Transcript: DjangoCon Europe Recap + Other News - Jeff Triplett

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Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I'm Will Vincent with Carlton Gibson. Hey, Carlton.

Hello, Will.

And we're very pleased to have back on the show, Jeff Triplett, Django president,

Django News newsletter, co-author, and general man about Django. Welcome, Jeff.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be back.

Yeah, welcome back.

Well, so now my circle is complete. You are the two who, outside of friends and family,

I text with the most day to day. So we can share that with everyone. But maybe the main point of

this episode, we want to talk about current workflows. And Jeff, you're doing some really

exciting things. And there's some news about Django.

But Carlton, DjangoCon Europe just completed.

Yes, yes.

Give us the, Jeff and I couldn't attend. Give us the quick take.

300, more than 300 people there in person. And then I think 60, 70 online attendees,

something like that. Talk lineup was just amazing. Really strong talk all day, every day. Just

wonderful. To be in Athens was,

you know, fantastic. I was, you know, I got there a day early. I had, the flights weren't great. So I

had to go a day early. And so I had the day before as a tourist. And I was like, okay, I'll get up

early and I'll go up to the Acropolis. And I thought, it was like 30 euros to go up and say,

oh, I bet it's not going to be that great. And you get up and you're like, okay, well played,

Athens. This is, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool up there. And then, so I was

walking down and I came past the prison of Socrates. I studied philosophy. So the prison of

Socrates is like, wow, that's pretty cool. So I was walking down and I came past the prison of

Socrates. It's pretty cool. And then the next morning going to the venue and, you know, I was

walking by myself because I was giving the opening talk and I was a bit, you know, I wanted to get

in the zone. And just next to the venue is the archaeological site of Aristotle's Lyceum, which

was like Aristotle's school in Athens. And it was just like, oh my word, you know, so I was

just massively touched to be around, you know, all of this stuff that's just there. And anyway,

Athens was wonderful. And the food, just one, yeah, what a venue, what a place.

We should go back. Pyke on Greece is going to be there for the first time this year. So, you know,

if you're up for that, fly in and do that. Athens was great. Venue was great. I've just got to give,

you know, massive congratulations to the organizers. They did a wonderful job.

And what more can I do? I can emote positively about the whole thing, you know, at length.

It was wonderful. Okay. Well, tell us about your keynote.

Okay. So yeah, so this was like the director's cut. I gave, I did the,

the thing in Amsterdam back in March, which was the PyTV Unplugged. And I gave a short version

of the same topic, which is Static Islands Dynamic C. So it's talking about Django's dynamic nature.

And Python is a dynamic programming language. And Django predates the type hints in Python by about

a decade. And Django's design philosophies like state explicitly that Django should make full use

of Django's, of Python's dynamic abilities, including introspection and things like that,

which makes typing it not a non-trivial thing, right? There is a reason why, you know,

this time later, we haven't just, oh, let's type the ORM. And there's a reason why that. So, okay,

well, my take is that that gives us lots of power and Python is a dynamic language and we,

you know, we need to accept that it is. And then, well, okay, if we want static things,

what do we do on that? What do we do on top of that? Well, we build static islands. I introduced my

package Django Mantle, which is how I, you can build basically type safe, pure Python classes

on top of Django and then map from ORM queries into these classes, which gets rid of N plus one

problems. It gets rid of over-fetching problems and all sorts of things. And I presented all of

that. And it was a sort of director's cut, slightly longer version of the talk I'd given in

Amsterdam. And it was quite nice. I went, got to go into a little bit more detail about

the problems with when the active record pattern, when your models get too big and they grow a bit

too large and whatnot. And I got to talk a little bit about REST framework and how I see that going

and, you know, Django's REST story. And it was nice and it was well-received and, you know,

that's exciting. And so far I was pleased the talk went well and people, no one thought I was

totally crazy, which is, you know,

That's the goal.

The litmus test. Yeah.

was a Defna, what chair or, you know, president for many, many years, which runs

President, co-founder. Yeah.

Yep. DjangoCon US is, but it's been a minute since you've been to Europe, I think, Jeff, right?

For this edition.

editions of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

there, was, did Natalia make it? I'm not sure.

No, Sarah didn't.

Natalia didn't.

Oh, I thought so.

Jacob was there.

Jacob.

Jacob Walls, since there's like three Jacobs.

council were there. Paolo, he's on the board. He was there.

Who else is on the board? I don't know. I can't remember at the moment, actually. But there

were, you know, lots of people from the community. Accessibility team members, DjangoCon, what's

it called? The event support group members were there. Security team members were there.

It was awesome. I mean, we had the sprints as well. The first day of the sprints was,

I was there for the first day of the sprints and it was packed. We had a, we had a whole

bunch of offices and it, you know, there was hardly a spare seat to be had, which was wonderful.

out after the event or is that?

get this written up. So this is the, the proposal for, to move Django to, Django to an annual

release cycle and to, to just two, a few things going on.

One is to tie in better with Python's annual releases. So Python's now got annual release

cycle. And that has meant that with our old eight month cycle, the old LTS was supporting

five versions of Python by the time it had gone end of life. And so Python 4.2 has just

gone end of life and it was supporting five versions of Python, including Python 3.8,

which has been end of life for 18 months now. And it's like, hang on, we can't, we need

to adjust that somehow. So that's it.

That's one goal of it is to give us a better matching with Python support, Python version

support. The other goal is to get rid of the gap between LTSs. So what we find is that

folks are sticking on the old LTS right until the end of life date because they can't update

to the next release because it's not an LTS. So they wait till the new LTS and that only

gives them a kind of six months overlap window. And it's like, hang on, it's not enough or

six, eight months overlap window.

And so what we were seeing was that as the old LTS goes out of date, the downloads

for a supported Python version go from about 70% down to about 30%. And it's like, cause

all those people are still on the old one. It's only then that they started updating

and, you know, and then another factor of that, another aspect of that is because it's

only the latest version that gets bug fixed backports. So, you know, so we fix something

on main and we'll back, we'll backport it to the latest release version. Well, because

that's not an LTS, people aren't getting those bug fixes and there's no, they can't

update date to them. Whereas if, if the, the latest version is an LTS, if there's a bug

fix they need, well, they there's a, there's a real case there for, yeah, we can update

because we've got the same three year support policy there. So this is, this is a proposal

that I published on the stack, my stack report newsletter, probably six months ago now. And

I've been waiting to waiting for the time and the capacity to write it up. And I finally

got it written up. And so I put that up and I, I got it done.

And there's been really constructive discussion over the last week. So this weekend or, you

know, next, next week or so I will pick up the various points that people have made,

make the clarifications that were obvious and then draw up the to be decided. Cause

there's lots of, you know, there's lots of like little questions. Like for instance,

do we support Python support? Do we support, um, only the last, the latest two versions

when a new one comes out and then the next one, the following year. So a version of Django

would support three versions of Python. Or do we go for the, the, the, that one end of

extra and give it four versions of python which is more is more forgiving but then it's obviously

more burden on ci and things like so they'll be back and forth on those decisions but i think

thus far um the the sort of the core idea is very well very well received and so i'm really quite

pleased about how that's that discussion has gone and then the rest is like well what shade

should we paint the bike should you know should it be this blue or that blue and we can settle

that those are all important questions right but we want to get the shaft right but they're not

they're not the substance of the proposal which you know we can all live with any of the answers

that are proposed for the questions that are to be decided and i think that's really positive at

this stage so that's lovely um yeah and i think sorry i think it's a huge win from a usability

cycle i think it works a lot better than it did

before with the zero one and two lts releases but when you're talking to somebody we sound

weird trying to tell people like well jango 6-2 is going to be out nine months after 5-1 but if i

can just say um you know jango 2027 jango 2028 um and i know there'll be some alignment when that

would start but it's just so much easier and also python has learned so much from jango and jango

from python they've floated a similar proposal but i dream of the day that we can say that

uh python 2028 and jango 2028 and that have some relevance and some meaning of knowing that like

these two things can work together and work at the same time versus some arbitrary like i think

python's up to like 314 315 is coming out and there was always a joke that python would hit

that pi release which we've done the joke wasn't that funny but it was cool now it'd be awesome to

have that alignment though and just have a little bit more sanity back and talking about version

numbers because you know people can understand what the year rollover

there's you know that's when breaking changes could happen yeah go ahead i think if the if the

um i i'm told it will be back at some point the the goal there i think um is to understand

jango's release um versions you kind of have to be inside jango you have to be a member of the

community so it's really hard to communicate it outside that and i think the clearer we can be

here the absolute the better it's like

i want to be able to explain to someone who's never heard of jango when it's out and when the

end of life is and it's when it's out the year it says and it's end of life plus three i'd love that

it would be easy math yeah yeah anyway so that anyway that's going on the discussion going on

there and we'll see you know what happens um they look like any change to jango it's always a bit

you're talking to people and they're like carl

you should do that thing you're like okay fine i'll go home and i'll i'll have the courage to

able to have those discussions with people about it because then you you know because i i published

the essay about it you know months ago and people knew about i've been talking about it i've been

sort of threatening to write the depth up and then to have the conversations and and you know

be able to have those discussions with people face to face about well what are their concerns or what

are the features of jango and what are the features of jango and what are the features of

they think are most important there and i think that's makes all the difference to be honest um

yeah you know so jeff i want to hang on before we go on i just gotta plug jango on the med there so

this is why we do jango on the med just oh yeah yeah ring events which we're going to do again

in september um last week of september in pescara it lead jango med.eu if you want to see that folks

um it's because that time that quality time together it's it's really um irreplaceable um and

so it's the same with the jango med which is really um irreplaceable um and so it's the same with

the conferences as a sprint event like jango on the med anyway go on oh i i wanted to have you

to quickly mention and so we're recording this on april 28th tuesday and unusually for us it's

going to come out tomorrow normally there's a little bit of lag until may 1st uh the annual

or now biannual uh pie charm promotion is happening so 30 off pie charm for a year

100 goes to jango uh this has historically been by far the biggest fundraiser for jango

so if you're curious about it you should take a look we'll put a link it's also all over the

jango project.com website but um don't want to not mention that and i'll turn that over to you

jeff as jango president there's a whole bunch of things to update us on about what's happening

renewals now and so i think that's on the website now and historically it's been new

um trying out the service now if you've renewed and i believe that's good for 12 months so even

if you renew it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to

at the end of the year you can get the renewal and and extend it so we'll have more details about

to jango right it's it's like all of them and they're around i'm free and they round up

because i was treasurer of jango and i saw how they treated things and they would regularly round up

and just the jango survey and a python survey across the board so um

they handle that stuff right i would say of course i'm biased but

yep um and if we uh segue the dsf news because there's a bunch of small things i'll try to get

through so that's not just dsf um we do have a call of for venues for jango con europe up

as well and i believe that expires at the end of the month or june 1st i guess so maybe there's a

and let's get a new group of organizers or same group of organizers uh let's get uh you know we

we want there to be a jango con europe next year and this is how we put it out the community to

run it um some of the other stuff too from the foundation there's a lot of invisible work that

goes on behind the scenes if you've been to some of the jango con sometimes that's where we talk

about some of that invisible work um i think it's exciting uh carlton doesn't get enough appreciation

for helping last year help us go through this process of hiring a new fellow jacob walls so

we're going to go through this process of hiring a new fellow jacob walls so we're going to go through

this process of hiring a new fellow jacob walls so we're going to go through this process of hiring

walls so we're going to go through this process of hiring a new fellow jacob walls so we're going to

come back from maternity leave and this is the first time we've had three fellows working

together and stress levels i think security release levels um and you know we're not quite

we're basically one full-time fellow and two part-time fellows that will continue to build up

but uh it's amazing having that third person what i've seen is the sf president working with the

fellows week to week and i think it's tremendous so fundraising is really big on our list so we can

program too as we go i'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute this is also the first time

we've had a this is a whole new board and i don't think people realize that we have four new officers

this is my first time being in an officer position for the dsf um and everybody's doing a wonderful

job but it's also because we're new uh we are also taking on things that needed to get done

for a while like we've been doing a lot of work on renewing our trademark that comes up every 10

years uh we we changed our fundraising goal from three hundred thousand last year to five

hundred thousand this year.

year. The new board members have come in and looked at some of the way things are done and

said, let's automate some of the boring work and the hard work. And so Priya and Afi have been

doing a wonderful job doing lots of automations to make board meetings run smoother, to make

membership run smoother. I hope to do a little bit more writing about that too in the future

so we can explain that. We've had some bylaw changes too. We're looking at trying to get

elections and memberships because we want to make sure that we're in compliance when we say we have

enough people voting every year in elections that we're following US laws for how nonprofits

should work. So some of those or all of those have been going through the Django forum too,

so you can see the changes we're proposing. We recently redid the code of conduct. It's

been 14 years since it's been refreshed. Dan Ryan did a wonderful job. And it's really funny because

when you look at all the code of conducts, they're all based on Django's original ones in some way.

And so we recently readopted the contributor,

I lost it in my notes. Let's see. Contributor Covenant, a dyslexic person trying to say two

words with the same letters. It's really hard when you're on there. So Dan Ryan led that effort. It

took about a year to do it. But it's funny, we are using a code of conduct that we've rewritten

that was based on Django originally. So seeing that come full circle is really pretty cool.

With changing our fundraising as well, we are very, very, very close to announcing

that we're going to begin.

Our executive director search. We also want to fundraise for that. We've had a half a dozen or

more sponsors actually put money into that fund. And we'll be writing about that as soon as I can.

But I want to spill the beans on that too. So we do want to raise more money because we want

my job as president, I do not get paid to do it. I will not get paid to do it. But I'm spending

eight to 12 hours a week just talking to lawyers about trademarks. And I'm not the only person

doing a lot of work.

But we have a full-time job worth of work that could be done better if somebody has a chance to

check their email outside of me checking on Wednesdays, Mondays, and Fridays to try to stay

abreast of everything. The other exciting thing to me, and speaking of invisible work, is we

recently, I think every team but maybe one has transitioned to a Django work group. This is a

GitHub repo that you can go to and propose a team, a work group, a group of people who want to work

on something for Django. And the board can...

They can help you with guidance, they can give you money if you need money to accomplish things. And

work groups can be a couple of months, they can be years. Tim Schilling has done a wonderful job

trying to organize and work with groups and try to get these people switched over to this model. It's

more transparent, it defines how you join these groups. Before you had to talk to Carlton or talk

to somebody on the side, how do I get in security?

Just because you apply for something doesn't mean you automatically get to be a part of it. But at

least it's a little easier to see who's a member. How does the board know things are going on? We

sometimes have like, board members who were on those groups to the help of guidance and

communication. So this has been pretty exciting. And it's been very invisible in the past, and

there's no reason for it to be.

the camel back. Sorry to interrupt Carlton.

be like, how can I contribute? And if you haven't got actual ways of contributing signposted, it's

really hard to answer that question in the given moment. It's like, I don't really know how you

contribute. So you've got to set up these pathways for contribution in advance. And you mentioned,

you call that Tim. Yeah, I've been watching as you've been doing that.

And I think that Tim is, is he's done a phenomenal job on, you know, helping coordinate that.

it's been really tough to keep up. Every start of the board meeting feels like we can spend 10-15 minutes just getting back into everything the directors and myself have been doing. But it's not just me, they're doing a wonderful job.

Sarah Abjermain, and I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the other off the top of my head are

leading that working group, I guess. So we'll put a link to that. But that's a long, long, long, long running

goal of Django to do something about the website. And this is the structure to make it happen. So

it's exciting to hopefully see that happen. And because they're a work group, that was news to me

cons for years now, that's been a huge thing. And, you know, Jeff, you didn't mention it,

but you were on the board of Python, the Python Software Foundation, and were deeply involved

with the search that led to Deb Nicholson. And so I'm excited for that, because you just in

particular, bring a lot of experience to that. And I know, from our discussions, you've been

talking to possible executive director people for a while now. So I'm really excited to see

who we get, because it's a small pool of people who have the skills to do it. But on the other

hand, Django is a pretty good gig, if you want to do this kind of thing. So

out, can we afford somebody part time, full time? But what does it look like? And it really has to do

with our fundraising goals. The reason we moved it from 300 to 500 was to try to afford an executive

director too. So it's all part of that plan, we just have to do a better job communicating it.

We had a small change to the Django project website where we can post banners now without

going through a pull request system. So the most exciting features that nobody

knows about in Django, but us, I could actually edit the text five minutes before

this, you know, our interview or our podcast and make a change.

banner for the promotion, please?" And probably Natalia was involved in that. Yeah, it was

not ideal. So yeah, they get a Christmas card for that. So great job.

That's the other invisible work they don't tell you about so you join the board and then you're like,

"We're a content manager. We build websites. We can make this process better."

but I want to make sure there's time for all the Django things.

for not highlighting those. Blogs, Mastodon.

if you want more curated. The Django News newsletter that Jeff and I have been doing

for seven years now, which has a new home. We switched from curated to button down.

And so if your email didn't show up last week and it's in check your spam folder, there's a whole

bunch of work Jeff in particular has done on that. So that's, yeah, what to say? That's a lot of work

and it's powered by Justin Duke, Django's site, and he's been a good member of the community and

he's been working with us for a long time. I think we're mostly there. The website

is flipped over and we're getting used to the new flow and also the Django knots program.

People have been, since Sarah Boyd started it, doing the updates to Django section. So it's also

providing them access. And just as a shout out, if you want to stay up to date quickly and

concisely, I would recommend the Django News newsletter. That's the easiest way to do it.

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Before we start talking about AI, what else do you want to mention?

Before we start talking about AI, I don't know. Let's just talk about AI.

So let's pick as an example. So Jeff, you're with your client work and

you're very tip of the spear. I think for me, you and Simon Willison are sort of the two people out

there blazing a trail. Maybe just talk about the notes that you, the Django minutes that are now on

a website. I'm pretty sure you use Claude for that. Is that a good way to talk about one way you're

tackling stuff? Is that a good way to talk about how you're, you know, one way you're tackling stuff?

I don't know if she uses AI to do that. So if it was the GitHub actions, GitHub pages website up

Yeah. Well, so I remember just because you sort of quickly shared it with me and I thought that

was super cool. So the, you know, by hand, the notes were all in a GitHub repo in Markdown format.

And then you with not too many prompts were able to kind of whip up a site.

But it was, it was interesting to me because I, I sometimes think of either going into an

existing code base and like fixing problems or just greenfield stuff. But this was a case where

you had a bunch of data formatted. And so you were able to prompt it differently to say, Hey,

build a Jekyll GitHub pages site based on these Markdown files. And it, it worked really,

really well. I just sort of a third approach I hadn't thought of, of, Oh, if you have this data

sitting somewhere, you can do that. And then you can do that. And then you can do that. And then

that's like the easiest way to actually create a website because, because cloud or whatever agent

files, I think three to five years of Markdown files and a GitHub repo. And all I really did

is had cloud code as kind of my preferred CLI tool. And I had it, you know, these things tend

to be non-deterministic. And the way you make them deterministic is to tell them to write a

Python script. They just added front matter to the top of the Markdown files. And then that just

gets rendered by, by GitHub pages. And I'm not even sure if they have full front matter now that

I say that, but I did have it write some Python to do it. It took maybe 30 minutes. The design

looks like it took 15 minutes. It's fine. It's fine. It's, it's totally good enough for our,

for our purposes. So, yeah. Okay. But yeah, it's just a couple of one shots.

And didn't take very long to do just because, you know, it's just GitHub pages. It's just a blog.

You get RSS for free by using, I think it was Jekyll is what GitHub pages is default.

was having this conversation with Carlton earlier. So I, which I just had spring break. And so,

you know, on the one hand, Carlton's, Carlton's son is going through Python books and now doing

Rust and kind of doing fundamentals, which is amazing. And then a friend's son, who's also a

anything built this cool prototype to, I guess, like sports cards to get the rating and it ties

into eBay. And so it's image upload and all this stuff. And he built this prototype. He was showing

me on his phone, but doesn't know anything, you know, doesn't know what local host is, doesn't

know, you know, which programming language he was using, let alone which framework, let alone how

anything was being done. Didn't even, what's amazing to me is didn't even know what an IDE

or a text editor was. Cause I said, Oh, can I look at the code? And he was like, here it is. You

know, I don't know. And he's, he's going through just a, uh, get bash, you know, terminal and

windows and just, it's just sort of mind blowing that he gets something to work with less than

zero knowledge. And so what I wonder is, um, you know, that's really cool that he can build that.

But then when he wants to piece together how to actually do something real with it,

that's a much bigger hill to climb than, you know, not grinding through, but do it like

learning what a function is, you know, learning what a variable is.

Learning what a data type is. I sort of wonder what is, what's the better approach, right? Cause

I want people to be empowered to build stuff, but if they build this colossus of code, that's

not great, like good luck, you know, it'd be hard for me to go through it, let alone someone who

points with AI. Like I think with, uh, somewhere around December, I think the, I kind of see that's

kind of the inflection point where a lot of the things I hear people talking about, which are

kind of myths about AI.

Uh, everything changed in December and I've been using them for years, probably four or five

years, but they just got to the point of like, we're, we're kind of good enough. Um, sometimes

when I'm working with our devs, our devs are pretty mixed. Some of them really like it. Some

of them don't like it as much. Um, and what's really interesting though, is maybe you code

something, you know, where you let the agent do too much for you, but you can also have that any

topic you run into that you don't understand. You have an on-demand blog writing machine too, that

can write you a blog post for what you're not understanding. You can pop into voice modes and

it can tell you, you can listen to it if you're more of a audible listener learner. Um, we've all

assumed that like reading books and just reading text, walls of text is the best way to learn. And

not everybody learns that way. And so just to have that on demand, like, uh, Marlene, I'm forgetting

her last name because I'm terrible at last names, but she's been on your podcast before from

Microsoft, maybe GitHub now. Um, but she was, she's doing some interesting work with local models

where she's running through the Django girls tutorial. And instead of hitting these inflection

points where you don't know what to do next, because maybe you don't have as much experience

with Python, like learning web is so hard. Like you have to be able to know a little bit of Python

and Django has been very good at teaching people Python while you learn Django, but then you have

HTML, you have CSS, you have opinions of what a real CSS designer is. Don't use Tailwind, use CSS,

which I don't agree with. You have, you know, real programmers don't use Python. They use Rust or they

use whatever. You have all this stuff just, just slung at you. And it's so hard to learn because

you can't just learn Django. You have to learn all this stuff at the same time. So some people

probably grasp HTML. They can pick that up pretty quickly because you really need to know like seven

things. Uh, CSS is this whole, like you're going to hit every limb on the way down to that tree as

you fall out of it. And so just the ability to say, I really want to learn Python. I really want to

learn Django right now. Just, just tag, just, I'm going to tag out and you go do this for me or

explain it to me.

I've never seen a tool like that before. And that's the part I think is really interesting.

And so not everybody does that. It's kind of like, well, let's age ourselves. What are the

old cheat books people would get for their essays and stuff in college, little blue books or

something?

Oh no, yellow, yellow, uh, oh, cliff notes.

Cliff notes. Yeah. So you get your cliff notes and that's one approach. You're probably not

going to get as far, but I think the people who can learn with AI, you can learn at an

incredible rate. And I think part of that is because that technology has opened up.

And it used to be this weird, like let's stump the AI, but there were always these use cases that

like, how many arms is Ursula have from the little mermaid or rather like is Ursula an octopus or a

can't count from one to a hundred. And it's like, that's been a solid problem for two years. Like

let's get into the things where they're very, very, very good at doing things. And I think that's

one of the things I've learned is that if you don't know how to do things and so if I tell it to do

things, um, it's brilliant that it can save you a lot of time. Um, if you, uh, have not the best

luck telling it to write something for you and you're very critical of it. Um, I, and, and

there's this weird hype bundle, sorry, I'm getting a little scattered. There's a hype bubble, which

I think is interesting because the hype to me, when I hear people talking about the hype, it's more

that they're seeing and it's less about is this a useful technology that can do stuff for you

and so a friend of mine that's had a lot of problems with like not getting the exact code

that they want because they're writing frameworks and they're writing lower level python code

and maybe it's not trained on the best examples to do something the way that they want to do it

and i've told them have it generate three versions of it and see which one you like the best and see

if that ups the bar a little bit and sometimes that works like it's really great for neapolitan

i've had it do hundreds of carlton's neapolitan project and it's it's brilliant at doing it and

i don't have there's not like a lot of code there that i don't understand because it's doing mostly

like 90 vanilla neapolitan code it's showing me like which fields to list i do guide it until it

don't ever write a template tag again just define you know override the functions because it will

try by default sometimes to create custom template tags for 50 different models and no one

has time for that but you know just a couple of examples you give it and it's brilliant

so you know llms i mean i'm i'm actually serious about this pretty sure there's an llm.txt file

sorry no i'm just thinking about what you're saying i think that the thing with the hype is

that um we're told that um by obviously the people with the vested interest in in selling

such things that they're going to replace all engineers and they're going to you know be able

to do things at human level totally unassisted with you know within six months and six months

but you know whatever model the next model will be the one and we're told all these things and

that's just not that doesn't match up to reality but that doesn't mean they're useless in you know

it doesn't mean that they have no out that nobody

in society like uh electric cars are going to replace all gas engines in 10 years and we've

are learning when they realize that they can just ask it and they can do more of that uh custom

learning um as they go um i don't think anybody i know i i've signed ndas with some of these

companies sometimes i get to check out new stuff but i can say i don't like these companies from

what they've done and how we've gotten here and i think when it comes to you know this big ip grab

that's happened um that will be litigated for a long time and i can agree with the best of them

uh mario's munas has some really good writing about data centers and companies and i really

appreciate mario's work because he's focusing in on the evils or the things that we can agree on

and don't like about how we got here but like you know a year or two ago i've used this analogy a

lot where there's the dinosaur meme where the dinosaurs are looking up the comet and even a

year two years ago people were looking at that and posting it saying like we need to avoid this

technology because or this comet's asteroid rather is going to hit the earth and it's like i hate to

this asteroid hit four or five years ago and there's no avoiding at this point so there's a

point that you don't

have to use it that is fine but you can leverage it and you can do a lot of interesting things with

it and i've told will this recently and others i believed and i was wrong about it i believe by the

end of the year the local models were going to be good enough that we could just use those and you

don't have to use these big frontier models the last couple of months i think we're almost there

for local models and we're not even going to make it past summer before we've hit that good enough

model point we've even seen this with like the later

versions of codex later versions of um clod code like i'm using last generation's models versus

the new ones because yeah they're less buggy um they're easier to control every time there's a new

model good argument there that go either way but yeah on paper it is but what yeah okay yeah that's

i read um things about that it's not necessarily the um the model per se but the harness around it

like the ability to um use tools and the loop that you put around it to to control

how it functions they're good open source ones that are worth you know trying with a

do with python uh but it has it's just a harness it's what open claw if you've

heard of open claw is built on top of it but it's something that ships that has no system prompt

and you have to write plugins for it in typescript and so it's a good one to start because there's

still a system prompts they're still prompting around the models when stuff gets submitted to

the providers and so but it's the closest one to just saying go do something i don't like what

you're doing do it this way next time and um frank wiles uh one of my colleagues business

partners uh keep pointing over there because that's where his office is uh he loves pi and

he's using it more and more and i think he spent like a couple hours friday or saturday like

playing around but telling me about extensions that he wrote that he thought was pretty cool

that seems like a pretty good one to try out i think i think uh the you know what's kind of ram

of ram to to host a decent one or you know yeah you need uh terabytes of ram that we can't

or not realistically i think 32 gigs of ram is the height you could go better than that but i've

had some really interesting projects done with quinn 36 they're smaller models too i'm told

take closer to like eight gigs of ram um i tend to get because i've got a studio here a max studio

that's got 64 gigs of ram on it and my laptop has 32 gigs and so i played with with quinn 36 a lot

um i think simon willison has been writing a lot about local models too and i do believe those are

then that's sort of realistic a lot of people would have that even in you know even the 64 and

open source project i like a llama the best but llama server is interesting because they've got a

i think it's called an m map mode where it

uses your ssd like it's ram okay and so you can run the big models on it at decent reasonable

performance using that m map mode simon may have wrote about that too a week or two ago so

i follow his i think it's funny because even though you say like i'm the tip of the spear

i think simon's kind of another world over where i'm just a power user and i use this stuff

and i spend zero thought on like when it comes to like recommending tools like uv

is an incredible tool has nothing to do with ai other than probably

ai they joined an ai company so they have that but like that was a tool that just hit like

a decade plus of annoyances i had with existing tool links and they just did stuff and so when

it comes to to ai like i'm very quick to try something and i'm very quick to move on if it

doesn't work for me but like kind of the topic was getting into workflows you know i use cloud

code a lot it's probably 90 of my code is written with with cli tools like it and then i'm reviewing

stuff anymore i haven't pushed off to github and i'm

using pull request and i'm reviewing there i don't use copilot i don't use any of the

code review tools like i am the human in the loop i just cut my projects down to the point

where like yesterday i had a pull request that was a one-line file change i can quickly

see that no this works i will have it write a little bit of tests with things but i mostly

have tests i've already written and it's extending and it's using those patterns as it goes codex

has gotten pretty good uh that's open ais it's a reasonable i think they've jumped as

far as performance model goes but what

i think is ironic is what i like about cloud code is its ability to just do things like i've

mentioned so if i tell it go to github read an issue open a pull request once i've approved it

i want you to merge i want you to check deployment i want you to use whether like i had a project that

was using fly i o monitor fly let me know when it's deployed or use kubernetes and let me know

when it's deployed or use the coolify api and let me know when it's deployed i'm doing very very high

level

i'm doing very short sentences telling you to do a lot and it knows and it understands and it can

do things like run this management command once this code has changed or let me know so you can

do something new mac whisper is an app i really like that just lets me have a little i made my

own little keyboard that i can hit it's a four button that i bought off amazon but i use it

because i can invoke mac whisper if i just feel like talking to it i can just give it voice

commands to do stuff some of the new tools have things like loops

and so i can say slash loop two minutes and it will check things for you know because sometimes

with deployments with processes it may take 20 minutes for something to get deployed

built tested deployed approved i can have a loop and then i can go get my lunch and come back

and know that things are going to happen and while i take lunch i can keep working

stuff like that's just incredible the productivity ten percent of my time that's left i'm doing stuff

on my phone so if i go to lunch i can get an alert no i need to do something else i can do something

else i can just you know hit that next cog to get the next thing to go but we're so rigid in our

processes and what we do i feel like most developers spend a lot of time waiting on github

or waiting for something to hit production or waiting for somebody to review stuff and so when

we're integrating all these tools right we talk about this you know i think the i think the ux

around models is gonna is the biggest area to improve you know so not it that's a separate

discussion what i was going to say is what's really cool to me to do a positive spin on ai

is uh just recently there was an erdos problem solved with gpt 5.4 so paul erdos was a famous

a bunch of these famous problems and a 23 year old almost one shot prompted with a little bit

of guiding i think terence tau mathematician helped and solve this open problem and it was

able to do that i think it took an hour and 20 minutes of of spinning it was able to do that

because it reviewed all the math literature and saw there was a technique in another realm

that it could apply to this program and often that's what mathematicians

do is oh this thing over here let me scaffold it over there

and so that to me and again it needed professional mathematicians to like guide it and verify

but that's such an amazing use case for for ai and math and terence tau in particular if people

if you haven't seen like he's been much more open about talking about ai he's makes the case that

scientists mathematicians there's so many problems out there and so few

scientists and mathematicians and all the like lower level or mid-level stuff

ai can now kind of try to try to do and it's not really worth like you're not going to get a

phd dissertation or get tenure based on solving all these small grinding little problems but

they're useful if someone can throw ai at it and then review it and so he's very optimistic around

let's just clean up all this low level stuff that we know is there that there just aren't enough

people to go around um and so that's that's pretty interesting to me and it's pretty interesting that

he's he's also again just making the case like mathematicians still are almost like chalkboards

and pencil and paper and small groups of one or two people meanwhile you know physicists and stuff

hundreds thousands of people together so i would say it was just a long way of saying i'd recommend

checking out what he has to say about ai because he's not you know he knows what he's talking about

and he's being very open-minded and trying to find ways to use it but carlton you're triggered there

aside and you know all of those things if if software were cheaper to develop there would be

still do in offices and in businesses and in day-to-day life which would be scripted if only

it didn't cost so much to have a program um and in theory you know the positive case is that ai can

step into that use case and liberate a whole load of productivity gains which hopefully aren't all

captured by you know um ai foundries but you know can liberate those productivity gains that's what

you're right though about like jobs are going to shift and people will lose jobs and there's

nothing we can do about that but i think the person we there there's this weird thing i see

on social media about people saying um i'm a my if my skill set is not a developer and i spend a

weekend vibe coding something and you think that's really cool that is a shiny bright toy

and you're gonna think that's really cool but when it comes to maintaining it you're not gonna want

to spend you want to be on your yacht your boat doing what you think is fun it's not going to be

sitting in front of a keyboard and doing this kind of code so like developers what you do has

the ability to shift there will still always be non-ai jobs but like the kind of things you can

build with ai too is what i find to be really fascinating i think that we get really caught up

on the the models and the ethics of everything and i hate to tell you a billion dollar company on a

not ethical probably a hundred million dollar company you lose a lot of ethics along the way

and i hate the way that the world works but i we can't change that on the podcast but

i do think there's some positive use cases for using them to help you leverage it for your job

your community i've got a half dozen community projects that are like 99 vibe coded um and i

think that they are of value yeah they wouldn't exist at all without these tools yeah and i don't

always have the skill to do every aspect of it either like i can't design anything but like

it's helpful to me i get told all the time i'm not a real designer shame that i shouldn't use

tailwind because i don't know why someone's having a grumpy day and that's what they want to take

abhorrent i'll agree with them yes totally yes but like still gonna use it yeah does it mean you

writing socket code but who has time for that either so that's always the irony to me is when

somebody wants to bash a technology it's like django is a framework so i like frameworks and

thankfully but you know if we're actually we're close to that we wouldn't you know ai would just

create its own framework right instead of python being written for you it is and trans what's that

there's even there's even one of django i'm sure but the question is sort of what's the

the code well i mean i would say probably not but you know i'm sort of curious to see you know and

what are the gains there right so i guess the gains would be it's more documented maybe faster

we'll put that in quotes but you know you're not going to have the three of us talking about

something a machine created and can't explain or promote um so yeah not to be a downer about it but

i'm i'm genuinely curious because i think this kind of thing is going to be a little bit more

kind of stuff is happening, but it's going to touch into like, what is code to Carl's Carlton's point, your point, like, it's

maintenance, it's communication, it's translating, you know, human language into programming code, like I'm sort of ready to hide

out in a cave for two years, and then see where this all shakes out. Because you just can't convince people who vibe coded

something over a weekend that it's harder than that. At least I find I can't right now. I've been

the age myself early 2000s where i thought beautiful code exists it doesn't submit

but i i'm off for building applications so i spend way more of my time now like adjusting and like

with neapolitan getting good filters on searches and making the applications usable i spend a lot

more code there and i can do a couple of you know cleanups to make the code so you can read it i

don't think dumping 50 lines of like vibe coded here's what the application general i think that's

kind of bullshit and i don't think we need that so like you have to pick your what's maintainable

to you what's maintainable to your audience django's audience is different django's audience

is for developers who want to work with the code and then you have another subset of people who

want to develop django and i think it's important to keep those two distinct in documentation and

that's why our documentation i think has shifted a lot for how is this used versus you know how's

the sausage made

and so thankfully we have both communities

okay yeah what else all right should we switch to our books books and projects time

before is let me show it the worlds i see by feifei li who is a ai scientist i think at

stanford though she's constantly

you know she's been doing this for a long time and she's been doing this for a long time and she's

taking time off to do private stuff but she create uh most notably known for doing work around

vision and having the data set that image net was in the competition around that so image net was

the first sort of modern deep neural network that blew away the field in 2012 2014 and sort of led

to this resurgence and interest in it um anyways it's a she writes really really well she has an

incredibly interesting story immigrant from china moved to the u.s when she was 15 and then found her

way to princeton and she's been doing this for a long time and she's been doing this for a long time

in caltech and stuff so it's interesting to but very much a a human a programmer and a human

um you know she she loves like art history and literature and so it's a really good book about

her story but also just a humanistic take on ai and that's optimistic about what it can do but

acknowledges some of the the challenges so anyways it was recommended to me by a colleague and

um i definitely recommend it if you want a positive human take on ai and yeah

uh django con europe dan daniele prater that gave a keynote called body of knowledge and um

he was uh drawing a it was an amazing keynote as always daniel he talks that they're wonderful um

but he was giving a talk distinguishing between kind of pure um abstract knowledge that we might

you know the intellectualist ideal and then

embodied knowledge and he was he was saying that as a younger man he was drawn towards the

the idealistic ideal but you know as he's got older he's come to appreciate the embodied

side of it more and there's much more to it now you have to watch the talk when the videos came

out but i got home and i was um i picked up william james off the shelf william james is a

brother of henry james american um american philosopher um and uh this particular collection

is called pragmatism and other writings it's in the book and it's a book that's been published

in the penguin classics edition but william james is lovely and um he talks about things that are

very related so i've been reading that so if you fancy something that's very approachable in the

philosophy department um and very um very human it's very related to um what it is to to live a

life um william james i can highly recommend that jeff i've got two uh one of them i'm going to

it's supposed to come out on june 1st that's my family and kids favorite uh author and books

are wonderful she's uh they're a very wonderful uh illustrator um and my second is since that's

a pre-release is please please please read in shitification by cory doctorow because you would

improve my bastodon feed by a thousand percent because people misuse the word in shitification

all the time and it's very important that you understand it no no cory he just wrote something

you burn your toast you stub your toe it's not in shitification so like let's let's use the

terminology at least the right vector the right ai non-ai vector in the right direction i'm glad

you've got like uh many any of any of cory's talks on youtube are great so you can get that just in

a conference talk like the one he did at pycon us last year just to just quickly swing back like

just see it coming with the with the hosted solutions it's going to be um quicker we can

is from carson gross and i think his crew at big sky software so this is a project that's going to

be running right now this is five small libraries you can mix and match there's a dedicated website

so there's fixie.js which is minimal htmx basically but let me look at my notes uh there's moxie

inspired by hyperscript uh one for streaming dom patching and then a naming one there's an ergonomic

fetch wrapper called uh rex rexy so anyways it's a cool experiment there's a github repo as a website

but just trying to push the minimalism um yeah definitely fixie fixie project check it out this

oh yeah i have to i have to stay away because i've still got to upgrade to htmx4 which is the

beaters out for the moment and i've you know i've got a branch where i'm updating to that for the

work project i've got to get that in place i can't go and look at this don't carson don't release this

us just a menu bar let's see it'll monitor every provider the llm provider that you have

and then you'll never be surprised that you're running out of tokens again and it tells you when

your quote is reset it's a free open source app and then pidentic ai is the other one i call it

the jango rm of working with llm providers i need to work on that little phrase um and if you use

the format and yeah exactly we're

scraping or you need to do it used to be called data extraction now i think they call it output

extraction or something they've changed the name um it's where you can take text and you can say

give me a python object they use pidentics uh base model but you get a very very nice i use it for

job boards reading jobs and giving you like salary bands and descriptions for jango job board

it's an amazing tool for doing that data extraction

without having this scrape um and it does a lot of other things if you want to build your own chat

gpt or cloud code use that to really play with the llms and get a better understanding for what's

really going on behind the scenes and it can do some output for most modes too so you see exactly

what's getting called on the model and it will like help you understand what's really going on

checker and language server from the author of the jedi um package the jedi was like the the um

auto complete solution for python for you know many many years and um you know that the vs code

early versions of vs code were all built built around it and well they've gone on and built this

new type checker and language server in um in rust um if that matters to you it's it's it's speedy

um it's it's got by default it checks um in the server and it's got a lot of things that you can

it's got a lot of things that you can do it's got a lot of things that you can do it's got a lot of

compatibility mode which it'll opt into if you tell it to if it detects a my pi configuration

um and but it's because it's about 220 between 20 and 200 times faster than my pi they say um but

it's got an lsp server built into it so you just zuban server and then you can connect whatever

editor you want bb edit in my case obviously um it's what it's super it's wonderful and um it

just goes to show the uh how i say the vibrancy of the python eco server and it's got a lot of

system around here there's now you know half a dozen type checkers half a dozen language servers

that you can use it you know it's a really vibrant time i think um fertile time in in the ecosystem

it shows the health of the ecosystem i think um you know and as i say rusted if you care about

but maybe i'll give you the mic to give us your hot set me up like that

um no i yeah i got i you know not just pi charm i play around with z vs code um i still find use

from them carlton does but you're not the only one who tells me they're not needed um so what

what is your workflow and why does why do you find that to be the case i've never said that

look at the gaps and what the cli tools are doing um pi charms good obviously give them a plug

uh zed i do like a lot i still use sublime text that's my primary um i kind of fall back if i've

stared at my ide too much which i don't do anymore i just don't really use an ide as much

but if i'm shuffling api keys and tokens and have notes i tend to put it in in like a sublime text

window um i don't think that there's there's people who believe that ids are going to stay

around i think they're going to shift for what they're doing and i struggle when i look at an

ide especially the ones that just try to put like a shell

um i use ghosty tty ghosty um it's just a i term two is good but something about ghosty i like the

look of better and then there's a new one called c mux which is like it's ghosty but they put side

bars on it and i like that side navigation even though i hate that for browsers and you can also

pop open a browser inside your id or inside your terminal with c mux and so you can put them side

by side with your code so that's super cool too but i think there's kind of a new generation of

they're trying to build like that ide like interface around the terminal and they're

putting it in your um your browser these are called harnesses for the most part i've written

a couple myself just to play around with the code um i think uh jet brains has a new one too i don't

it's called air um so you gave some feedback on that there's also conductor um so yeah

is i manage probably 50 60 applications for various clients some of them may be 30 applications

some of them be one or two applications there's weekly cycles that i go through where i'm doing

the same stuff over and over again so i really like being able to run prompts i really like

being able to like do things like keeping lists of tasks that if i switch between i want like the

one interface so whether that's an ide whether that's one of these harnesses and i want to be

able to say go do this 30 times and open a pull request or let me review it that saves me because

i spend hours a week just doing those kinds of tasks and yes i've automated some of it but it's

that directing and do things that's what's really important for these tools and i think that's what

the next generation is going to build on so that's what i would like to see in an ide i think all the

ids do mostly the same stuff it's just do i like the extensions does jet brains have the right ones

sorry microsoft i will still give you opinions on why i don't like your ide but like it just

doesn't do it for me and i think it's because of the damn update cycle even zed gets that wrong

every time i log in the zed it's like every time we change something two hours ago

smaller ones but it's not quite as uh aggressive but yeah i agree i mean we all want one tool to

do everything in and at least you know for me internally at a company right now i'm not going

so just doing a python ide like i did a linkedin post um so there's every four months pycharm does

a feature i guess feature release there were 593 bugs that we fixed and almost all of those were

not ide bugs it was just like keeping up with django keeping up with python keeping up with

typing so there's still a lot in a dedicated professional ide but i think also most people

want just one tool to call the agents view the code

um and again

that's for jet brains that's what air is um it'll be interesting to see how that plays out you know

um yeah i agree look at how new people good yeah yeah no just yeah like it's for the three of us

we're sort of a little bit stuck in the old way and so so someone new needs to come in but also

they need to know what they're doing right that's the problem you have new people coming in but if

they don't know how to code i don't know how much i trust their opinion

kansas uh we have the university of kansas here and i can get the best research walking into a

coffee shop seeing somebody on their framework laptop or macbook and about 50 percent of the

time they have an ide up or they have claude code up or something and seeing their pathway like ask

do research on your own ask these students how did you get in the programming and the path that

they go to is so very very very different than we did because some of us started in linux before

like you know like we could date ourselves with x windows and early windows applications but

they're pulling up github and they're seeing copilot and they're seeing this different pathway

and it takes them a while before they have to pull up an ide and they're writing code and they're

being effective i'm not saying we want people just to come contribute the django that that's

their default path but you can get there and contribute but it's just super super different

than what we're used to

and they're not wrong because we've created like you know like there's the joke about vim and emacs

and how to escape how to exit it once you start it like there's a reason this continues to be a

thing after 30 years and so i think that the tools that we have we just got used to but they kind of

suck and so now we're in an age where like if you don't like something um not to go off on a tirade

but i feel sorry for the sas companies of the world because they always do 80 of what we want

them to do but that 10 or 20 percent is what makes us go to the next level and that's what we're doing

right now and i think that's what we're doing right now and i think that's what we're doing right now

is give up our loyalty to them and go find the new one cost is a lever but not listening to us and

not adding features and some of those features don't make sense but we have a new generation

of like call it artisanal software you can write and do it's so easy with ai now to customize that

10 and write your own that's why i played with writing custom harnesses i've i got annoyed about

one of the companies having the pains where you move them around and they just wouldn't let me

move windows around i'm like how hard could that be it's 10 minutes of codex time and i'm like how hard could that be

it's 10 minutes of codex time and i've got the coolest it doesn't do much but i can move the

frames around and split them in any way that i want to and that's awesome so this ability to

customize code i think is going to be really interesting but look at the pathways that

non-traditional developers they're now they're just now they're developers but it's really

interesting to see how they started versus how we started 10 20 30 years ago brave new world that's

my soapbox so and find the dsf and thank you both for doing a podcast so it's a amazing community

resource

uh the python promotion is still going on if you want to support django

renewals are included check out all the links for stuff and uh we'll see you next time bye-bye

thanks again to six feet up the python django and ai experts you call for the hardest software

problems from scaling applications to simplifying data complexity and unlocking ai outcomes

Thank you.