Transcript: DjangoCon US 2022 Recap

Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat, a podcast on the Django Web Framework.

I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson.

Hello, Carlton.

Hello, Will.

I just nearly said hello, Carlton.

Hello, Will.

How are you?

And this is a special episode.

We don't have a guest for a change, but we're going to do a recap of DjangoCon US, which

we both attended last week.

This will come out a week or two later.

Lots to talk about. The message boards are blowing up. This week's Django newsletter

is super, super long. And what are your quick takeaways from the event and seeing Boston for

the first time? Oh, right. Well, so there's two things. First, the event is, this applies equally

to Django in Europe. It's just been so good in both the conferences to finally get back together

after so long. I think people were really struggling with the pandemic. I think the

community was sort of feeling a bit like as it's still going to work is it still going to work

and it's just as soon as you're in the same room it's like yes it's you know here we are and you

know and then you know the vibrant in-person thing that's just amazing and then the second thought I

had to say just about Gen Con US particularly is I just have to praise their COVID policy

because they had this very strict COVID policy about vaccines and about pre-testing before you

arrived and about mask wearing mask inside the venue outside no it was okay no mask but inside

the last and whilst it's a bit like oh this is a bit of a pain is this it turns out that it's 100%

successful I don't know if nobody got COVID there but I've seen so many tweets and reports that you

know negative tests when you get home I'm sure people are tired they might have a sore throat

or whatever but they haven't gone and caught COVID at the conference whereas I've seen other

in-person conferences where it's perhaps been not so strict and it's like oh I got COVID oh I got

oh i got covid so honestly i just have to salute that 100 percent um it was a tough choice to make

you know there was a lot some controversy about it i think they've absolutely made the right

decision and they've implemented it really well and it's got a proven positive result so well

done jangokon for that um i i know this is going to be jangokon us focus because that's the one i

attended but i don't want to skip over jangokon europe which you also attended a couple weeks

before so we can you should sprinkle that in with the the videos are up we're promoting them on the

newsletter but you know there was a bit actually i think twice the size jingo con europe this year

yeah billions of people 600 pent-up demand you know it's like the faucet's been off and then

all of a sudden it's open and just yeah because typically i think it's a little smaller in person

right typically jingo con us is like five six hundred and europe i don't know a little less

Yeah, in my experience, it's been slightly smaller in previous years, whereas this year it was a lot bigger. I don't know how that translates into future years. Who knows? But yeah, I mean, what can I say? It was, it was lovely. I mean, the venue in Porto was very big and they didn't have such a strict COVID policy, but I mean, I didn't get COVID there. I don't know how other people do, but it, you know, it was fine. There was lots of outdoor space. There was big meeting rooms, you know, if you've got ventilation, but the main sort of worry area, I guess, is in the seating.

where you've got um you know the talks and you're all crowded in a space and ah what should we do

especially after two years of not seeing anybody and not doing these events and then it's an in-person

event and there's a bit of i don't know what the correct protocol well i do know that icon us was

speaking to the django us organizers about what worked because everyone's trying to sort this out

and yeah the us one was more on the strict side but it's not that big an inconvenience and no as

you say like um some past conferences everyone's been testing positive after or you know either

on twitter or anecdotally and um so anyways for such a small inconvenience my view is for such

a small inconvenience for such a successful result you know seeing so many people test

negative afterwards it's like yeah okay that's it's worth the inconvenience i have no problem

at all with with that um so that was my view um on it how was boston boston's nice because on the

way i stopped off to see you and uh will's always telling me that uh he lives in brookline and should

he move to the country i'm always like yeah move to the country but i went to see will and his

family in brookline and that was very nice um so now i'm like you know you should stay in brookline

yeah now you and you and my wife are like nope we're never leaving so no you know but i have to

say fall fall in particular is a pretty i mean you got to see foliage right you hadn't seen foliage

in a while yeah i hadn't seen like the trees putting on that autumn display type thing and

also i had it was like 25 degrees beautiful weather what's that in new money 60 70 degrees

yeah it was very warm it was a 60s yeah yeah so it was lovely and you know perhaps if it'd been

raining and miserable i wouldn't have been so enamored yep and you you won over my kids my

two-year-old still asks about you um even this morning so um yeah good i like i like i like to

hear that you know so when you're four acting up you can be like you know there's three across the

pond that i appreciate my presence yeah good good good i like it you'll have to come and see us in

spain well yes i know well uh next jangon europe is may in edinburgh which i would love to attend

i hope i can do that um but okay certainly i'll oh go on yeah go on karen so no it's gonna come

i'm just plugging it yeah jango european so i was going to cut over you then with um we both

gave talks let's talk about your talks uh your talk and we'll talk about my talk then we cut

back to you know round up about the the conference so okay so these might be up by the time this

comes out um yours the european version is out so we'll put it in the notes um yeah my talk 45

minutes, the Django jigsaw puzzle, aligning all the pieces, trying to provide a comprehensive

look about what is Django, what is the entirety of the framework, and do some high-level code

examples. So I think the talk went okay. I wasn't as prepared as I have been for past ones, partly

because there's no Django Boston meetup anymore, where I would normally run through it. So you'll

to start one will oh my god i know i know well someone needs to well and there were there were

people um uh one of the sponsors path ai of the conference is based in boston and would provide

hosting space before so yeah it's doable um but yeah i was i was pleased that the talk happened

um i think it'll be i was actually talking to some people from cactus group yesterday about

mentorship because they they have that's an agency with about 24 developers in north carolina

which is likely where DjangoCon US will be next year. And they have some mentorship programs and

it's hard for, there's this imposter syndrome when you're learning web development that you just have

no idea what you know and don't know. And so the goal of the talk was to say, here's as much as I

can show you a roadmap of Django and all the pieces, the beginning pieces, intermediate,

advanced pieces. So you can check things off and know, oh yeah, there's signals or middleware.

And along the way, the biggest thing for me is I wanted to have a detailed drawing of the request-response cycle so someone can see the file system, WSGI, again, middleware, like just how these things all connect.

I'd never seen that really when I was starting out.

And there's some talks now that are quite good that go in detail on this, but this was a high-level overview where we built up all the pieces.

So that's the goal, a beginner-level talk.

I want to do a deep-dive talk, I think, next time, but I hope this talk will be helpful for people.

Yeah, I watched it.

I thought it would be very handy in terms of just that orientation.

Because when you come in, it's like, oh, wow, there's this kind of flood of information

that you get when you start.

Yeah, like, what are the batteries?

It's like, well, here's the auth system.

And that's great.

But to appreciate it, you have to know what sessions and cookies are, which if you're

new to web development, you have no idea what they are.

So I introduced the auth system and was like, here's a very basic configuration.

And then here's quickly how sessions and cookies work, because you should know that.

and then all off and yeah, just trying to go. I mean, I ran out of time. I went like three X speed

for the last, the last couple of minutes. Cause I was so nervous. I didn't look at the person

giving me cue cards, but I was trying to, you know, basically how do I distill 10 years into

just here's 45 minutes of all I can give you, you know, because there's thing is even the command

line. Like I have a little bit on the command line because like just this morning, someone

emailed me for my APIs book where there's a section where I say, open up another console.

because you're running the background server, the Django server, and then you spin up a react one.

And this person was like, I don't know how to open up another console. You know, I mean,

it seems trivial, but stuff like that happens all the time. And it's just like a full stop. And it's

it's not the doc's job to do that. But I'm fairly attuned to those pain points. So I try to make the

ramp up as smooth as I can and take 10 seconds to say, hey, this is how you do that. Or, you know,

i mean i think a talk i could do off the top of my head that i mentioned was like choose your

own adventure django like there's so many things where it doesn't really you know do i have a

period at the start project do i not do i how do i configure my urls do i use function-based views

there's so many things that for us it's like oh here we go again with these religious debates but

it's a full stop for a beginner because they lose confidence so trying to stay you know i really

liked that about your talk how each thing so not only did you introduce all these these things and

it's just like they keep coming and they keep coming and they keep coming because there are

so many batteries but for each one you're like and of course there's this question or this question

if you're a beginner that might stump you just pick one doesn't matter you know you move on but

yeah you know i remember um it's beginning and i don't know i had some i don't know version

conflict with some php thing and literally i was just right that's it i can't progress

anymore um yeah yeah no i mean i was able to find a workaround i think well and both of us are

self-taught and self-taught not in a boot camp or with a formal internship, like a book and a

computer and internet connection and banging a head against the wall. So yeah, I've been stuck

for weeks on stuff, which is such a waste of time. But I didn't know any better. The Django

forum didn't exist. I didn't know how to ask for help. I think hopefully this podcast, one of the

things we do is, and one of the things I'm thinking about this with the mentorship conversation I had

is beginners don't know, like, when they're stuck stuck, right?

It's like, you know, you got to, right?

So if someone comes to us, like, I saw this at the conference for you.

I mean, you're quite the celebrity.

People come up with questions.

And, you know, if somebody has made a go of it, and you can tell, and they say, okay,

I'm trying to do this thing, and I researched this, this, and this, and they're just stuck,

like, that's great.

Like, put your hand up.

But sometimes people are just being lazy, right?

so like you know don't be lazy but don't don't spend days on something that you could get help

for like you know ask ask in the forum ask and stack overflow there are places for people to

get you unstuck because that's i've been there and it's it's you know you shouldn't be that stuck

when you're starting out it's programming at its best is like puzzle solving right so puzzle

solving if you've got the answers in the back of the book and you just open the puzzle then you go

straight to the answer in the back of the book that's not much fun that's not you're not getting

the value out of it but it you know sometimes you do need the answers in the back of the book to

help you forward and the the challenge i guess for a beginner is how to know which is which

is this just something i've got to work out or am i really stuck yeah am i dense well and the

thing is that that feeling is what we you know professional developers we have all the time it's

just you know more advanced things but it's you have you sort of like build up the the muscle

memory for like that feeling you know and then you get to a point where it's like boring if you're

like oh i know how to do all this it's like it's not it's not enough of a challenge yeah we can

always play with tooling at that point yeah right then we go down the rabbit hole of like i'm going

to reconfigure start project or you know all these things so i try to resist that but i see the appeal

at a certain point but anyways enough about me let's let's talk about your talk because you

updated a little bit from the european version yeah so i mean i basically gave the same talk

And they both went well, but I'd say that my European one was better time, like I blew

the timing slightly for my US one.

I don't know why I think-

Well, you had 10.

I saw your European talk, you had like 42 minutes and your US one was 25.

Right.

So it was quite a lot tighter and I tried to compress it and I didn't quite manage to

compress it.

So I, again, same as you, I was rushing right at the end, I was flicking through.

i think if you watch both talks you get a full you know yeah yeah yeah i mean you could combine

i mean i i think i i went into more depth at the beginning where perhaps i should have rushed on

um well your talk was on async let's say that it was about async yeah so i was talking about

async django and i called it the practical guide you've been awaiting for because the awaiting for

is the joke on the await async await syntax and obviously once i've thought of that i had to go

with the title so it was kind of i thought the title then right right about build a talk around

that yeah but the idea was that i mean async is really complicated um and it just is a matter of

plain fact that once you adopt async in your application it's like twice as complicated or

three times as complicated you know you're just making it harder by doing that so okay well what's

the benefit and when would we use that and so i just introduced a few um a basic async io example

to show a couple of things about the event loop and then you know can you use that for background

tasks in Django because if you're running under ASCII you sort of kind of could but you don't

have like all the error handling and retries and scheduling and all these nice things that a proper

queue is going to give you so you're still probably better off using a proper queue implementation

than just a sort of quick and dirty create task with asyncio and then what oh my favorite example

is aggregating views so for years I've been building REST APIs and then you have a client

app that wants to fetch i don't know a list a detail view plus a related list view all in one

go so it only has to make one http request rather than you know multiple because on a mobile

application it's going to be slow and battery draining and and painful and so you create a

little proxy view that sits inside sits in front of those two rest views makes the the rest views

and then aggregates them and returns them and we always used to do that with node.js because

you know that was what you did but now with um async def views in django even if you're running

under whiskey you can write that view in in just in django and it keeps your code much simpler so

you've got an example i gave is a hotel detail with a room list um so you've got a hotel with

a list of rooms and prices and you want to combine them to return one and instead of spinning up a

separate server instead of having you know a different technology stack you just got a django

view with you know perhaps httpx as your async um http client to fetch those and combine them

And I just think that's such a beautiful pattern.

And I've literally been using it for years.

I never got into GraphQL because I had this pattern and I was established with it.

And I never felt the need for the complexity of GraphQL.

You waited it out.

I think the pendulum has definitely swung back.

Well, that's recently.

People have been saying, well, you know, GraphQL is sort of fading from favor.

And sometimes these questions come up.

What technology did you wait out and not ever learn?

And, well, I might one day be able to answer GraphQL.

I'm not saying I will because, you know, GraphQL still is very rich and mature and there's lots of power in it that, you know, but for me, it kind of feels like that.

I mean, yeah, I remember, I think it was 2019 DjangoCon US, Ed Rivas had a tutorial.

So one of the, you know, three hour long things on GraphQL and yeah, it's there.

It's a GraphQL tutorial at DjangoCon this year, at DjangoCon this year.

Yeah.

And there's the strawberry package and DjangoStrawberry and like GraphQL is not, I'm not.

this in GraphQL, but I've always been a bit of a skeptic. I've never got involved in it. I don't

really know it. I've, I've never, um, architected an application that used GraphQL. I've worked on

applications that use them, but not, they weren't my creations. Um, and it kind of feels like,

okay, maybe I've, maybe I can just never have to learn that technology. It's like,

yeah. Well, and that's part of, I think getting beyond the beginner phase is there's just this,

this, you know, you go on hacker news and there's a new technology, a new, a new thing every week.

And at a certain point, you're just like, you know what, if I need it, like I tell you, I try, you know, take a look and peek around and, you know, read the Django News newsletter, but you don't have to learn everything.

Like the fundamentals don't change and, you know, you don't need to have the burden of feeling like being left behind, especially with front end stuff.

So, yeah, I know I really liked your talk.

I'm on a Hacker News blackout at the moment.

I periodically just block it.

Well, Adam Johnson's putting up a good fight.

He's on there, like, multiple times a week, so.

But then he puts out, like, a half dozen posts a week, so.

Anyway, so we have some flags.

I don't mean in terms of me being on there.

I mean, me reading it.

I'm not reading it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the orange site.

Anyways, yeah, well.

And then, yeah, I just went through a chat example four ways,

which introduced starch.

Oh, and that was my favorite thing, like, showing, you know, the progression, right?

Like, you don't have to use it, and if you are going to use it,

the thought process, I think, yeah, that was my favorite bit.

Yeah, I mean, because the idea was to give people a sort of idea of, well, what should I do and what are the options?

And again, it's an overview, same sort of thing that you were doing, but a much narrower topic.

Because async is one of those buzzwords and the trouble with buzzwords is you go, oh, let's use it.

And then you've suddenly created yourself all number of problems, which you didn't need to have.

You could have just used a simple polling solution or I don't know what.

And so I wanted to go through that.

And people were very kind.

It went, you know, it seemed to go well both times, even though I was rushed.

Katie McLaughlin, who was chairing, she nearly had to go and get Kojo, who was running the lightning talks, to come and time me out.

But fortunately, she let me go on for a few minutes extra.

Yeah, no, she did a great job with the deep dives.

Something else was the sprints.

So at your suggestion, I stayed for the first day of sprints.

I paid for it on the red-eyed back, but I can't complain to you.

You and others had much longer trips.

But the sprints were fantastic.

I mean, it's a much smaller group, and it's sort of like the core, core, core people who really want to be there.

So that morning, I was going to go see your Contributing to Django bit, and I got there right at 9 o'clock, and you weren't there because we'd biked down to the ocean and stuff.

And so I went and had breakfast with like Jeff Triplett and Jacob Kaplan-Moss and ended up talking about the board for an hour.

And then I came in and that whole morning, you know, there were how many were there were at least a half dozen or more, you know, to be clapping when someone else did a new commit somewhere to Django based on, you know, you and Marius were running around.

And it's just like in a couple hours, there's so much progress made is really amazing to see.

Yeah, and I like the sprints. And the last few years, in 2019, I ran it once. So I went to Copenhagen in 2019, Gen Con Europe, and I was trying to lead new contributors, but I was doing it on a sort of one by one basis. And so I ran around and did the same sort of talk 50 times. And I was exhausted and my throat was dry. And I, you know, I couldn't be in all the places I won.

and there were still people who were sort of lost as to well what can we do and um someone suggested

to me that we'd have a uh like some there needs to be some kind of structure so in DjangoCon

and DjangoCon US that year 2019 I did a workshop and it went really well and we had like four

tables or so and that was just to try and get all the people who perhaps haven't got a project to

work on or want to get tripped into Django together and then they can sort of help each other

um and then I ran it again this time this year in Porto and it went okay and again here in um

San Diego and it went I thought it went really well it was really successful and the the all it

is is get set up with the test suite and have a go at find a ticket have a go browse through the

track because there's the thing is we've in Django we've got a thousand open tickets just under and

so if I give you a list of a thousand tickets you're like totally overwhelmed by what could I

possibly contribute to and then there are no easy tickets either like because it's 17 years old

right so there's nothing where you just come in snip something and there's your commit and only

took five seconds right if not every single ticket but almost every ticket requires you to sit down

read it open the code have an explore become to understand it and i have this idea i have this

little spiel to people people say to me well how can i contribute i'm new i don't how can i how can

I suggest anything it's like well because by the time you've spent that hour or two hours really

digging into it you are literally literally are the world expert on that ticket at that moment

and the goal of the workshop is literally to get people to have that experience so that they

realize how it is that just by giving it a bit of time and love they are legitimately able to

contribute on an equal footing with anybody who's been you know it's been around 10 years and you

know millions of commits and all the rest of it because you know they someone will come to me

they've been looking at ticket for two hours and they're like oh what do you think about this and

i'm like literally i don't know you have to explain it to me i may or may not have some memory of that

ticket from whenever i've come across it previously but right now you know you know 10 times more

about that ticket than i do and then you can have a really good conversation and then they could they

go okay well i could do this and they open a pr and it's like yes there's your first pr and in a

couple of hours you know people were it was the same day people were you know even though there

aren't super low-hanging fruit people were finding stuff and they were submitting you know it's just

great it's like almost like a gong like a sprint at work or something i mean there was every half

hour there was another round of applause and someone else had done their you know first or

another commit usually a first commit yeah i mean it's just marvelous so from that extent um i think

the workshop was really successful my goal for that workshop is to have that freestanding um

I don't want that to depend on me it has depended on me over the last few conferences that's fine

it can depend on me for a couple more conferences that's not a problem but I would like to write

that up and have that as a freestanding resource that then you know other sprint leaders could

choose to use or not or adapt or whatever you know in future Django cons yeah well and there

were so many good ideas that came out of the conference and the sprints I mean one is um

Paolo just wrote up thoughts on the fact that core sprints.

So saying, can we just have two, three days for people to come together and do stuff on Django?

Because his experience, the Plone framework, he'd use that.

And so he discussed that with a number of people.

He just wrote up a blog post on that.

That would be really exciting to do, especially if you could do one in your side of the world and one in the US side of the world.

and just a long weekend.

And then someone, I think it was Pamela Fox said,

well, can we do virtual or hybrid?

Some of us can't leave for whatever reason.

And yeah, I think just like a modicum of structure

allows for these things to happen.

And that's something that we can talk about

the Django Software Foundation board.

But I think that was the kind of big takeaway

is there's all these ideas

and we just need to get the organization right

to have them happen, right?

because people on their own need a little bit of that.

Yeah, and that tied in with the other big one

that came up was mentorship.

We need, so Simon Charette gave a keynote

on the state of the ORM, which is just fantastic talk.

You've, you know, you really must watch that

when it comes out.

But one thing he talks about is the contributors

to the ORM and I sort of over time,

the pool of people who can review PRs to the ORM

has never been big, but we need to make sure

that it doesn't ever narrow to, you know,

two one zero oh dear what happens right we need to we need a way of bringing on people and over

a release cycle because let's say you add a feature to the ORM and I don't know and I think

he did mean a full release cycle like a 4.x or a 5.x so that would be 4.0 4.1 4.2 not just 4.1

because let's say you introduce a feature in 4.0 guaranteed that there are regressions in that that

don't show up until 4.2 when people upgrade from LTS to LTS and so if you've introduced the feature

you kind of still need to be around

like that couple of years later.

Yeah, later.

Yeah, like, you know, it's not really till say 5.0

that you think, okay, well that feature's kind of steady now

because we got through the LTS.

But it's not realistic, I think,

for people to just come along and, you know,

open the source code to django.db and start reading.

I mean, you can do that, and that's a great thing,

and I do recommend doing that because it's not that scary,

but, you know, to get a comprehension of the ORM from that is asking a lot.

And unless you have a direct need that overlaps with work,

it's, you know, I think, like, you know,

Marius Django Fellow had that with Oracle with some of his work.

I think Simon at Zapier had, there was some overlap,

and then he continued it.

But not a lot of people have jobs where hacking on the ORM is, you know, they're doing things

that require that.

And as well, I think over the last kind of year, I've come to realize that it's no good

us just asking for more contributors because if you're basically economically privileged,

then sure, you can find time and we'll get the same sort of demographic, like, you know,

Essentially white blokes from North America, Europe, you know, the global north, so to speak, who've got the economic capacity to give that kind of time.

But we won't get people from a wider demographic or, you know, more representative of the community unless we're able to say, hey, you know what, there's an opportunity grant here that goes with this mentorship so that you've got the capacity to actually do this.

So we're not asking for free labor from people who are already struggling to do it.

I think, you know, I've previously done talks on your web framework needs you and your web

framework still needs you and I get contributing to Django and how that does benefit you and

it benefits your career and it's a great learning opportunity and all these things.

But that doesn't remove the economic barriers to people contributing.

So I think as part of thinking about mentorship, thinking about the future sustainability of

the maintainership of Django Django of the Django projects the Django code we also need to be

thinking about opportunity grants and funding for that so that we can widen access yes I think it's

also would be more fulfilling for people like like you and Simon and Marius and others who are in

there to to mentor I mean not for everyone but for many of those people I think it would add an

additional layer of um it would feel good right i mean you know because you aren't you all aren't

going to be there for forever but if there was a sense of handing off the torch in good hands

i think that would either if if not prolong how long you'd stay just make it more rewarding to

keep doing it again and again and again yeah i mean one thing contributing directly like just

fixing tickets it's great it's good fun and i always you know in a way it's kind of like the

feeling I have about freelancing after freelancing for years and years was that a great it's brilliant

freelancing is brilliant you pay you know you get a good paycheck and you you know get to work on

interesting stuff but the end of it you're kind of no closer to your long-term goals and when the

paycheck's gone you're back sort of where you were and so you have to carry on it's a bit like a

treadmill it's a bit like well hang on how can I how long can I do this I mean till I'm 80 perhaps

not um oh that's an interesting question but the same with fixing tickets it's like well I can fix

tickets i can fix ticket i've been fixing tickets for years now but there comes a point where it's

going to be like oh you know i haven't quite got the energy to fix tickets where if i can help

people come along and and you know learn to fix tickets it's like a false force multiplier

yeah well and it's also this sense of like i was joking with you about something the other day like

you know self-deprecation you know it's like you don't want to just leap out you know

Carlton is pending deprecation.

Yeah.

He will be removed in person.

Well, you know, because there is, you know, I think that's, there's a way to have that

for involvement or just taking a little lull, you know, and not, because right now it's

like, it has been, okay, you're core, you're on the board, you're organizing a conference

and then it's just like a big drop off.

So that's like, I wrote up some personal thoughts on the Django Software Foundation board because

I've been having basically this whole week has been me having discussions with people

about all this. Cause I really, and I, I've seen a lot of people are stepping forward. I think who

weren't fully aware of the need, but also weren't aware of the possibilities, you know, of what,

like what, you know, I, I sat down with a very prominent people and they're like, I have no

idea what the board does. Like, I have no idea what the budget is, you know? And, and so it's

not a scary thing. It's like, you know, here's what it does now, but here's what it could do.

So I would, at the moment, having been on the board three years, it feels like whenever we come out of a conference and things and we say Django should do all these things, the only way to move it forward is the board.

And the board already has its hands full with stuff.

So I think the board, I would like to see it get in a position where it's managing more than doing.

Because right now, we in the board do the great deal of all these other things.

So I'll link to it.

wrote up a whole long thing of thoughts on how we can do it. I think it'd be, you know, a number of

people stepping down. I think it's great to have new people come in and come in with at least one

thing they want to push. And at the same time, like Anna's stepping down, I'm probably stepping

down, a couple other people are stepping down. I still want to be involved. You know, I want to be

on a working group, you know, the mentorship thing, like to me, I want to make that happen.

So maybe you can't do that being the treasurer and all these other things. But if you're in a

working group or if you're on the side you know you can push that forward so that's what i would

and people have said again people have said hey is there is there a way to contribute and you know

no we don't really have that structure so we need to you know working groups whatever it's called

we need these areas where people will say a couple people will report to the board every so often ask

for um approval or funding as they need that's what like paulo did with his course prints i mean

that's why i said to him i was like you know please make an ask because i the board should

exist to approve and help things but it can't like we already are doing a lot of stuff so anyways

offloading things and people new people coming in with things they want to push and just yeah

mentorship dsf grants we can do that well jango project.com site go sorry go ahead the things

you're talking about grants like the idea there is like if say i mean andrew godwin gave a great

talk uh which he kind of had to put together at last minute and about the history of can i just

say like he put it together like less than 24 hours notice and just like just like

it's so much better than my talk you know okay he goes to he's been to every conference and he

speaks a lot and he's andrew but it was just like oh like what am i even doing here but yeah he gave

you a great talk on the state of django among other things at the end he put forward some ideas

of where he'd like to see Django going.

One thing amongst those was he wants not just him

putting forward ideas, he wants, you know,

if you've got an idea, come forward and let's propose it.

But, you know, two or three big projects

that if they could be funded projects,

that would make them much more realistic.

And the whole point, I think the point with the Django grants

is that if there are concrete ideas,

it's easy to, it's easier to put together a fundraising drive, you know, and this money

would go towards that than, you know, if there's nothing specific on the agenda that we want to

address. No, absolutely. Well, and that's, you know, again, I'm always like, okay, and like,

let's, let's not just talk about it. Let's do something. So how would we do Janko Software

Foundation grants? Well, we have a technical board. They could in one meeting agree on five,

10 things that can be done in a couple month period of time by the right person, they could

review who that person is. And we on the board could provide funding as needed to say, okay,

like, bring serialization into Django. Okay, like, the technical board has scoped it, like,

this is what we're thinking. And then we can review, you know, over the next year, who potentially

could have the time, okay? And then what are the funding needs based on your personal situation?

Like, yeah, boom, like we can do it.

But I think, again, that's what it requires.

And that's what the board or working groups, like we just need that extra thing of someone to, you know, and I'm planning to push this, like, but I can't push everything to make this make that happen.

But like it's that's to me, that's the only bit in this whole ecosystem that's missing.

Like we can get the funding.

We have the people.

We have the ideas.

We just need that organizational structure.

And that's, you know, I was able to talk multiple times with Jacob Kaplan Moss, who has said publicly he's going to run for the board again, which would be great to have, you know, a creator on there.

But a lot of his focus the last few years has been around organizations, and he writes wonderful pieces almost every week about this.

So people who can bring knowledge from the PSF, from private companies, into rethinking, you know, how Django is structured, because we haven't changed it in a while.

yes and we we can and should yeah and i think you know uh you know it's not an excuse but

one reason has been you know the last couple of years it really with the pandemic has taken the

wind out of a lot of everybody's sails and so okay we've got a chance as we start to come out

of the pandemic to re-energize and that was the thing to see everybody that's the opening point

was that seeing everybody is really re-energizing and it's like yeah okay we can do this we we

there's still this heart of a community here that really wants this and is really passionate about

the framework and the community and the ecosystem let's let's make it happen um there was a panel

we were on a panel yes at the end we were we were we were everywhere yeah there was a state of jango

panel that um don wages ran which was i i wish it could have been a lot longer um i'm sure the

audience may not may have felt that way because it was the last thing on wednesday but it was um

People did say that it was interesting and it was one of the panels that they've been to where it wasn't just people on stage just talking to themselves sort of thing.

It's just like, wind us up.

What do I say in the podcast all the time?

So it was you, me, Marius, Rachel from Django Girls, Andrew Godwin, and Jeff Triplett, Defna, PSF, RevSys.

so we we covered a lot of yeah i mean there were lots of films in it you know watch the panel when

the videos come out that jeff made i think a good point is that you know uh perhaps historically

python sort of looked to django as oh what's django doing let's do that but in many ways in

terms of um particularly diversity in the steering council uh python's pushed on in front and you

know this ties back to your point that you were talking about jacob there we haven't updated the

django structures in quite a long time and it's perhaps now time for django to look at what's

being done in python and see if we can bring some ideas back and you know update we had depth 10

which was to widen participation but then the structure of the rules haven't quite resulted in

like the technical board has been the same group of contributors and not not as pluralistic as it

could be and so can we can we adjust the the election rules there can we loosen them can we

can we allow for people to tag out of of um of contributing and then say yeah do you know what

after my break i'm ready to come back and give back to the community again and have a mechanism

when they can be on the steering board rather than oh no you haven't been contributing therefore

you're not you know you're not um what's it called eligible right well there's a pretty active

discussion on um django developers uh google group and also among dsf members about about this so

that's hopefully hopefully things will come together yeah well and i think it's just we

haven't been together so like even even just on the board i was the only board member there but

like you know we could we the board could just do a lot of stuff but if we don't talk to the

community we don't feel like empowered to do that stuff you know like yes so these in-person events

And DjangoCon Europe, I think there are three board members there, so.

And then, yes, there were.

And Haim made this point about, in his talk at DjangoCon Europe, on the state of Django,

I can't remember the exact topic, but it was one of the last ones on Friday.

But he talked about, well, okay, if you don't listen to the podcast, or if you

don't subscribe to django news or you're not an individual member of the dsf we've got no way of

contacting you um we've got no way of outreaching so okay there's the blog but you know we twitter

and twitter and the blog is it yeah twitter and the blog and it's like well you know have we got

other can we think of other channels so that we can reach out again on django developers um just

this week so i think prompted by the discussions coming out of django con someone asked a question

about well what is an individual member and where's it about because if you look on the website

doesn't really say and then you know tim shilling who maintains um django debug toolbar and has done

for years he's like well i i've only just applied to be a django a member of the dsf well clearly he

would be you know a candidate but he doesn't know what it's involved i think he applied he applied

last year but yeah i've had quite some discussions with him yeah and you realize someone like this

who's a pillar of the community has doesn't really know doesn't doesn't really know and a lot of

people wrote in saying i yeah i you know either i don't feel like i'm qualified um which is you

know it can be anyone or i don't know what it is involved and therefore i'm hesitant to put forward

because what am i stepping up in for you know yeah yeah even even people like that okay so there was

all these things about the community which and and how we're going to push django forward which

i think have new new life out from your new impetus from the conference and the buzz coming

out of that um i was going to ask you did you have any other sort of exciting hot takes i've

got one more secret exciting hot take oh well ask you first yeah well i just just just to finish up

so i think i wrote personal thoughts on the communication bit that we and the board have

talked about and like you know could do in 20 minutes is have an official newsletter like we

could just like python has one like i just send it around to some people we can just put it on

the sidebar um but here's the thing it doesn't it can't be a board person like so like i'm happy to

do to be the working group with the newsletter but you know i have there's other things to be

done but just like put it up say someone all you do is once a month send it out repeat what we

already have we can put down the line sponsors on there like boom like we have to have a newsletter

like that's that's kind of what everyone has like it's it's 20 minutes um but it was yeah hot take

um so i got to sit next to david lord at the sprints who maintains flask he lives in san diego

and um knows andrew godwin and some of the other people um and that was interesting uh so he you

know he he he has a full-time job and then he single-handedly runs flask and i can't remember

a whole bunch of other things in the ecosystem. And he made the point, which I hadn't really

realized, Flask is downloaded 10 times as much as Django. So, you know, okay, we sit here and

say, well, you know, yeah, Flask is for kitties and add-ons and, you know, it's not for, you know,

snarky things like you just rebuilding Django, but like it has unbelievable usage. And he was

saying a lot of times in science and other fields where people don't want to be a web developer,

But it's a professional setting.

They're using Flask.

But anyways, he's managing all of that.

And he was asking about our board, right?

Because he was like, wow, it seems like Django's figured this out, right?

Like there's a whole community.

It's not like literally one person who took it over from Armin.

And some of the things we're talking about, he's like, you know, so he's being a fellow and a core contributor and everything.

And a board member and all the rest of it.

And not his day job.

And so he was asking about, you know, yeah, how do we structure things? Is it possible to have kind of like a fellow-like role? But then there's this huge trust component. There's no clear person to him in the community who could take that on, even if he had the money and everything else to do it.

One thing he's done is he's recently gone under the branch of the PSF.

So they, if you contribute to Palettes, which is the Flask organization, it routes you to the Python Software Foundation.

And in return for, this is public, I think 10%, they handle all the administrative, they handle the processing fees.

You know, they let him, which is great, like, because otherwise he can't, you know.

So PSF is expanding its umbrella to these areas because most of these things aren't Django.

They don't have conferences.

They don't have this wide community, even if they have insane usage.

And so they can provide legal accounting.

And so that's something that we, Django, can also do.

Jeff Tripple has been making this point.

Can we have a more formal liaison with the PSF?

And actually, tomorrow, Friday, Jeff has set up a call between the PSF executive director,

Deb Wilson, the new one, me, and Anna, our president.

So we're going to chat it out.

And that's something that, you know, if not a board member, we should have some direct

line of communication beyond, like, I have one with the accountants for conferences.

But like, anyways, long rambling thing.

That's my hot take is that, wow, Flask.

Wow, David Lord.

And, like, we in the Python community can and should try to pool our resources and share tips on how to make this all sustainable.

Yeah, I mean, sharing resources is the thing.

Like, Dango's tiny, realistically speaking.

And if we were able to leverage some of the expertise and know-how of the PSF, that would be great.

Why don't we do that?

It's probably just an accident of history that we don't do that.

Yeah, I think, I mean, they have a new executive director.

You know, they've been looking to us, but they've, you know, they've changed a lot the last couple of years.

They have a lot more staff, and they still don't have a huge number of people.

They've got the whole PyPI situation going on, but they are the large organization.

Whereas if you asked a Python developer on the street, they would assume that the PSF and the DSF are equivalent.

When our budget's $200,000, their budget is millions and millions.

Bless them for it.

So what's your hot take?

my hot take was um on the first day of the sprint simon willison came up to me and he's like um

you know it says in the docs that you shouldn't use sqlite in production and i'm like and he's

like well how do we how do we change that and i said well um well ideally what we need is some

benchmarks um you know we need we need to know like because you get this database sqlite database

is locked error thing that comes up and um when you get concurrent right so you know you can read

from a sqlite database as many times as you want but if you try and write to it from two separate

processes it blows up and uh there's in the existing docs there's this uh timeout you can

add to you can add a number of seconds that it will sort of retry for before it raises the same

error um and then there's this other thing called the wow or the writer headlock where uh you can

write much faster uh to sqlite and um i was like but we really have no idea how fast this goes so

simon in his brilliance just whips up a benchmark puts it all together and he's like yep um if you

with the default journal mode and you know no no timeout settings and all the rest you hit this

error quite quickly which is you know the historical advice but if you set the timeout to

about 20 seconds it kind of disappears for some you know you scale up quite a lot before you hit

that error again but he was like but then if i enable the the wow mode the writer headlock

um it just kind of disappears and you know 4 000 requests a second sort of thing and gun

multiple gunnicon workers and you know all the things that you think now surely this is going to

to um blow up the the the locked error just kind of went away um and that benchmark needs a bit of

work if they're more moralistic right more realistic or different right patterns which

will create which will trigger again trigger the error because uh you can you know the right ahead

log isn't flawless if there's a there's these checkpoints i i forget the details it's all in

on the sequelite uh docs but you can hit errors but why aren't we hitting them in in simon's

benchmark you i mean you want you want the benchmark to hit the expected error at some

point right um but the figures he was getting out of his um example were more than enough for

you know almost every website you've ever worked on yeah and he wrote that up so we'll put the link

yeah right and so well can we in fact change that advice and um you know you know can we can we

change that advice and see what we you know see what we say because for a lot of websites it might

be that that's enough and then it takes you know if you if you're running a small site and you're

worried about cost it takes yet another cost center out because to spin up a an rds or another

managed database instance it's not free at all whereas if you've already got a server and you

can just put a sqlite folder file on it you know it essentially you can just store it in already

you know in volumes on a you know a docker thing all the modern deployment things are using so you

can have persistent storage instead of an ephemeral thing where it gets wiped that's also seems like

um yeah but no that was i mean so that's i'm really excited about that i know i was speaking

to simon chalet on the way to the airport about it and he was like well yeah but you know if you

need access from multiple hosts and you need to or need to migrate to a different one it still

may not you still may be better off um starting with postgres anyway so that you know it's not

a totally one-sided story that you should all just use sqlite but for you know where in that

measured case you you know sqlite fits your use case why not i mean it would make for for teaching

it would make it a lot easier to just say you know what like for these for these toy sites and for in

most cases like you can do postgres i'll show you that but you can also just use sqlite that would

be that would lower the barrier well as as you're talking one thing i maybe maybe the thing i i feel

like my biggest contribution is at these sprints. I was sitting with, so David Lord came over and

then he was talking to something about like automating deployments and asking questions.

And someone was like, well, Simon's or Willison is over there. He's like, you know, he's got like

hundreds of projects and, you know, should talk to him. We kept talking and, you know, I'm for a

developer, I'm outgoing. So I went over and said, Hey Simon, like, could you come over here? You

know, I was like, are you in the middle of something? He's like, well, yes. I was like,

can I bring you over here? He's like, okay. So bless him. He trusted me. And Simon came over

and he and David had never met. Like, I just sort of assume that these original, these, you know,

these, these gods of web development, all are, are chummy. And some of them are, but it was like

amazing to see. It was just like, Oh, like, Hey, I'm Simon. Like I'm David. Like, obviously they

knew who he were, but they'd never met. And then, you know, then, then they were off to the races

for, you know, I had to leave for the airport, but like an hour in, they were showing like all

these little things and hacks and so it's a beautiful thing to see but it's also a reminder

like you know it's not like everyone knows everyone right and especially these conferences

the bigger point i want to make is i think tim schilling was tweeting about this but

you know most developers are a little more on the introverted scale so like it's just natural

in conferences not every interaction is going to be smooth but everyone is there and trying and

and wants to engage if they don't they can go to their room you know so um taking that extra step

to you know if you know that two people might work well with one another don't know each other

is always worth it well then yeah no exactly and like even simon you know superstars i say simon

like even you know even superstars that you think oh well they must be really that that can be shy

people you know too and they're feeling it just as much as you are when you're a bit nervous about

talking to people like it's it's not it's not you it's everybody yeah yeah exactly well but

come on let's call it a day that's that's plenty to talk about really exciting and good to be back

and ah anyway i've got some such warm changokon feelings yes likewise likewise and lots going on

so check out the newsletter check out you're already on the podcast check out the podcast

um and on the yeah we'll put links but i think there's changes afoot and if you want to get

involved raise a hand um we're going to try to have working groups and all these other areas so

people can act on it it's not just the board and we can keep the momentum going well that was it

we are going will you see us yes okay yeah uh jango chat.com chat jango on twitter and we'll

see you all next time bye-bye join us next time bye-bye