days. There are people who do that, but that is the question.

How does Django fit in there? How does web fit in there? Because

they still got to put it out there and share it somehow.

Well, but everybody does that.

They're ML, they're pandas. Put your pandas online using a flask or the fast API,

you know, how to work, but you could just spin up a nano Django example and you, you know,

that's in your video. And then all of a sudden these people are using Django instead of something

else. So this is our, this is our secret weapon.

Yeah. So I think there'll be a lot of videos, which I'm very excited to get

better at videos and to do videos, a new format and a big part of having this private office,

which nobody can see is to have a dedicated space to do these things. So yeah, that's a new thing.

I'm excited. I'll,

I'll mention things I have to mention, but it also, I want to make clear that that is

separate from this. So they know the JetBrains PyCharm team knows that I have the podcast.

I have the newsletter. I have the learn Django site that will all exist. And that will all

still be doing stuff on it. I'm just not going to be doing as much, maybe new things. So I have,

I have my three courses. I'm finishing up the updates on APIs and professionals.

I'm very close. Not quite there. I wanted to, I wanted to, you know, pre pre-break, I was like,

I'm going to get that all that done and just come in, you know, with all that done, but it's not

fully done, but it will be, I've been working on it. It'll be better for the break. To be honest.

I have the e-commerce course, which is still half to two thirds done. So that probably won't come

out this month, but it will come out the next couple of months. As I, but I'm going to be,

you should just back bracket that for Q3, right? You should say it's coming out in Q3.

Like, yeah, we'll talk about it. But I do want to talk about the big thing for me, you know,

last year was I finally got the LearnDjango.com site out, which I don't think we've talked about.

And so I had a Black Friday sale. I had the user payments. It all worked, which was honestly a

little bit surprising because it's like just, just me, you know, staring at my computer and.

But I don't really, I don't really think it's surprising because you, like you dot the I's

and cross the T's, right? I know. Yeah. Well, this is the thing, like when you, when you work

in code and then you work for yourself, it's, it's so easy to just all the demons kind of crop up,

right? Like there's no,

there's no external thing. There's nobody who's like reviewing my stuff and saying like, oh,

that was good. You know, it's just like going down the list one thing after another. And then

I think I was also very tired at the end of the year. And so I finally got out, I did the Black

Friday, but that meant the whole Black Friday period. I was online the whole time. And I

mentioned to all the people who bought eBooks that you can, um, get access to the new site.

Cause I'm the long-term goals to switch the site and then print books. So a lot of, you know,

hundreds and hundreds of emails from definitely a couple hundred. I'm not, I'm trying not to

exaggerate at least three or 400 emails from people. Um, and that's still manual. So I have

the Django admin going for my courses and, you know, can I make that better? Yes. Will I? Yes.

No. And this moment, you know, and this moment I'm just going to get done. And it's also a chance

to email with people because they ultimately, like if I look at my sales and how I've made my living

the last six, five, six years, um,

it's not that many people, you know, I mean, it's a couple of, it's thousands, but it's not,

it's not more than 10,000. And so it's important to like, have a chance to, you know, have a brief

conversation if they want about like, Oh, like what, what did you find useful? Like updates,

new things. Um, you know, cause that, that is who I, in a sense I work for, you know,

the paid people anyways. No. And I was, I remember you saying that at the time,

cause I was like, well, why don't you just script up? So you've got the emails and just script it

up. So there's automatic credit. And you're like, no, no, I'm, I'm enjoying speaking to these people.

I'm enjoying communicating with my users, with my, with my customers, with the people who bought

the books and seeing what they've got to say. And I was like, really touched by that. You, you know,

ultimately this is why, no, but this is ultimately, this is why your stuff is so good, right? Is

because you, you've got that empathy to reach out instead of just, I'm going to script out and not

speak to them. No, I'm going to one by one deal with these, with these requests to see, and that

connection is irreplaceable, right? You, you can't, you can't get that back if you script that.

I benefit. Yeah. I benefit from

it. And I think it comes through in the, in the text. So yeah, so that's that. Maybe we'll do a

longer one. I mean the, the site itself, I think I don't have enough distance on, you know, we,

we talked to one time, like let's do a whole episode on like building this e-commerce site,

which we could do, but it's a part of me is also like, oh, I just want to go on to the next

thing. But at the end of the day, like I very much like elegant code. Like I work in all my

examples and books to think a ton and then try to make it as elegant, but not overly clever.

So like, I still want someone else to be able to come in and see how it works. But ultimately I

have, it's a Django site. I've got Markdown. I write things in the admin. I've got tutorials,

which are free. And so there's some, you know, reviews and permissions on that. Then I've got

courses where you have to have an account and you have to have access to that. Payments. Yeah.

At some point I'll do a, there's a user progress thing. I think that's the problem with coding in

a way is that you do all these things. And as soon as you're done, you're just like,

meh, onto the next thing. There's no sense of like,

Oh, that's quite, this is kind of, that's quite cool that I did that, right?

This is the infinite list of things you could possibly do, which you haven't yet done.

Yeah. It's not like, you know, I stare at a painting on the wall and go like,

oh, that's okay. You know? And it's also, and I think maybe the slightly insidious thing is it's

not, it's just this sandcastles, you know, it's sandcastles on the beach. And so you,

it requires constant maintenance too. So that's, that's part of the thing that I've spent this

past year. I spent a lot of time updating my tutorials,

updating courses, and that's like kind of the, that's the less satisfying work,

but that's also the necessary work that, you know, makes a difference. So.

Well, people don't realize how much maintenance, you know, you think the source code is just what

I download. It's just this fixed thing, right? It's not the fixed thing. Like all the time,

you're constantly needing to keep it maintained.

Well, that's the thing when someone's like, I want to write a book or I want to do this or that.

It's like, yeah, yeah, you know, do it. It's a ton of work to do, but like,

keep it going more than a year. And then you're like, you know, I think then you get the gut

check of why are you doing it? Cause it's not financial. Like I I've certainly

would have, you know, as well as I've done, I would have done better just having a job.

But it was, I wanted to, I had, you know, personally, I've got young kids, so I had

flexibility, like, but you have to, I think you have to really, really want to teach

to keep it going because it's, you know, like I updated 50 blog, 50 tutorials last year.

But like, it's invisible. It's completely invisible. You know, whereas somebody could

look and see, Ooh, you 50, 50 tutorials. And every time you write it, you post it on LinkedIn

and Reddit and you get feedback and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it's like, I just took

that thing. And it's almost more work to update something because both the code changes a little

bit, but also my understanding of how I had presented changes. And that's, and then, and I

was actually happy to see that emailing with customers, there were a few that had read the

5.0 update to beginners and had recently read an earlier version. And some of them were pointing

out, you know, Oh, I really like this, this, this, I saw that you did that. And I was like, Oh, thank

God. Cause I don't expect anyone to know that, but like, it's so much work and there is so much

difference yet. It's all within the marketing banner of the same thing. And so, yeah, it was

banging in the background. That's okay. Carlton. Anyway, so big news, new job, hang on, hang on two

things. Sorry.

It was just banging in the background. So I was a bit like, I was wincing and I put you off your

stroke, but I just want to comment on, on two things you said there. One, um, you should make

sure that you boot, you, you do mention every time you update one because, and you do repost on

LinkedIn because like you being modest, right? I'm back. I'm back on LinkedIn. I had to, you know,

cause when I was interviewing with JetBrains, they're like, well, do you have a resume or

LinkedIn? And I was like, Oh, um, I have had those. I like, you know, gleefully or whatever,

but I was like, well, I, at the time I was like, I'm never going to get a tech job through LinkedIn,

which I think maybe six years ago was the case, but now, you know, everyone's on there. So it's

a chance to, you know, see what everyone else is up to. Um, see what my MBA classmates are up to

in their, you know, glass mansions in the Hills. Uh, but yes, but even I, even I doing a professionally

fall into this trap of you do all this effort to make the thing and then to just put it on those

things. Sometimes you just like, can't be bothered. Um, yeah, I should do the updates

because it doesn't, I know in a sense, it doesn't feel like a lot of work to, or it doesn't, it

doesn't feel like noteworthy to update. But it is that this tutorial now has a new version for the

latest channel or the latest is that's important thing. Cause then people see it and they go, Oh

yeah, I'll read that one. But so that was one point. Second is you must have some, some call

to action or some thing that I know you're too shy to like possibly mention it. I have a

three-course bundle. So I have my beginner's book, APIs and professionals. The beginner's one is

fully up to date. The APIs and professionals are in the process of being updated. So they're still

on the 4.0 version. So they almost entirely work, but there's a couple of small things.

Um, I will have updates for that soon, but you get $30 off if you buy all three,

plus you get lifetime access, lifetime updates. You can email me, I'll engage with you.

So I highly recommend you do that. Um, that's the offer that it will always be,

the offer is something of individual and then something for all of them. Like I don't want to

play games with being too, no, but if somebody's got a new year's resolution to level up their

Django skills and you know, they should act on that now before that. Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

Yes. Well, and I would just say people teach differently. If you find any tutorials or

things and you think that's a mind I can follow, like you're going to like it. Um,

and enough people like it that I have done it and continue to do it.

So thank you. Yes. And yeah, even as an MBA, I mean, I'm going to make you, I'm going to make

you market it even if you own it yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I honestly,

I hadn't even thought about saying anything about the updates. I should, I should do that. That's

smart. See, this is why we need colleagues and you need COVID. All right. Sorry. All right. What

else? Oh, the podcast. We are going to have, we have some people lined up to sponsor the podcast,

which you'll see them in here. Um, there's information on djangochat.com,

but basically you can do per episode, or if you do five episodes,

you get a discount. It's the price of four. It reaches a couple thousand people, highly engaged.

Yeah. No, I mean, it's quite niche as well, though. If you're in the Django space, then

it's not bad. It's not, if you were in the Python space, maybe not exactly your cup of tea,

but if you're in the Django space, like this is, well, this is it. Well, there we are.

There we are. And we are, you know, we are, we are back. Our brains are,

will be fully started up with, we have guests after this. We have a whole bunch of guests lined

up.

It won't just be us going on and on, but we'll have guests diving into Django. And there's a lot,

there's a lot that's happening, um, both in Django and the guests that we have lined up.

I'm super excited about because we just get to ask them questions. And, um, I'm, I'm not going to say

names until the episodes come out, but we have a whole bunch of people lined up that we've

wanted to have on for years. A couple of people we've had on before they're doing really new,

cool things. So yeah. What else?

I don't think there is any, I mean, we can say happy new year to everybody, right? And

you know, yes, enjoy it.

Happy new year. Any complaints about Django? Ping Carlton cause he's on his during council now.

You have to open up, don't ask me about it.

All right. Well, thanks everyone. Thanks everyone for listening and Django chat.com. We'll see you

all next time.

Join you next time.

Bye bye.