Transcript: DjangoCon Europe 2022 - Kojo Idrissa
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I'm Carlton Gibson, joined instead by Will
Vinson. Hello, Will Vinson.
Hi, Carlton Gibson.
Hello, Will Vinson. Django Chat, what's that you're saying? It's a podcast on the Django
Web Framework. Totally out of practice. Welcome back from the summer break, folks. Joined
today by Kojo Arisa, who I've just bumped into at DjangoCon and gave a great keynote
there, and we're going to talk about some of the topics he brought up there. Hey, Kojo,
How are you?
I'm good.
How are you all?
Very excited to have you on.
You've just flown back from Porto, yeah?
Yeah.
Yesterday, what is it?
8 a.m. Tuesday in Central Times.
I'm recording this.
I arrived home.
I got back to my apartment about 11 p.m. Monday.
Wow.
Well, you're a trooper.
We appreciate it.
No problem.
Thanks for coming on.
So let's first of all talk about DjangoCon because it's been, what, two, three years
since we were all able to get together?
Yeah, yeah.
I guess 2019 probably was the last time.
Well, I think we're probably, you two were at DjangoCon US 2019.
The US one, yes.
Okay, okay.
Not Europe, though.
So, yeah, that was the last time because that was in, like, September, October time, 2019.
And then, obviously, by the time the spring came around, DjangoCon Europe was canceled because of…
Yeah, but I remember I had my plane ticket, which I had to get a refund and all.
i was so excited carlton was going to caravan and bring his whole family on the train over
so that's right i keep forgetting carlton lives in spain and so he's you know closer to closer
to various european things i was gonna i ended up flying to um porto this time just you know short
shortish flight but i really wanted to get the train but like it's like three hours say from
barcelona to madrid which is kind of halfway across the iberian peninsula that's such a cool
train ride that's like i've done that the high speed one it's so beautiful and that's the fastest
in the world i think well i don't know i saw i read it i read a thing recently it said that
spain's got the second largest high-speed network in the world after china because they've invested
a lot of the eu development funds in that um and then you know you can get from madrid to close to
the portuguese border in sort of similar kind of time but there's just no connections across and
so it was going to take me a couple of days each way and in the you know with with my wife taking
care of the kids at home i'm like i can't i can go away for you know the conference and then the
sprints and then but like to stretch it two days either side is is asking a bit much so i had to
fly but maybe next time i mean if they have it in paris i'm definitely getting next i can get to
paris they just announced edinburgh in may i believe next year yeah but it's a janko europe
2023 edinburgh in may end of may i don't know about you kojo but when i first arrived it was my first
in-person event since the pandemic and so we you know we arrived and we walked into the park where
the venue was it was amazing venue the supporters are lovely city and there's this big conference
center dome arena thing and it was it's like wow yeah we definitely needed to make sure that we
definitely need to come after they put all the work in to organize it we definitely needed to
come here this is amazing but then you get there and it's like oh like lots of people i think five
nearly 600 people in the venue it's like this is that was a little strange for me it's certainly
the first day i suddenly got a bit more use what how so for me uh i guess for better or worse this
was my third event in-person event this year so i i keynoted uh pi con pi texas in at the end of
march of this year and so that's like a two and a half drive in austin two and a half hour drive
Houston so pretty straightforward and I used to live in Austin so I'm comfortable city but that was
I think I'm pretty sure under 200 people it might have been like 125 150 so it was you know it is so
that was my first in-person gathering of you know anyone who wasn't like a family member really uh
since 2019 and so you know so that sort of eased me into things a little bit but then I was also
of PyCon US.
Which is like 1,000 or something like that.
Yeah, it was like 1,000 or 1,800.
It was not as big as usual PyCon, maybe like half the number of in-person people as usual
PyCon.
But still, more than 8,000 people that you don't know, or most of whom you don't know.
And so, and a very large venue, PyCon is usually in the city's main convention center.
And so, you know, that sort of helped, I guess, with, you know, with getting over any potential
anxieties as far as like suddenly being in a crowd again.
But, you know, the important thing was definitely because this is my first time in Europe proper
or mainland Europe, or I still, despite having been there, I still don't know what it's called.
It's the European mainland.
From having lived in China, I think, you know, the Chinese mainland, the European mainland,
I guess, but I doubt that's what people in Europe say.
Well, I don't think people in Europe.
think people in britain they call it the continent we're going to the continent
well we say these days we say the king you know we're not talking about that let's not
go on there go on there okay go on if you've got a question go on do people really say the king now
like i mean like just like when the year changes people still writing last year's date on things
it's like it's been like what two weeks you know people still say you know i'm sure people still
reflectively saying god save the queen and then oh wait no she'd be on telly they may well be i
did to be honest i don't know um yeah carlton fled for a reason so exactly
civil war the first the english civil war back in 16 whenever had to live in holland until you know
like john lock for instance john lock famous british philosopher he had to live in exile for
awesome anyway i don't know so in present gatherings uh porter was nice um so i guess
so the the getting reaccustomed to being around large numbers of people you know was that part
was less of an issue um i think it was just really more of the sort of you know just the adjustment
to new country new continent um although it also helped that i was the opening keynote and so
there wasn't really time to be worried about anything other than okay you know do i have
do i have words to say i feel like i have words to say but can i say those words who can know
um and then i went and said the words and then i was tired and so uh yeah i think you know the
opening keynote is the best spot to have because you can relax you can just enjoy the conference
whereas if you're talking at some any other spot it's like builds and builds until you talk and
then you can relax and i know myself i will tend to make adjustments and i guess i sort of saw
other people sort of, and I'm not sure if this was scheduling genius on the part of
the Jango Henry people or just sort of lucky sandivity, but it seemed like there were,
you know, a number of talks that had at least a somewhat related topic to my opening keynote,
you know, or, you know, more than one of us was on the same page, and I heard sort of
references to my talk over the course of the event, but then it was also interesting because
I know that, like, I'm that person too, like, if I was speaking later in the event, there's
always this temptation to like oh let me let me include something that i heard in somebody else's
talk in my talk so yeah i i think that's one of the the lovely things about the live conference
versus the pre-recorded talks that we've had the last couple of years i mean and the virtual
conferences are massively better than no conference at all but this kind of way that the narrative of
the conference builds over the course of the three days and that's super so we wanted to get you on
because I think your keynote was super important
and something that, you know, is really interesting.
And so perhaps you could talk about what was your talk and, you know.
So the talk, the title was
Improving Contributor Experience and Broadening Contributor Scope.
It really probably should have been called Improving Maintainer Experience,
but sort of both were true.
There were two very broad ideas there.
One being that in the open source community,
we have people who are maintaining the core projects.
And we, as a community, need to try
to find ways to better support those people, better support
them as they do work that supports us.
That's important.
And then, at the same time, the need
to broaden the scope of our contributors,
the different people who contribute to the projects.
We have, as a community, I think,
focused too much on the idea of contributors being limited
to people who write code for Django
or people who write code for Python or what have you.
And the truth is, there are a lot of other types
of contributions and types of contributors.
And so I never work on a talk because I'm always
working on talks.
And so I think the next version of this talk,
or the next iteration of these ideas,
might have to be called, let's talk about how we talk.
Because as I was working on this talk,
and discussing my ideas with other people,
issues came up around language.
And I had some of my own concerns
as far as using certain terms,
and trying to not alienate people
and trying to not other people .
So the idea is, even the small differences
between a term like a non-code contributor
and a non-coding contributor,
non-coding contributions,
they sound almost identical,
but they can have very different meanings
depending on one's ear, but I think,
and just sort of for the sake of clarity,
since I've used these examples,
I have used the term non-code contributor in my talk
and in some of the things I've referenced
as someone who is a contributor
to Python or Django or what have you,
but they're contributing by not using code,
and in my talk I used examples
of some of my coworkers from RevSys,
three of whom are developers,
one of whom is not, and so for people who are familiar with the Django community and or Django Chat,
Jeff Triplett, who does the newsletter as well, and is a former founding member of the Django Events Foundation,
North America, former Django Clan U.S. chair and Django Clan U.S. co-chair,
current Python Software Foundation board member, him, Frank Triplett, former Django Software Foundation president,
Lacey Williams-Sancho, who is a former Django Clan U.S. chair and co-chair and organizer,
And then Catherine, who works at RevSys and does a lot of administrative stuff behind the scenes to make sure that Django Client US works and has done similar type of work for the DSF.
And so the reason I use them as examples is because all those contributions that they're doing, they're definitely making significant contributions to Django and the Django community.
But, you know, none of them involve code.
but three of those people, Jeff, Lacey, and Frank,
are developers and are capable of doing code contributions,
but they're not, they're making contributions without code.
And so, and then Catherine is not a developer at all,
but those are all very significant contributions.
So I contrast that non-code contribution
with a term I've heard other people use and say,
the idea of non-coding contributors,
which seems, which is almost sort of this like,
oh, well, people who can't code, and so they have to, you know, do other things that, you know,
people who can't code do because that's all they can do.
And it ends up being this sort of like, oh, like the kids' table sort of, this is sort of a very weird thing.
And I think that's why we have to, I think, like I said, the next iteration of this might be, you know,
let's talk about how we talk because there are definitely sort of ideas and
cultural norms in our community that I think we need to address them to be fixed
Kate prime example and I was I was literally shocked to hear this you do to
sort of hearing witnesses so I was the opening keynote for it for it this can
be sound a little pedantic but the repetition is for a point I was the
opening keynote speaker at DjangoCon Europe, a Django conference full of Django people.
The closing keynote for DjangoCon Europe, a Django conference in front of Django people,
was Chaim Kirby, who is the Django Software Foundation's vice president. And I watched
him stand on a stage at DjangoCon Europe in front of a bunch of Django people as the Django
Software Foundation Vice President and say, he has never contributed Django.
And I'm like, okay, that's, and so, and this is not to try to, you know, be pedantic about
his words or what have you, but it's sort of a larger cultural thing of, he got on a
stage in front of a bunch of Django people and said that, and knew that they would, he
He knew how they would interpret it, and was aware that this is the commonly accepted viewpoint
in our community.
If you have not made a code contribution to Django, then you have made no contributions.
You have not contributed to Django, and you look at different people's bios, and it's
like, oh, Django contributor, and I'm like, okay, that's someone who's on the technical
board or what have you, and so we somehow as a community have defined contributor as
Only people who have written code or maybe docs.
Yeah, and that's exactly right.
But what I love is anybody who's involved in Django,
involved in the Django community,
as soon as you phrase it as clearly and bluntly as that,
that you've got somebody like Jeff or Frank or Lacey
or Catherine, Catherine, or Chaim,
and you say they haven't, I mean, you know,
Frank and Jeff and Lacey have all made commits at some point,
but like you say, oh, they're not contributors.
That's ridiculous.
everybody involved in the and so okay it's like reductio ad absurdum it's like we've got uh
you know this the way of using contributors like this leads to thing leads to conclusions
which we all know are false so it can't be a good way of of using it and in addition to that
i think it also uh so the the something so kind of cutting my talking and sort of half to thirds
there's the so there was an issue of me trying to lay out the problem of
why our current maintainers need more help um and so the sort of the first
half to third to two-thirds of the talk was focused on code contributions um because there's
a problem that i thought needed to be laid out and then i proposed a solution this idea of a new role
of contributor mentors um specifically code contributor mentors but then the second part
of the talk, maybe I guess the last third approximately, was focusing on non-code
contributors. Or, you know, and again, I've been struggling with that language.
Maybe sometimes using like, you know, code, you know, contributions without code,
because again, I mean, like the people that I work with, you know, like I myself, like,
It's like in two weeks, I leave for DjangoCon US where I'm an organizer, I am the orientation
chair, the Platinum Talks chairman, and the development sprints chair.
There's no code involved in that.
There may be, there could be, but just like the ... I think I said this to people in Porto
just while we were at DjangoCon Europe, as we were sitting at lunch, there was no code
involved in putting those beers on the table, or having the food arrive, or securing the
venue, or making sure all the AV worked, so that the large undertaking is involved in
putting out a general kind of road, or any sort of conference, or any sort of, or all
sorts of other things.
Those are contributions without code, but those are still vital and necessary.
I mean, like, times talk about the future of the DSF, and where it could go, and what
it might do, he wasn't talking about regression bugs.
He wasn't talking about how we need to improve test coverage or update version of Docker.
It's about the legal and the financial and the organizational aspects of the Django Software
Foundation and keeping those things going.
I think those sorts of contributions are often overlooked.
I think because there's, the community culture has,
is too heavily swayed, too heavily slanted
towards software engineering, yeah.
And also I'm realizing that I need to,
I've done a separate talk on this
called the Python Spectrum, and this idea,
there's a range of people who use Python,
but I'm realizing, I have like this graphic
that's sort of a, sort of like a bi-directional arrow
that's meant to show a continuum or a spectrum,
And I'm realizing I may need to change that graphic
to make it more visually clear that
software engineering is a specific
of programming so it's like if you've written any code then you're a program
I mean if you've written hello world you know that that's programming you're a
programmer congratulations now I mean you might not think of yourself as a
programmer you might not be someone who programs on a continual basis but you
know so that's sort of anyone who's written any sort of code is a programmer
as you move towards the other end of the spectrum you have this very specialized
use of programming which is what's known as soft which is what I call software
engineering, and that's what people who are, you know, and I've got a bunch of different
things that delineate that, but when most people think of professional developers, they're
usually thinking of software engineering, but especially with Python, that is an increasingly
small subset of the community, and so, I mean, it came up a few times, but just the idea
that software engineering is a subset of programming, you know, so software engineers are a small
group of programming of the people who use programming specifically python for various
uses from it's a small subset of people who use python to generate some value for themselves
but the community culture is so heavily slanted towards software engineering is the one true way
that it leads to all these uh weird things so i think that's right as well it's because if you
just take django that i think the vast majority of django projects out there are on the programming
to middle end of the spectrum, rather than, and you know, as you get into a bigger team and a
bigger project, you take on more and more software engineering practices. But most of the literature
that you read is all about being Google and Facebook and, you know, these massive companies.
And it's just not appropriate to take on that kind of tooling for the vast majority of Django
applications that have ever been written and ever will be written. Exactly. I was gonna say,
Yeah, I think part of why there's so much just advanced writing is that people in those organizations have the luxury and the knowledge to write it.
So they have an employer and they can spend months on a specific thing and then they would document it.
Whereas a beginner generally doesn't have the confidence or doesn't document what they're learning as much.
Or if you're in the middle, I know, I think like going who goes to conferences, right?
It's a lot of consultants, freelance people, and then people at big corps because it's an investment, right, to do.
So I think there's the same thing for tutorials to write any sort of or not even a tutorial, right?
Any sort of blog post is a big investment in time.
And for whatever reason, I think the more advanced you are, the more prone you are to write that.
And, you know, I find this like I lose my sense of what a beginner is thinking except that I get lots of emails every day.
that's the only way I have any sort of touch point to remembering all the pain
that I went through.
Yeah. And I think, and I'm not sure how clearly I communicated this yet.
It's like the moment you finish your talk, you know, you're like, okay,
here are the four ways it's going to be better. You know,
but for me,
one of the sort of the danger points there is that by focusing the definition
of contributor so heavily on people who make contributions by way of code, we end up largely
excluding, you know, or, you know, sort of explicitly, but also sometimes sort of, you
know, sort of tacitly or, you know, unconsciously, sort of excluding people who could become
contributors, who could become contributors without needing to use code.
And so, and it's like most of what Han was talking about in his keynote, like those,
we need more of those people and my contention is and yeah i think you know this is like sort
of well i have similar backgrounds as far as having been like you know accounting nba people
before you know becoming developers as i said in my talk i was a professionally trained in
capitalism and so um yeah after you know receiving my professional capitalism training i then became
software engineer but there are a lot of people in those spaces who could benefit from python and
that's my first sort of serious python project was in my work as an accountant in an automating uh
process but i think there are lots of people who in in the the most obvious example of this we
see with the growth of data science and people you know generate all sorts of value with python and
other tools in their own data science but there are a lot of other people who could benefit from
both Django and Python without having it become their primary focus. It is this spectacularly
useful tool. The language itself lends itself to people being able to focus on solving the problem
instead of having to wrestle with the language. And so that's a much larger percentage of the
the population using Python and Django and those people who aren't focusing on
being web developers or software engineers as their primary career have
all these other skills and all this other expertise that we could use in our
community as far as you know with ranging sort of from obvious things like
the DSF board a PSF board but also on you know on smaller boards like you know
for that you know if there's an organization around Dagon kind Europe or
or DEFNA, or I know here in Texas there's a high Texas
foundation in different organizations like that,
or organizing your local meetups,
or helping to solve code-related problems
without actually being involved in coding.
So this contributor-mentor thing that I've been thinking
about and trying to sort out and talking to Carlton about,
some of that is motivated by my desire to help friends
who are maintainers of projects,
But that is also work that needs to be done, sort of an issue that needs to be sort of figured out to some extent.
But the core maintainers shouldn't necessarily be the ones trying to figure that out because they're already using a lot of their free time.
And again, most of the people are using their free time, time not spent with their families, time not spent taking a nap or eating a pie or going on a walk.
They're building software for us.
And so instead of also asking them to say, oh, you have problems?
Well, use some more of your free time to figure those out.
You know, there are other people who could be trying to figure out, you know, decent solutions to those problems.
But those are also contributions that don't involve code.
Carlton, you and I have mentioned at one point, or you mentioned the idea of like a hall of fame or some sort of, you know, recognition for all these people.
Because I think part of, and I don't think you mentioned this yet, Kojo, but part of the issue is that a commit is so black and white and there forever.
But organizing a conference or all these other things, you know, people aren't doing it necessarily for the recognition, but it's harder to see it, whereas a commit you see.
Well, I think this, I mean, this is like a longstanding sort of discussion that we've been having.
It goes back to the discussions three, four years ago around the dissolution of the old Django core, which became Django 10 and changed the governance of Django.
And it's kind of natural when you begin a software project and it's, you know, only a few people in Lawrence, Texas to count the commit.
Because, sorry, Lawrence, Kansas.
I apologize to my southern middle bit of the North American listeners that I got the states wrong.
They're very proud in Kansas.
Yeah, as well. They rightly should be. I'd like to go to Kansas. But it's naturally counter-commits. But then as the community grows, and especially it grows to something like Django's side, all these other aspects come in, and it's how do you count those?
It's, you know, one hope that there was around the end of the resolution of the old Django Corps and this kind of honorary title of a Django Corps contributor was that we would be able to apply it more widely.
And I think the ball was nicely picking up momentum there and ideas and lists of, you know, some cohorts that that could be applied to were being drawn up.
and then obviously the pandemic arrived and well that ground to a hole but i think that um that's
picking up katie mclaughlin was helping me um pull together a hopefully we're going to get a
list of you know be able to draw together contributors for django perhaps 4.2 we'll get
it up and running i tried to do it for django 4.0 and then the world came along and sort of knocked
me sideways just at the wrong moment so that didn't happen i got a couple of blog posts
that identified some committers but again this was just committers what katie's able to do i mean and
she's given many talks on this subject and works um yeah it's doing a lot of again this is a a
contribution that doesn't require code and i mean there could be some code in the background but
it's not a direct it is not a contribution of code to django or to python but it is a contribution
to those large ecosystems and i know she has done a lot of work uh around this idea of
um sort of better better highlighting a better surface and better tracking people who make
contributions without go yeah and what she's able to do is she got tooling around this to do this
is not only get the person who made the commit like the official person with the github commit
but any co-authors and then she's able to go to the issues and find people who commented and
interacted and gave a meaningful interaction because you know you might you might um advise
everybody and and yet not commit anything and you know not and somehow you were a major part of the
of the release and yet you you weren't recognized at all and this this isn't you know the hope so
you know she's making massive progress there so hopefully um that will come together or you know
or it will come together it's just you know when it comes together for which particular release
but then that should give us the the center for saying well okay but also in this time period you
know this conference was organized who you know who were the team there and who and then start to
call those people out and recognize them and say hey that was important and then you know who was
on the the django software foundation board well and what did they do and then we can start to say
well you know in your city who pulled out who organized the meetups and we can just start to
build a wider recognition um culture and the thing with recognition is that um you identify you can
identify the jobs that are done you can then give recognition for them but you can then start to
codify what the job actually is because you know do you realize the Django translation team who
were never recognized by anybody in the whole 17 years of the history of translations in Django
that do you know that they they do all this and that one day they might not turn up for work for
whatever reason and rightly so and because I say work it's not paid it's all volunteer for all of
this time what work is it they do and so if we if we do need to give them more support and we do
need to make sure that there are other people around who know what that work is that we can
draw up a sort of a checklist of what the work is and then a call for volunteers to help do it
it's a kind of self who can then go on to be recognized right it's a it's a it's a self
perpetuating cycle for a healthy community a healthy ecosystem yeah i think so and it was
let's see so one of the one of the bits of information that i referenced to the in my
you know there was you know i was sort of synthesizing ideas between places but one of
them that i i thought was very important to include with naomi cedar's pie kind us 2022
keynote where she talks about you know sort of the idea of our community being a gift economy
ecosystem. And I think that is important from the standpoint of one of the problems that
has come up, in much the same way that you don't want to build your community around
responses to a limited number of bad actors. Like this one guy tried to put a bomb in his
shoe on a plane, and now we all have to take our shoes off forever at the airport. So you
don't want to sort of key in on that too much. But I think Naomi's point as far as wanting
our community to remain the sort of gift economy, and not just a transactional thing, is important.
And you will sometimes have bad actors as far as code-related contributions who will
try to make a code-related contribution just so they can sort of say, look what I did or
have it as a line item on the resume.
So that is a concern, and I agree with Amy that we want to keep things focused on as
as close to a gift economy as we can.
However, and I bring that up because sometimes
when you start talking about recognition,
there's a concern that, oh, if there's more recognition,
people will start doing stuff for recognition.
I think that is, while technically true,
and theoretically possible,
I don't think that that's a large concern.
I think the larger issue is that by recognizing,
by increasing the recognition of these people
who are making contributions that don't require code,
It also allows you to highlight the areas of need
that's in your community or in your project.
It's like, okay, we have, you know,
let's say you can, over the course of a six month period,
you can see 100 commits to Python,
see Python 100 commits to Django.
Okay, those are clear and obvious, you can see those.
They're easy to look at, it's data that's easy to capture.
But then if you can look over and see,
oh, well, wait a minute, we have like 200 people
who are making these contributions that don't require code.
okay, well, clearly that stuff that was done
and needed to be done, what is that stuff
and who's doing it and how can we make sure
that it continues to happen?
Because nobody, we definitely try to make sure
that the new code contributions continue to happen.
And we have tooling around that.
But okay, well, what's this other stuff that has happened,
that's going on and that makes things work?
And what's this work that people are doing?
We need to make sure we're aware of that
so that we can continue to have that work being done
and try to improve the way it's done
and make the lives of those people easier,
and make the lives of future non-code contributors easier.
Maybe this has come up before, Carlton,
but even just having a slash contributors page on Django Project,
for some of this, we don't list past board members.
Based on this podcast, some former board members have reached out
and been like, oh yeah, we wrestled with that issue before,
and I didn't know they were on the board because there's no listing anywhere.
Same with translation team.
Actually, quite often there's emails into the DSF board saying, how do I, you know, help?
And so redirect them to, used to be the Google group, now the forum.
But it's completely hidden.
So just in terms of, like, doing something, right?
Like, you know, the first step is, okay, even if we had Passport members, you know, DjangoCon organizers, translation team, there's many, many more people to add.
But you sort of need to start somewhere, I think, rather than not doing anything.
Yeah, you can't not do any of this because you can't recognize everybody.
You have to start recognizing someone.
We have a Google Doc somewhere with like 200 people with like former core.
Honestly, I forget what happens.
I sort of dried out a little bit.
I mean, it would be a lot of people.
But I think if you had, like, current, we could delineate, as you've both been saying, you know, conferences, organizing, helping, mentoring, you know, however we define it.
And then also have, you know, scroll down to the bottom, past ones.
And then it can be a little bit on people to add themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, Katie said something I felt important at the conference while we were discussing this.
She said to me that, look, if we can just focus on recognizing some people from, say, a fixed release, say, the next release coming up.
Yeah, exactly.
and then and then if we can then run it for backdating well that's great but you know if we
can do it for one release and then do it going forward that's better than worrying well you know
did we really capture everyone in the whole history of django isn't and like being proud
it's not as relevant in fact we haven't been able to do that well it'd be nice to do but don't be
blocked by it no exactly from from even starting you don't want the lack of a perfect solution for
everyone to to stop you from trying to attempt to to integrate on a first solution that you can then
you know improve on going forward yeah i've got a question about a term that you you brought up a
couple of times but it'd be nice to just sort of clarify it a bit for the listeners who weren't at
the keyword which is contributor mentors and the reason why i mean the let me bring it in the way
that it appeals to me is because for quite a few years i've been worried about the on-ramp to
contributing to Django and I've narrowly thought more about code contributors but I think it would
apply across the board but it can be difficult to get going started get going to you know
contributing it's it's you know Django is not now a project where there are really low-hanging
fruit which you come along snip off and you've contributed a major new feature and as you said
as like you know as a Django fellow part of my role is to help um could get people on board and
help new contributors but there's only so much time that I can allocate to that so so in that
space could you just say a little bit more about the contributor mentors and you know and I guess
let me sort of be clear so this idea of contributor mentors is in okay I am not I'm sure I didn't I'm
I'm not the first person to think of this,
but I'm using sort of my own terminology here
in my own very limited, you know,
partially big thinking on this.
But the idea being, what we currently have is,
you know, with Django and with Python,
on most other open source projects,
we have the core maintainers who have
that primary responsibility of making sure
the next version of Django, the next version of Python
gets released, is in good working order,
and gets built and gets released so that the world can use it.
And that's their primary responsibility.
That is the primary burden that rests on them.
When you have, as an open source project,
you have new people who want to make contributions
for various reasons, and the issue then
is the only people to really sort of help
those new potential contributors are the core maintainers,
who already are, who are already doing, in most cases,
a lot of volunteer work on their own
to make sure that we get new Django, new Python,
that PyPI keeps working, blah, blah, blah.
And so how, so that A, puts an increased burden
on our current maintainers,
which increases the risk of them burning out,
which is not good for any of us.
But then, B, it also makes the experience of trying to sort out how to contribute to the project, i.e., how to help all the rest of us for free, it makes that process more difficult.
And so, like, if you want people to help you for free, you want to try to figure out the easiest way to have those people show up and help you for free.
And so my idea of a code contributor is to sort of have, if you try to look at it visually, you have, you know, at one level you have the core maintainers and they have the primary responsibility of making sure that, you know, the software is in good working order and gets released.
And then you have lots of new people sort of coming in and trying to interact with them to make contributions.
The idea of a contributor mentor is a set of people who are sort of between those two groups and who is, A, can have a focus on helping new people get started so that the primary maintainers of a project, and again, focusing on this is on a software side,
Make sure that the primary maintainers, the core maintainers, or even if they call different projects, make sure the core maintainers aren't having to, you know, to focus as much of their energy on that because they have this primary responsibility to bring the software out.
So they can help new people get onboarded and figure out how to make contributions and what to do.
And maybe also sort of, you know, help with some triaging of tickets and things of that nature.
The specifics will vary from project to project.
but essentially sort of acting as a buffer between the primary project maintainers and
like new active or new potential contributors and i think that the new potential contributors
part is important because you know there are people who will be excited about open source
and want to show up and make a contribution and then maybe sort of once they've done it once that
okay you know they've done it once in that now they're fine and they'll they'll go off and
might not ever come back might come back three years later you know what have you
um but to have the core maintainers have to divert a lot of their attention to all these
people who in many cases are transient um
attention is a limited resource and the core maintainers of any project as human beings
um have limited attention when if you see on a slightly on a related slightly tangential
philosophical grant um one of the reasons so many people are distracted today is because we have
have these little attention-stealing devices in our pockets all the time you know that's
kid children right that's what they are children because i got it well honestly if it was just
children that would be a different thing but you know even the smallest child won't fit in your
pocket and so you know um and then the trick is like the children also have these little devices
in their pockets as well and so now yeah so so you know you have three kids each kid has a
attention-distracting stealing device and you have one of your own um so it's turtles all the way
down. But and so at this point the large corporations have focused on
monetizing attention. That's how important and valuable resource
attention is. And we have our project maintainers who again as human beings
have a limited amount of attention and so trying to give them back some of
their attention while also providing additional attention to people who want
to contribute again to people who want to come and help us for free and so you
know let us provide attention to those people who want to come and help make
sure that their new versions of Django and the new version of Python and to try
to help make that process as easy as possible and so the reason it's sort of
a bit half-baked is I am trying to sort out the details of it and so my
experiment will be to try to make myself a contributor mentor for Django and then
try to get back to what we were talking about as far as trying to recognize
people who are contributing without code instead of trying to come up with a
perfect solution maybe try it for one Django release and then and then you know
you can iterate on that going forward that's the approach I'm going to take
with this contributor mentor thing so try to figure out what can I do and you
you know, can I make myself this,
can I put myself in this role that I have in my mind
and then iterate on that.
Just thinking about one concrete way
we can try this out
and your Sprint's chair for Gen Con US,
so it may not be that you can play the role yourself,
but maybe as Sprint's chair,
you can help drum up some people who would.
So at the Sprint's 2019,
so 2019 Gen Con Europe,
I tried to help new contributors
who coming along to strengths get started you know get downloading Django running the test suite
finding a ticket this sort of thing and I didn't have a collective way of doing that so I did it
sort of table by table group by group and I was just destroyed I was blown and blown out and there
were still people who were like twiddling their thumbs didn't have anywhere to go not anything to
do and so um at Django US we ran a workshop 2019 and it went really well we had four tables and we
had some but what i realized the difference we had there which i didn't really know at the time
was like um sort of veteran hands um sort of placed in the audience so to speak on the tables
helping and like smiley chris was one of them smiled at people and they were they were working
with the the people the the the genuine new contributors going through and you know they
obviously you know smiley chris obviously knows how to run the django test he's been around
forever and a day but because he was there he was able to go through it and it worked really well
and then i was able to get around the groups and having run it just in porto this this weekend
it was it went really well as well but i was finding actually i was too many calls on my
attention all at the same time and there gets this i have this line that if you look at a ticket you
become the world expert so a new contributor always asks me how is it that i can as a new
contributor how can they um have a voice in what the solution should be and the answer is because
if they investigate it they at that point when they've spent you know a couple of evenings and
they've worked through it and they've really come up they know more about that ticket at that moment
than anyone else in the whole world and so then you know they may not be the most experienced
contributor but the other contributors will listen to them because they know more and that's how it
becomes a conversation between the person working on it and you know everybody else who's in the
community rather than just hey you have to implement it this way like the you know the
senior dev told you what to do it's it's not like that and in in the in the sprint circumstance
because i'm busy trying to go around so many places i can't load the individual ticket into
my brain in order to have a meaningful conversation with with them at the level they're at they're
much they're far in front of me and i haven't got the capacity at that moment to catch up
whereas if there were you know a few senior you know more experienced developers django developers
around in the in working through with them those people would be able to go on the journey with
them through the ticket and um and and input meaningfully and help them get closer to a
to a resolution in that day exactly and so and that kind of thing you know works very well at
development sprints and and that's what i think so part of the idea behind contributor mentor is
to try to have that role happen offline and asynchronously,
because I'm not sure that that is a thing or the best thing
or that we have.
So we definitely have people who could fill that role,
but perhaps some of them don't want to,
or perhaps some of them aren't aware that, hey,
this is a thing that needs to be done.
Again, back to the idea of people
who are contributing without code,
one of the values of recognizing those people
is just like, oh, you recognize, hey,
the huge work that is being done that needs to be done we didn't know it needed to be done because
someone was just making it happen and i didn't see it i didn't know it and so and i like in
porter i spoke to people who were you started to think about it from that standpoint i was like oh
you know that's the thing i could do but like i didn't i didn't really know that that was the
thing that was needed per se or maybe they're doing it like on a on a small scale like with
people that they know what people that they work with um but sort of not realizing oh hey here's
a thing I could be doing and that was one of the points of the talk was to try to to try to get
that idea out there and to point out to people hey like if you're making contributions if you're
making code contributions to django that's fantastic or python or whatever whatever project
that is fantastic and we're thrilled that you're doing that consider perhaps being someone who
helps other people make code contributions to your project of choice so that the maintainers
of your project of choice don't have to bear that burden themselves you can you
can help some of that and and the truth is like so people who were just in
Porto with us at this at the development sprint on day one who made maybe like
their first contribution or a second first or second code contribution those
people would be excellent code contributor mentors for people who are
trying to make their first step make their first purchase because they're
familiar with the process as well as people who have been making code
contributions over a longer amount of time,
but who also might have the mindset of,
I would like to help people make co-contributions.
So I think that's important.
But also, and I think this was sort of heavily impressed
upon me just by being in Porto, we really, really
need to change the way we talk about what
it means to be a contributor.
Because there are all sorts of other problems
that came up in me talking to people about my talking
and about some of the language involved as far as like,
so there's the idea of like, you know,
non-coding contributors being viewed a certain way
or there's a concept I introduced from Nadia Egbal's,
I referenced Nadia Egbal's book, Working in Public,
that talks about how open source software is maintained
and there's a lot there.
One of the issues that she talks about as far as
the production side is the side of what she calls
a casual contributor, which is someone who,
And the analogy she uses is people who might record a tornado or some sort of news event on their phone and send it to the local news station, and the news station uses that.
Those people aren't planning to become reporters or cinematographers.
They were just there, they made that one contribution, and they're going to move on with their lives.
You have casual contributors in the same way with code, with software projects.
But each of those terms can sometimes make people feel
sort of excluded.
Especially, I spoke to a couple people about this
at Python Quarter, and so this idea
comes to me partially from those conversations.
The idea that if you call someone a casual contributor
or a non-code contributor, it has the potential
in some situations to diminish what they do
because they haven't taken on
full software engineering thing, Will, I believe, I could be misremembering this, but I feel
like you and I, I think we met at DjangoCon US 2018, and so one of the things I know that
Will, one of the things I remember Will talking about was the idea of making web development
easier for people, you know, in general, and so, and the question tooling around that,
and I feel like you and I were both at lunch and, you know, talking about how that should
be simpler. And someone at the table was like, well, do we want those people in our community
if they're not going to learn all these such and such tools? And I feel like you and I
both in stereo answered, like, yes. Because, like, you know, you shouldn't have to, you
know, you shouldn't have to know Docker and Kubernetes and, you know, Puppet and, you
know, all this infrastructure's code tools to know web development. And so to bring that
back to this idea of changing the way we talk about things, I feel like that's kind of the
problem. The same underlying problem that causes people to be worried about being labeled as a
code contributor or casual contributors or non-coding contributors is the same underlying
problem that makes the DSF vice president go on stage and say he's never contributed to Django.
So I feel like that's a thing that needs to be – that sort of cultural thing needs to be addressed within our community because there are so many different ways that people contribute, and they all need to be – and I don't say this in a, like, woo-woo, everybody get the participation trophy sort of way.
I say this from the standpoint, again, as someone professionally trained in capitalism,
yes, the salesperson or whoever, the people who contribute the code, they are necessary,
but without the entire rest of the team, the whole thing doesn't work.
As great as Michael Jordan was, he didn't win any championships by himself.
Well, that's why I was so pleased to see the most recent releases having more contributors
and the the steps carlton's been taking to to normalize this and recognize i mean i feel like
it's only i don't know how many years have i been inside of django i mean five six like only now do
i know all these people who do these things but there isn't like a place where someone else could
know about the event organizers about all these things so okay so if contributor mentors are
going to be contributors writ large not you know just contributors let's not have
let's not let's not let's worry about the language we use but let's let's have contributors in the
the large sense where it includes all contributors one thing that a co a contributor mentor needs to
have in mind is a kind of mental list of all the different jobs that get done so at the beginning
of the contributing guide we've got writing code translating or writing documentation but we haven't
got all the other things and so i think there in in my talk i tried to make a separation
i try to make the separation because i think it's it's valid it's important so code contributions
and non-code contributions are are two different things and require different sets of skills and
different mindsets. So for instance, when you point out the contributor guide, that's
the contributor guide to the Django software project, to the specific actual code base
of Django. But the things that Chaim and the DSF board members are doing, those are contributions
to the larger Django project that don't involve code.
And so there are different things there.
And so I'm thinking of this idea of code contributor mentor
and a non-code contributor mentor or some other language
as far as helping people make, having a class of people.
Contributor mentors writ large,
but some of the contributor mentor will focus
on helping people make code contributions.
And some of the people will focus on helping folks
make non-code contributions.
And we talked about, of course, that the code contributions
are, for lack of a better term, easier.
Because it is easy to see what needs to be done
and what is done and how.
The non-code contributions cover a much wider range of topics
and are much more amorphous.
But the help is needed on both sides.
Because again, in the same way we see,
and you hear about open source maintainers
having burnout and that sort of thing,
what the three of us know,
because we have been involved in these different boards
and things of that nature,
is that people on the non-code contribution side
burnout as well.
You know, the DSF, PSF board members,
conference organizers, things of that nature.
Those people are burning out as well.
And so, trying to make sure that help is there for them.
or so there's like a new generation of people
being brought in to make those sorts of contributions
or and to solve these new problems.
Because again, Django is like 17, 18 years old now.
There are issues that Django has to face now
that Python has to face now
that didn't exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
And so new ideas are needed there.
And that's where those people who are contributing
without code and come from backgrounds
other than software engineering can be super, super valuable.
Because we need that, you know,
we don't need just software engineers
trying to solve all these problems,
because a lot of these problems,
you know, they're organizational problems,
they're financial problems, they're marketing problems,
they have nothing to do with software engineering.
And so a bunch of software engineers
probably aren't the best people to solve them, so.
Well, I think also the I mean, the pandemic obviously has really hurt the the new rejuvenation of members.
I mean, you know, thinking of myself, I mean, how did I get roped in?
I learned Django. I wrote about it. I gave a talk.
And then it was at the conference and at local meetups where I got a sense of the community and then saw the needs.
And, you know, that just hasn't been there with COVID.
So there definitely is, on the non-code side, a number of people hanging on who I think are ready to move on and mentor people.
But hopefully there will be, from these conferences and other things, more people who want to come in and join and help out.
So I think it's a little worse than it would normally be.
It's still a challenge, but that's why it feels more acute.
I mean, the board, right?
We've had the same board, the last Django Software Foundation board, the last two years.
There are multiple people who aren't going up for re-election.
So there's a real chance there to have, you know, new blood and new ideas that will come up in the fall.
And all these other areas as well, translation and all the rest.
To have the conference in Porto this last week was just amazing.
i came away thinking oh yeah we needed that and that's it was so good just to you know
rebound with people and reconnect and meet new people you know this this podcast carlton right
this podcast came out of django con because i met you and you know we had the idea like hey
how do we replicate the hallway track and here we are let's do that here we are stuck with the
podcast okay i so you've mentioned heim's keynote loads of times cody i have one more question for
you and will really um so heim talks about at the end he's like well so put your hands up if you're
an individual member of the django software foundation so many people put your hands up
put your hand up if you subscribe to the django news newsletter so many people put your hands up
put your hands up if you listen to the django chat podcast so some more people put their hands up but
by heart by perhaps half that was only half the people in the room and heim's point was well the
rest of you i haven't got any channel which i can reach you via because we can talk about something
on the podcast and will and jeff can put it in the newsletter and the mailing list for the individual
members but that's not the entirety of the django community so how what what might we do that would
be a low you know a low maintenance easy thing to to do that how might we have a channel which we can
reach more oh i've got kind of a hot take that i've had for a while but uh yeah go for it let's
have the whole time if you're hot if you're hot if you're hot take the mic take the mic so
again i think for me it comes back to sort of this new idea of how you talk about how to talk
but also just sort of how we behave as a community and i'm sure i guess at some point my talk also
become just one big talk. This idea of a lot of the Django or Python community's
interaction with the rest of the world, a lot of that happens at the local level.
It's a local meetup level. And as Will pointed out, you know, here over the past
couple years, you know, a lot of those things have sort of gone away. There are a
number of local meetups, you know, that don't really meet anymore or, you know,
might have to be reconstituted or what have you. But most people aren't and
and probably shouldn't.
A lot of people who've been using Python and Django
aren't and probably shouldn't be interacting
with the PSF and the DSF.
There's not necessarily a reason.
If you've downloaded Django and you're building a site
for your town's volleyball league,
you don't necessarily need to talk to,
you don't need to talk to anybody on the DSF board.
You don't need that.
But as far as what Hans mentions about,
okay, how do I reach these other people?
That sort of outreach and connection I think
comes from the local meetup.
So I know I have attended all these various things
because I went to my local Python meetup here in Houston.
I went to my local Python meetup and met various people
and they had certain attitudes as far as
how people use Python and use Django
and contribute to that sort of thing.
And I know in other cities and other places
it's that same thing.
So my, the initial thing is we need to change
kinda how we talk about this and stop having our culture
be so software engineering centric.
And so even within people who write code professionally,
I have seen in my own local Python meetup,
as the shift happened towards web development and,
not just web, so we had a Python meetup in Houston,
it split into a Python and a Django meetup
because as Django became more popular,
there are lots of people who use Python for non-web stuff
and didn't want to sit through a bunch of dango talks.
And so we had two different meetups.
But then even within just the straight Python meetup,
there was a sort of a split between people
who were sort of following newer,
you know, developing software engineering trends
like Docker and containerization and things of that nature.
And then there were other people who were like,
well, I've been writing Python since like 1998
and I've never needed to use Docker once.
So like, you know,
Who are these people who are going to tell me this is the way?
And so there's definitely a lot of sort of leaning in one particular direction.
So I think that needs to change because I think that's how word gets back, word from
DjangoCon Europe and from DjangoCon US.
The people who attend that then go home to their local meetups.
They go back to the Munich Python Meetup and to the London Python Meetup and to, you know,
the, you know, what, Lawrence, Kansas, I guess Rebsys is the Lawrence, Kansas Python Meetup,
you know, to the Houston Python Meetup and they share those ideas with their people.
So that's kind of how, you know, that's sort of the diffusion approach.
But the really hard part of the take is we need to stop being jerks and we need to normalize
not being jerks.
just because somebody is not a professional software engineer doesn't
mean they can't be part of our community and we have to get past that there's
there's a certain amount of hero worship that comes up oh it's you know like
people who are sort of enamored of the sort of the very heavy software
engineering approach and not recognize that you can use Python and Django to
solve a wide range of real world problems without having to use all the
self-engineering tool and so I think that's just part of me just sort of
changing the way you talk about this stuff and that makes its way back out to
the broader community but I think also also just sort of recognizing that like
a lot there are a whole bunch of people can use Django and benefit from it and
don't need it you know I doesn't you just talk to them and they don't need to
hear from him because like if you didn't you know as long as I can download
Django when it works and it doesn't I needed to do like you know but you know
Thank you, mysterious Django people, you know, for making me do this software.
Exactly.
Or Will, Django is free.
Why aren't your books free, Will?
I love that one.
But there is this guild mentality that some people have around, you know,
I have a CS degree and it should be hard.
And, you know, it's a big world.
I mean, honestly, when I hear people getting on a high horse about something,
it's just insecurity, personally.
I mean, if you meet gatekeeping, yeah, gatekeeping, I mean, it's, you know, so you take it for
what it is, but it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way.
It shouldn't be that way.
It doesn't need to be that way.
At the same time, there is that, you know, just like in organizations, there's an individual
contributor to manage your leap.
Not everyone who tackles tickets wants to be a mentor.
That's fine, right?
It is, it's a different personality.
It's a different thing.
But when we talk about, when I'm talking about communication, I think that's something that
gets missed is that there are people who have a personality such that they want
to be mentors and they would like to be mentors and like to be encouraging
people but the example that is all you know it I'm the black guy so I'm gonna
have to go there so like we have seen over the past month or so people in an
uproar about the Little Mermaid the Little Mermaid being black and they're
being black elves and Lord of the Rings and people you know they're non black
people seem to be mad about that sorry not sorry um but so you talk about sometimes issues of
representation and when we look at within just our software communities what is seen is again
the culture being heavily biased towards software engineering but then also being heavily biased
towards this individual genius contributor sort of thing and and that's kind of that's that's what
people coming into the community kind of think they need to be aspiring to and the reality is
there's plenty of need for you to show up and be someone who is kind and friendly and nurturing
and supportive as a software engineer like so you could be a software engineer who is kind and
friendly and supportive and mentors other software engineers to do software engineering stuff
or you could be someone who makes code contributions perhaps you're not intending to be
you know have a career as a software engineer but you can if you if you have the mindset and
the personality of someone who wants to help other people
and be kind and supportive and help other people grow
and help yourself grow in the process,
then you could become, you could try to work towards
becoming a code contribution mentor
and help other people do that sort of thing.
But I don't know that we're seeing these examples
of kind, helpful, supportive people
in our coding communities.
We're not seeing those, we're seeing the individual
lone genius, I'm antisocial and I would like
talk to people because I'm too smart for that because I'm doing wiki code things that you know
normal models wouldn't understand this sort of like the and the the angry unix wizard you know
archetype that we had that existed like in the 70s and the 80s or what have you it seems like
that's that's what got pushed forward into this sort of lone genius developer mindset but the
reality is like there is there's no more genius in Python or Django okay there was just like this
one really smart person who just you know made all of Python or Django by themselves and continued
used to do that right if they were a jerk they wouldn't have had people help them out i mean
django was built on collaboration it was it wasn't well django django especially but i mean even
yeah i'm just thinking about what you're saying i'm trying i'm thinking it even c5
it's it's it's built on the power of friendship i mean that's kind of what it is i mean it's
people helping each other, you know, do a very complicated thing, build this very large complicated
software that's used by billions of people all over the world. And it's not just this one lone
genius thing, but we don't see that part. You know, what we see is what sort of gets pushed,
sort of the community culture and community narrative that gets pushed. And some of it
is also is definitely a side effect of U.S. culture, I can say. But even like sort of
within our group specifically um there's so much emphasis on like you know being a brilliant
developer or a 10x developer i think fortunately people don't say that anymore i i don't think but
you know like being a tennis developer or a code ninja or you know whatever whatever
but the reality if you want to be friendly and kind and supportive to people in a software
engineering community you can do that or in a programming community just using python
you can you can that that is a valid approach to take yeah well attitude over aptitude every
day of the week assuming there's a base aptitude and even i because most of my friends aren't
programmers programming i think is unusual and that's it's sort of a hive mind that you have
it's very intimate when you're seeing someone else's code most white collar professions
you're just you hire someone's like you got the credential go sit in office deal with patients
oh you're a little bit of a jerk i don't have to deal with that but coding if you if you have a
If you have a bad apple in the mix, it's going to pollute everything.
It's so much more about communication, I would say, than many other fields where you can just kind of be solo, get a credential, and do it.
You have to collaborate so much more.
So anyone who's a bad apple, I mean, I think of some of the people when I was at a startup and had to fire, it was probably the most brilliant programmer, but he wasn't good to work with.
And we were going around and saying, hey, this new thing, who wants to work with him on it?
in the entire group, no one raised their hand. And we're like, okay, well, you know, he was,
that's not going to work, you know? So I, I, I don't know. I hear what you're saying. I don't,
I don't get that same sense, but I'm not on Twitter as much. I hope it's not still that
case. Or I hope new, I can see how new people might feel that, you know, it's Linus or all
these people, but even someone like, like John Carmack, like he's not necessarily a jerk. Like
he's pretty you know yeah so i hope that goes away so john carmack definitely well i mean younger
maybe as younger he was now now he's now he's mellowed out maybe perhaps and and and so what
now what i've seen from that you know i haven't seen him sort of being a jerk but i also i feel
like in a lot of ways he has been less visible than say ellen store vault or or other people
like that from the standpoint of like people know who he is and what he's done but he wasn't
necessarily like the face of of a major project for an extended period of time.
So it seems like he was like he was fine just doing what he did and living his life.
But I mean, things have definitely changed as far as, you know, how we interact with
the community. Again, the pandemic has changed so many different things.
And I think we are we are continuing to figure out what those things are and how to adapt
to them, but I feel like a lot of it comes down to us as members of a community working
to ensure that our community culture is positive.
I think it was Kaplan Moss who said it, maybe?
That's where I heard it from.
This sort of idea that any community culture that's not sort of tended or maintained tends
towards toxicity.
And I feel like we might have gone a little too long without a little more tending, or
or maybe overlooking an area of community culture
that needed to be tended or maintained.
This idea that, okay, you know,
we can't have everything so heavily slanted
towards software engineering as the one true way
to use Python or Django.
And also, hey, you know what?
People can be kind and collaborative in all sorts of ways.
You don't have to just like,
if you want to be kind and collaborative
with Python or Django,
you don't have to just limit it to like Pilaters
Django Girls or to some sort of
community service thing. You can be kind
and collaborative while helping
people work on tickets in Django
or while helping people work on
tickets in CPython or while
helping people figure out
how to secure new
funding for the PSF or for the
DSF so that we can continue to have a development
residential or we can continue to have Django Fellows.
You can be kind and
collaborative in all those
different ways within our community because that's how we
roll and that's what we do.
Well, Carlton, at my first talk where we met, beyond being the Django fellow, was kind enough to, after the talk, mention that I misspoke on something rather than raise his hand and ask me publicly about it.
So I remember that was one of my first thoughts on Carlton.
I was like, that was very kind of him.
I mean, I would have been fine if you called it out, but.
No, no, hombre.
Just give him a talk.
Excuse me, I've got a comment.
It's more of a comment than a question.
Did you know that you're wrong or are you just an idiot?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no.
that's horrible when that happens kojo we're we've probably gone over but um super thank you
for joining us um straight after your long flight and you know um you can go next but it um you know
such a you know such a good important topic that we were desperate to have you on and kick off the
new season with you know chatting about thank you thank you it is good to talk to you all just sort
of in general but also he's good good to sort of talk to carlton after you know having just seen
him recently in person and like i'll see him in a couple in a few weeks so i'm giving a talk as
well okay okay so it'll be good so i just saw crofton yeah i just saw crofton like you know
a few days ago but it's been awesome so it'll be good to see you all here in person uh we should
say that's um jango corn us in san diego what are the dates because i think there's just a few
tickets available if people still rush yes they're still they're still online um it is it is the 16th
to the 21st of October
with the talks are
so tutorials on the 16th, talks
17th through 19th, and sprints
20th and 21st.
And you can get hybrid, you can get online
hybrid tickets if you can't attend.
It's a hybrid event this year, so
if you, and so I pointed out to people
in DjangoCon Europe, like, you know, it'd be nice for them to
come, but I also realize it's a little late,
you know, a month before the end to try to plan a trip
from Europe to Noram, but
there are also, it's a hybrid event
so there are online tickets available, so that
is always a thing.
Yeah, I have different dates
in my head
because I'm arriving,
I'm moving back
for the different times.
As a conference organizer
and then, you know,
as a rush employee,
I'm moving back to the thing.
Yeah, different dates.
So, thank you, Kojo.
Thank you, everyone,
for listening.
We are DjangoChat.com,
ChatDjango on Twitter,
and we'll see you all next time.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.