Transcript: DjangoCon US 2024 Recap - Tim Schilling

The links in the show notes and we'll tell you more about them later.

I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson.

Hello, Carlton.

what are you too?

Like, is that like actually recorded or is that all live?

Like then seeing the pause in there, like this is a good idea.

Yeah, it's live.

We do it live.

But anyways, we're very pleased.

How are you, Tim?

I'm doing great.

And end up in the back of a van with both of you and just looking around.

What is going on here?

Um so yeah.

So now seeing the actual recording of it, it was kind of cool.

Oh cool, cool.

We want to talk about DjangoCon US because you were an organizer, Carlton and I spoke.

It was a couple days ago, and I've I just wrote up a little recap.

Maybe I'll put in the show notes, but I've been thinking about you know, first conference, second conference.

I think this is sixth or something for me.

And I vividly remember the first one I ever went to was in San Diego.

It was there three years total.

So um, but that first year didn't know anyone, you know, you're sort of milling around in the evening, like I don't have any friends, and then people just appear in the lobby, and often it's like, yeah, let's let's go to dinner somewhere.

So it's it's very organic and very, very friendly in a way that other tech conferences aren't as much.

I just know I was walking down the hallway and Carol Gan uh Gantz uh recommended, hey, go down to the lobby, you'll find people to eat there.

And so I did that, and yeah, everything kind of was great after that.

So once I learned that superhero trick.

So it was

I was trying to think of a different one, and no, it was it's really that.

Was that 20

22.

So you get up to the city.

You just show up and

Yeah, no, it um I kind of had a plan coming into it, and then Kojo had his orientation where he's like, hey, know what you're here for.

And so did some quick reflection and uh yeah, tried to make the best of it and just dove both feet in and haven't really looked back.

Like, so I I was answering questions on Stack Overflow for many years, and then the forum, and then uh the Discord, and then I became a moderator of Discord, and then yeah, um then it was really the uh 22 DjangoCon US conference and then Jenga Not Space and DEFNA and uh an organizer, yeah.

So everything kind of just snowballed.

Um but yeah, I've kind of been around on the edges, just not as deep into it as I am right now.

I mean, because you you don't look like you've been involved since 2000.

You're a little bit younger than us.

Well, so DjangoCon, one of the things is everyone has a different experience.

There's the first-time experience, there's this speaker experience, but there's also the organizer experience.

Maybe you could touch upon that.

You know, how did you get involved?

What is what is that like?

Because I know from talking to you know Jeff Triplett specifically, who helped run it for years, it's just wildly different when you're behind the scenes making things happen as opposed to you know just showing up.

It I didn't really process this until I just um Lacey Henschel did an interview with Jay Miller and I just watched it recently.

And she was talking about how her perspectives on Django cons have changed, where like originally she was there for like the technical talks, and then as she became more involved in the organization, like that's where she ended up uh skewing to.

And I realized like that is exactly what happened this year.

I I the first two years I had pages and pages of notes from every single technical talk.

This year, not so much.

Um, trying to manage like the organization side of things and keep up with the communication, check and make sure that everybody else is having the conference that they're intending to have kind of um it you have to take that from somewhere.

That focus has to come from somewhere.

And so a lot of it's like that deep thinking during the talks.

Uh so now I'll have to go back and re-watch them and really consider like what they were.

So there were a couple that stuck out, but like those were like more of the emotional ones.

The um some of the technical ones were a little bit harder for me to grok fully.

Um, but yeah, other than that, like it was great.

It uh this year went a lot smoother for me than last year.

Uh I took some advice and tried to step back and not do so much.

So that was really nice.

Um, we were able to do a couple of new things that I'm I'm proud of.

Uh there's the the interviews that I just referenced, Nate Zieger, Nathan Zieger was helping organize those and we'll be releasing those over the next couple of weeks.

And I'm I'm I'm really excited about those.

And then um, yeah, we had the hackathon this year.

Yeah, there was a bunch of new things that we added um that were that were pretty cool.

I mean, it is a little bit because I want to link to them later, but it becomes I remember my first year, I felt like I had to I go to every single talk, go to every single thing.

And so I ended up staying inside for like three, four days.

People were like, what was San Diego like?

And I was like, I don't know.

Like I took airport to here, and then I basically didn't leave.

And then the next year, um, I think that's when Carlton, you and I did the biking.

We did biking too.

I was like, wow, like that's a good idea.

So we went out in the mornings, and then now I feel like I'm I'm almost like at the other extreme where writing up my recap, it seems like nothing but you know walks and coffees and then a little bit of the talks.

But I think that's because the talks I still went to a lot of talks, but I know that I can see them online after, and there's it's about meeting people and it's also about um pacing yourself and not being overwhelmed by everything.

I mean, well you might, but that's hard work.

I have like pages and pages of notes for my first Django Con because it was so it was like you know being in grad school, but I didn't I don't know if I knew that the talks were gonna be I don't think I knew the talks were gonna be online later, or somehow it didn't click for me that I could just absorb it and then yeah, go back and dive in later.

Like it wasn't gonna completely and so now actually that's what I do.

I try to make a point of watching basically every talk from DjangoCon Europe and US, and then I have like a whole notes section.

Um, because I otherwise I'm not gonna remember anything, but then I can be like, oh, what was that talk?

You know, what was that code snippet?

And oh yeah, it's a lot makes everything a lot more enjoyable, and you don't feel like you have to write things down or or you'll forget it.

That one hit pretty close to home.

Like uh I was there with a couple of employees and afterwards we were talking about like, yeah, we might have a few of those, and we're just kind of letting smolder for a bit here.

Uh but

Oh yeah, it's still that's still live.

That's still

You come back and certain things like I should really do something about these, you know, ongoing things that that bug you.

So yeah, yeah, we had or we um Jeff Triplett and I run the Django News newsletters, which we put out during the conference or tried to, and uh it was having one of its periodic issues on Friday.

And so I think it was a combination of like being tired, being home, new, he and I are both ready to just like rip it all up and switch to some other platform, and we yeah, you came out with a new perspective.

Um, there's some things that might be changing there.

Well, of course, other than

I don't know, maybe I'll tell the story another time with how it all plays out, but there's some interesting things with how yeah, curated and other things.

Carlton knows I've I've complained to him about it, but we'll see how it all shakes out.

But we we got someone we were like, is this a zombie project that we're we've been using for five years and paying like real money to?

And we found someone involved and yeah.

When I sort that all that out, we'll we'll tell that tale.

But you know, the point is you come at it these month everyday things, and you're like, uh, you know, maybe we should do it differently.

Yeah.

Well, not really.

I mean, we have the email addresses, like we we don't it would be as simple, you know.

I actually already moved it over to uh to something else, but it would just be about giving the Django the Django knots access and be a little bit of a hassle, but it's not it's not that like there's no payments that go through it because we have sponsors, like that's all separate.

So um you know it's weighing up the annoyance of change versus the annoyance of three times in six months no new a newsletter not going out, and then um this time at least though Jeff and I both wrote some pretty frustrated emails for us.

Uh and we actually got a response um and then yeah, found out that trying to figure out the ownership structure of it right now, which when I have that nailed down, I'll talk about it.

It's great.

And then Jeff responds back with, Well, I didn't even realize like people have read it that much.

I'm sitting there like, no, this is fantastic.

This is a really core piece of uh of our community that that's required almost at this point.

So yeah,

Is all these digital friends and colleagues, you get together and you hear just a couple token, hey, thanks for thanks for organizing the conference, Tim.

Like, thanks for all these packages, thanks for helping out, right?

I mean, you don't get that, right?

I mean, GitHub stars or listens, uh, you know, you don't I mean, I can speak for the you know, the podcast, like Carlton and I, every once in a while we get an email or something, but absent Django cons, it's almost like it doesn't exist beyond the people we're interviewing, right?

Because it's like, I see some numbers, but I don't know, unless someone says something.

Same thing with the newsletter, right?

It's just like, okay, I mean, I see that it goes to thousands of people, but until someone says something, it might as well not.

Um, along that vein, like, how important are Django cons to the Django community?

Okay.

Like, um, I often tell the story of um how I kind of really got deeper into Django.

I was using it for years and years and years, but I never went to any events because I'd been to tech conferences in my early career and they were they were okay, but they weren't particularly great.

And lots of things that we pride Django cons being about.

Well, these events weren't like that, and so I I and then I don't know, I saw the Django under the hood events come out, and I was like, Oh, I should have gone to I could have gone to those, but they they sold out quickly and I'd missed them.

And then the year after I think Django Con was in like Florence, and I was like, I can go to Florence, I really can.

And I went, and the talks were um, you know, they were technical talks, sure, but the the talks were on things like um cognitive biases and diversity hiring and like all these just topics I hadn't even really considered, right?

Right.

And it I literally think of it as changing my life.

I was like, yes, I'm home.

This is where I want to be, this is what I want to engage in.

And at the at the time I was at an inflection point in my career.

I was um I I've been I'd had a kind of five years or so of building mobile app front ends with Django backends, and that was a nice niche.

But at the time it was getting harder and harder to maintain that.

And I either had to specialise more on the mobile front ends or specialise more on the Django, and I remember going to that conference being like, Well, which am I gonna do?

And it was very much the conference that made me say, No, okay, I'll double down on Django.

And yeah, it was literally life-changing.

And I met all these people and I engaged more with the community, and every year it refreshes it.

And every year you go and you see these fucking, you're like, Oh, how are you?

And that is magic, and it's irreplaceable.

Is that where you gave the I just wanted to ask Carlton?

Did you give a talk at the first one, the growing old gracefully, or was that the no that was the next year?

Was it also in Florence for some reason?

But basically, I I came away from I came away from DjangoCon U EU seventh 2017 being like I've got to submit a talk for the next one.

And I've you know

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just trying to say, I mean,

Because I just I'll answer your question, Tim, but I've found Carlton because I saw that talk.

So I probably because I was going through the the videos and I emailed you, I believe.

And so then DjangoCon 2018 US, my first one, I gave a talk.

I sort of knew who Carlton was, um, and then he came up after the talk and said hi and had feedback.

And then that, you know, here we are now.

So you know, it's always like a

Every year I'm it it's a ha it's it's a big ass to go to a conference.

Like it's a lot of time, it's it's money and stuff.

And I have I can sort of talk myself out of it.

But every time I go, all these good things happen, and it's often after, you know, it's not, you know, I can't evaluate the conference based on how I feel, you know, the week after as we are now.

It's like the weeks and months and getting to know people, and then you know, just having just having a meal or coffee with someone later when you interact with them online, you you know, they're a human being, right?

So it just makes it a lot easier.

You can understand, oh, they yeah, maybe this is how they're thinking about things because you've had conversations about and you have a just you know, just a sense of them as a as a full person, not just this name out there that's helping or hindering what you want to do with Django or with code.

Um, so absolutely the same experience for me.

Like I've been I've been to a PyCon, I've been to some tech conferences in San Francisco when I was out there, but nothing, nothing like a Django con.

Like I would if they're there and those the organizers are there, I'm willing to go to those conferences.

Yeah.

Um I I I have that bit of trust uh in them and that's willing to spend the money and the time to go do it.

But it took a lot for me to go to that first Django Con.

Um, like it was really a decision, like, nope, I'm investing a lot of my career into this, and like let's see what happens.

Um, but yeah, that part of the question behind the reason behind that question was uh do you both then feel so you both agree that like hey, personally and community-wise, like Django cons mean a lot.

Do you feel like we accurately represent those uh within the community?

Like the the sorry, do do we accurately reflect that importance within the community?

Of like Django cons kind of keep things together moving forward.

Yeah, I mean what well I don't quite understand the concern.

Like, yes, they're big things, right?

And we a lot of effort goes into them, a lot of promotion goes into them, but

Like I think it was the last episode, you two were talking about um the the auth uh change and how we might be able to get a decision made at DjangoCon because we're gonna have a bunch of people, DjangoCon US, because we have a bunch of people in the room, um, and and we can kind of hash out a bunch of these differences and hopefully arrive at a solution that moves us forward.

And so, like this is a common trend in these conferences.

Um, but I don't know if we're I think everyone within it, we all know that this is true, but are we actually actively marketing it and telling people like, hey, if you want to be a part of this, like you need to be here, like you really should be here if you really want to invest um into the community, if you want to integrate yourself into the community.

And then also making sure like the people that are in the community that we are trying to help support, like, are we helping them get to these?

Um so like that that's kind of where I'm yeah.

I mean, you said the magic word marketing.

And you know, I just gonna say, like, I mean, Jacob Kaplan Moss gave a talk this year on what would the Django Software Foundation do with a million dollars.

And one of the big takeaways was having an executive director to do things like that that fall through the cracks.

You know, we could also do things like put the conferences on the homepage of Django Project, right?

Like I I we could well, I mean we don't track the statistics, but I would venture that the number of people who see the news community section of the website is point something percent.

You know, that's that's kind of why that's why the newsletter exists.

That's why the the podcast exists.

I would rather the newsletter be a Django newsletter.

Um so maybe I should Jeff and I should push harder for that.

Like we've offered to to run that for Django, but I think the reality is it's a lot of work and it's a lot of you know, I I think the pro ongoing volunteer commitments are difficult.

That's why we have the fellows' role, um, which I thought um Natalia gave a really great talk about it this year.

Um but yeah, mark marketing shining the light on you know, organizers.

Like I didn't I didn't know that volunteers ran the first Django Con when I was there.

I just like, oh, it's a conference, you know.

I didn't realize it was like, nope, nobody's getting paid it's it's just right and then as you get into it you start to see and you know however we can shine a light on the people who are making Django happen the better.

But I think it's easy you know it's running a conference doing code doing community doing docs you know Sarah Boyce um gave an amazing talk on accessibility features in Django 5.x but we basically don't talk about them because by the time we've done everything involved everyone's just exhausted right and so that last bit that if we were a commercial enterprise or something would get all the focus instead all the focus is on the the meat and not on the the sizzle.

Yeah that's what I would say Carlton what's what's your take?

But the framework is the only bit that we have on the website.

And if you come along as a Django a new Django dev and you find the website you manage to download it you managed to go through the tutorial you kind of don't even know that there's this ecosystem around it right we finally Tim you managed to get Django debug toolbar into the tutorial as that final step as oh look there is there are these third party packages and here's one and look there's a there's a site that tells you about more and that but that was a major change for Django to even just even hint that there are all these third party packages and could we perhaps hint that there was a community that

used in fact the best bit about it.

I mean Carlton's spoken of especially when he was fellow some of the founding figures were stepping away a little bit which makes sense but there wasn't that next generation and I feel like now we have we have it or we have it more so change is happening you know we're there's a ticket open to add user profile models.

You know all these I think because a lot of people who did so much work back in the day are slightly less involved but can still inadvertently be a block on change.

And so having these in-person conferences, seeing newer people come in nobody wants to be a block, but we kind of need you know new ideas, new enthusiasm, you know, reconsider things uh you know so that forum post my talk was on auth.

I think most people when they step back and think about it like yeah we why don't we have a template for login so we have built-in login it's I don't think it's controversial it's just hasn't been done and the whole auth thing was there were there was a big not fight but discussion about it you know 12 years ago and a lot of the people who were involved with it then have scar tissue from that but yeah you know it's

it's hard.

And one of the PRs she pulled up was this verb changing the variable names to be more straightforward and then there was a comment about performance and immediately I'm just thinking like oh my goodness like that this is so difficult to try to reason about and like this is just one small change that isn't functional.

It's literally if you're reading just happen to be reading this one function this'll help but then you have to have how much time of investment over how many people and that's just it it it was mind boggling right then of how much time it goes into changing any bit of this code and then when you make it much larger of talking about models and like a core part of like the developer experience.

Yeah I can see it's gonna take a while.

core bit that's small and tight and difficult to min difficult to edit and difficult to minute and then around that we we have got the great third party ecosystem and that's all fine except again nobody knows what to you know if you're a newcomer how do you know what to install from the third party ecosystem and so Django's philosophy of batteries included sort of fades away and dies unless we find a way it it well either we have to pile it all into Django in which case it's hard to maintain and it it can't be done because we can't make chang

es quickly to Django or we have to find a solution to this problem this messaging problem about hey and if you need I don't know if you need rate limiting there's option one and option two for rate limiting if you need um debug tooling there's these options for debug tooling if you need I don't know two factor off there are these packages that are all worth looking into we need to solve that problem so that a newcomer arriving at the Django project has some guidance and doesn't have to go and find say awesome Django on the GitHub repo like lo millions

of people don't even never even know about this awesome awesome X projects right we can't be relying on that as our information distribution channel.

get these you know how international it is you know these I you know how off putting some of these things are to newcomers which uh people aren't trying to be but our concerns as developers are different than new people and we sort of lose that perspective over time.

So it's I don't know exactly what the solution is but there's the dilemma.

So you start writing blog posts you start creating a package how do you get the rest of everybody to know about it like if you're not in the in group it's really hard for people to take you I wouldn't say take you seriously but to give you to invest the time to research it and provide you like critical feedback and stuff.

And so it's yeah there there's challenges on both sides of it by not having a standard like hey this is where you go for community like third party like this is where you go and submit your your blog posts for greater reach and um

Like that's that's my idea like the central index of all the Django knowledge and like have some curation in it.

And yeah never got anywhere.

But like it's it that need is still there I just there's other things I I'm investing my time in right now.

So give us the pitch.

Like we we can't guarantee there's always going to be a maintainer for things because that's not our purview, but we're gonna work our hardest to make sure that we're identifying packages that do need maintainers and help main new people become maintainers and try to ease that logistical burden um around maintaining software.

So it we we've learned a lot from other solutions in the ecosystem like JazzBen did a lot of things has done a lot of things really well and continues to um so we've copied a lot of our organization from there but the the main difference was we started with a group of people uh at the administrator level at the top to create that redundancy and create a success like an immediate secession plan.

So everything we have to do, we have to allow multiple to have access to it, and and by confronting that from the beginning, then it's easier to be like, all right, we can onboard somebody, we can remove someone.

Um, and then that that idea then permeates down.

Um, and then yeah, so and what I held, I don't want to say community interview, but like kind of asked who would be interested.

And I had 10 or 12 people respond, yeah, Carlton was one of them.

And uh yeah, we had like a list of responsibilities, and the four people that I ended up going with were the they were the ones that had responded like yes to everything wanting to be involved with the community, like responding to questions, reaching out to maintainers, reaching out to new people.

Like I felt that at least in the initial phase, we need to be really strong on the community aspect of trying to maintain relationships and um set up those organizational flows so that like later on people have then processes and workbooks or playbooks to be like, oh, we just need to go implement this now.

And so that's kind of the idea behind it.

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I think there's that's probably quite wise in that we've historically Chad, the hero does code by themselves approach, and that's worked very well, and that goes very so far.

But it it's it reaches its limits and that there's no difficulties about succession.

That's the key.

How do we hand off to the new generation?

That's the I've heard this topic come up just a billion times recently, but baking the community in from the start is exact reversing the the framework ecosystem community.

It's like, well, let's go, let's go community ecosystem framework and see if that works better.

Like DjangoCairn didn't go anywhere because I was the only one working on it.

But then like the debug toolbar has been really fun to maintain with Matthias.

We have a co-writing group, and then we meet every six months to just talk about the project.

Um, we've recently added a couple new maintainers, and then Django.space is so much more fun because we have a group of administrators, we now have some new session organizers, and then Django Commons, like it helps create that accountability, but then it also creates that connection.

And then when you go to the Django Cons and you see people's faces and you get to connect with them, and yeah, it's a lot of fun.

And at some point you think, I'll just stop for a little bit, and then you kind of stop, stop.

You know, I mean I certainly this podcast with Carlton, the newsletter with Jeff, I mean, even the awesome Django repo, Jeff came in, I forget, like two, three years ago, because I was feeling overwhelmed.

And, you know, when it's a non-paying, you know, community thing, it's very easy to just be like throw your hands up.

Um, but if you just have a little bit of help, it gets you over the edge.

Can we talk about Django Not Spaces though?

Because that I feel like we've talked about some of the challenges here.

This is this unbelievable success story that yeah, came from you know, this new generation of people who are like, we should do something and and actually did it.

And now the thirds the thirds cohort um just closed the picks for it.

Yep, we just sent out the announcements to people who uh were selected.

Um yeah, it's yeah, that another another Django Con product.

Uh Rachel and Dawn, I think it was after 2022.

I think that was the one, whichever one Rachel was on the panel at the end, I think it was 2022.

Um, they realized like, hey, we we should have something to help people get contributing, like start contributing.

Um yeah, and from there, like it it kind of grew.

They added Sarah Abdurmain and then Sarah Boyce and I joined a couple months after that.

And then we had the little pilot program, and now yeah, we're on session three.

We now have we we session two, we had one new session organizer, uh Tashar Gupta.

And this session we now have three new session organizers helping.

Um Priya Poa.

I'm sorry for pronouncing your name wrong, Priya, and then uh Lillian Tran and uh Emmanuel Cachi.

So it's it's really exciting to see people like go through the program, advance up and like take more and more ownership, and now being to the point like actually helping us out, because the the organizers of Django Not Space like haven't stayed static.

Like Don's now president of the PSF board, Sarah Abdermain is on the DSF board, Sarah Boyce is a Django fellow.

Like it people keep moving, so like we there was a vacuum growing, like we need to pull people up and help out.

Um, and so it's it's really exciting to see see that happen real time.

Where it's expected and celebrated that people can do different things but still be involved.

I mean, and even something as simple as the um Sarah Boyce started on the Django newsletter, she was like, hey, because she was on the review and triage team at the time, like, why don't we celebrate all the PRs?

And we're like, that's a great idea.

And she's like, and I'll do it for a while.

So, you know, and that's turned into a regular feature in the newsletter and a bunch of the Django knots.

And uh Raphael has done it a lot recently, and that's a perfect, I think a perfect example where it's not just and you know, it's like, yes, we should do it, and someone raises their hand and takes it on, and there's a way to have some continuity.

So that's you know, I th I think a beautiful thing, right?

If we could mimic that, like you can't and this ties into Carlton's initial talk of growing old gracefully, like you can't it's unreasonable to expect the hero model into it's off, you know, it's off-putting initially and it's off-putting long term when people when that, you know, but the it's almost like the burnout thing, right?

It's like it just builds up, builds up, builds up, and if there's no release, you just throw your hands up and walk away, you know, unless unless you're actually getting paid for it, which almost none of us are.

I I was gonna say that with getting paid for it opens a whole host of other issues that I don't want to go down that channel.

Yeah, but we'll ignore that.

Because I feel like this is something that's really, really, really hidden within the Django community.

I mean, I only knew about it from Carlton mentioning it because he was mentoring, and it's this long-running thing that's had major changes and yet has basically no visibility as far as I'm concerned.

Um, so how did how did you get involved with that and what was your experience like?

And the toolbar is one of the most popular ones.

Like, we need to make sure that we're not a bottleneck.

And so we had came up with the project, we had done some work on it, but we kept stalling.

And yeah, for the last three years, I've been submitting it as a project for Google Summer of Code.

Um, and this year we had, I think it was two submissions, and we ended up selecting Amon Pandys, and he did a fantastic job.

Um, we actually had so it was on the mentor side, it was myself, uh Matthias Kessenholes, Daniel Harding, and then Elanita.

And Elanita was a Django Not from Django Not Space Session One, which was really exciting for me.

And then yeah, Amon had previously done a Google Summer of Code with Wagtail, and yeah, Tebow recommended him.

Um, and it yeah, it went really well.

It was fun to see his ideas and like pushing things forward and like the actual direction of the project changed as well.

Because originally it was like the serializable version of it, which we still need to do, but Amon identified, like, oh, we we can't even run the the toolbar in an async fashion, like we should start there.

And so yeah, we moved over there.

We got as many of the panels to be async compatible.

Like, there's a couple that aren't like profiling.

We have to swap out what does that underneath the hood because that's just not async compatible, or we have to, yeah, it's a little tricky.

Um, yeah, I'm really proud of Amon and the team's work on it.

And I agree, like there's it's another thing where we're not we don't have the visibility and into it because like there were four really big projects, and um I'm gonna plug Juggernaut space once more.

Shafia uh she did the JSON, it was Sage Abdullah, his uh mentee, Shafia was a part of Jangonaut Space, I believe it was actually our pilot program.

So that's yeah, it's really good to see like things just kind of come full circle and all the connections between things.

Carlton, you and I sit back and you know smoke our virtual pipes because he was you know, he was just a college student who did Google Summer of Code, who became a core contributor on Wagtail, and now he's mentoring, and and that's you know, if not for those entryways, he wouldn't be part of the Django community, right?

So yeah, that's a huge success story.

Yeah, yeah.

These bits of code that that need you know a dozen weeks to get done, they literally wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you know Google Summer of Code and that's and over the years it's enabled all number of projects in the Django ecosystem.

I mean, because the thing is Google provides the visibility, but the funding is not super high.

I learned about that, um, yeah.

We but I can't change Google.

Um, I can affect us.

Uh no, but uh to the to the community and the marketing aspects.

Mario, his keynote on community, I was talking to him after it, and he was saying, like, why don't we celebrate the people who are involved in like the releases and stuff?

And his example to me was if you are on uh the craft services team, you will stay through that entire list of credits just to see your name on the screen at the very end.

We could do something similar of like on each one of our release notes, or at least on the major releases, of having a credits or at least crediting like the fellows that are part of it, and then eventually start adding the list of everyone who's contributed to that and like what their contributions were.

Yeah.

Um, so that people rather than just saying, like, hey, I've got these commits and linking to GitHub, like you can link to Django Project.com and be like, well,

So um, like this this just needs the the just needs.

I'm gonna say just needs, right?

There's there is no just needs here, but this just needs a little teeny bit more life force.

Katie McLaughlin built a tool which goes not only pulls the um GitHub commits and who the committers are, which is relatively easy to do, but it goes through track and it looks at who's commented on all the issues and it pulls those people out.

And I think it even hits the forum API.

You know, it it goes through and it finds the wider set of contributors, you know, because lots of people just leave a um an insightful comment, and that leads to the solution, but they don't get a credit on because they're not a git contributor for the, you know, they're not the git committer for that.

They've done all Katie's done almost all of this work, and it just need just needs like that little bit of life force to get it over the line.

And we, you know, I was working with them to get it done, and I've I failed and you know, I ran out of life force, and it never happened for I don't know 4.2, but the tooling is there, it exists, and it's it's ripe to be picked up, and we could so what so very well create something like this, which is much richer than just a list of the Git committers, much richer.

I'm not saying like anyone here has to go do that, it's also throwing things out there because someone might be listening, like, oh I could do that.

And then even if you can't do it, yeah.

Is that the next step?

We should do something along those lines.

Hey, you know, it's because Katie's got this tool.

It's it's right,

We have to like end with action items and be like, and you do this and you do this, you do this, and then

That's that that's not what I was told coming out of the way.

We don't action items.

We want we want a clear path, right?

Because you can only have the same discussion so many times without saying, okay, let's just identify what a solution would look like.

So if somebody listening wants to help pick that project up, ping me and I will communicate with Katie and see if we can pick up something in that domain because it needs to be, it's so close.

And it was, you know, a couple of years ago and life was different.

Let's try now.

Now the newer point I'm trying to make is like it doesn't have to be the whole solution that you implement either.

Like you can do half a solution or like just do like what the front end would look like and be like, I need help populating this.

And once you've already invested that time, someone's more willing to come in and say, Oh, I can help you with that.

Like we can just do this.

That's one of the things I learned being on Django Not space is like you gotta the public marketing of celebrations is such a great way to like raise awareness.

It it it's it's literally a cheat code that you know that I've found um or that we found I learned from everybody else.

Let's just have a have a list of just just or maybe it could be an open source repo.

No, but I I I'm I'm not totally joking because uh there are all these things that are so close, if only.

Yes, Carlton.

So that I was gonna um the there's a way of rephrasing just is um Seth Godin, who's the the marketer, he has a mental exercise which is ask yourself if only.

So you know, when you've got if only this, then and and then you keep just saying if only, and then that's the job list, right?

If you can knock off the if only's, then you achieve what it's a you know, it's a powerful.

I mean, we can't just dump everything on the forum, but uh that's I I'm excited to see the forum seems to be coming into its own the last year or two.

I mean, because it I think Andrew Godwin started up or someone, I think started up a number of years ago, just because the the developers list on Google I mean couldn't be more off-putting to a a younger person or a newcomer.

I mean, not the content, but just the whole format, and it's just like it's it it just shrieks of like yeah, not not what Django really is.

I won't, I won't, you know.

So, anyways, that's a good choice.

Anyway, the forum.

I would then there was a related issue that Tim um was working on.

I was able to find that in a single shot with the search.

Whereas I, as a fellow, used to have to spend time on the Django developers mailing list searching the history to find the relevant threads, and every single time it's 20 minutes of scrolling, you know, it's it's just ah, it's a life really is.

You know, forum versus email.

Yeah, I understand the oldies like email, but seriously, the search and the the filtering and the threading and these things, these are you know worth any disruption you get from not having an email interface.

Anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You give off all these vibes of being like a some sort of really senior engineer, and I'm just like, what what is it you do?

What's your what's your gig?

Yeah, that's cool.

That's what's called I work for a company, yeah.

Uh no, I I work for a company called Aspire Edu.

We do education analytics, we don't do data science, like that.

Uh I feel like that's relevant here.

Um yeah, we're we're a really small company.

I think we have nine people, and then three of us are on the software side of things.

And yeah, I've been I contracted with this company for a while, like halftime for a number of years, and then about two and a half years ago now, I was brought on full time.

Um, we've got it it's it's an interesting project.

So we we run Django, Celery, Postgres, and then we have RabbitMQ and Redis.

But like we do everything on platform as a service or uh software as a service.

So we don't run any of our own hardware, we don't use AWS.

It's we run on Heroku, we have Redis Labs, we have uh Cloud AMQP, crunchy data.

Um we do, I guess we do have some S S3 uh AWS stuff for like S3 and backups and stuff, but um yeah, so we do all that because none of us are all that great at DevOps work, and we there's enough work elsewhere that we're just trying to ease the developer experience and just kind of work on what we're focused on.

Um it's it's an interesting project.

We have, I think the last time I counted, over 200 models now.

We got some tables in the 2 billion row mark.

So we can hit some.

It it's so we don't have a lot of usage on the web app.

It's more of the nightly process to capture data.

We have these massive salary signatures that run and have to hit all these endpoints to capture data to determine like what these differences are.

And um, yeah, we're working on one of the things I'd really like to do is instead of capturing all the data every night, they the some of these LMSs they offer the ability to listen to like an event queue, but then like that then introduce new problems.

Like, sorry, we're gonna go real deep on this s one particular problem.

So like if you have an assignment and you have the due date set at midnight and we're scheduled to capture data at midnight, or even if you set like due date at 1 a.m., you then run into this problem where all the submissions are most likely gonna occur in that last hour.

Because it's like

Yeah.

So you can go back in time and show data at this certain date.

If you we need to cut off that date at some point.

So now we're trying to deal with, all right, if we have this backlog of submissions that can accumulate and we don't know when we're gonna get them, like there's no indication, like, oh, you've gotten all the submissions, like you're good now.

Um, so now we're trying to figure out like how do we do a cutoff point, but then continue to allow more submissions and put those before the cutoff points that you can properly um dictate things.

Like it's uh yeah, as you just keep growing, it's like all right, next problem up, and then try to like patch things together and make it all work.

And yeah, so that that's one of the things I really like working up with like the same project for eight, nine years is you know all the gnarly but all the gnarly bits, and like you can be really effective really quickly.

Um yeah, you can get deep into some weird problems.

So one of the platinum sponsors at the conference was was Valkyrie.

What so for those who don't know, Redis has whatever it's sort of a longer story, but basically there's a license for it now, and a group is, as I understand it, trying to control Redis itself.

So there's a fork, one of which is Valkyrie, which is supported by AWS and some other places that want to keep it open source.

I'm curious, working on a like real world project, how does that filter to the decision making?

Like, are there these red lines when you say we switch or like you know, what does that look like in the real world?

Um like if I have to go and set something up in AWS and manage the user accounts, and because of another nature of how we scaled, we have like different app what we call backends, it's not super simple.

So, like there's a major cost to us switching over to things.

Umce that exists, doing the price analysis, like the cost analysis on it, if it's gonna make sense for us to spend time on it, because it's gonna require my time and I could be spending that elsewhere.

So, like it's a lot of forward momentum elsewhere that would prevent us from going back and like, all right, let's change this one other thing real quick.

I mean, that's the arbitrage, I guess, of the business opportunity is squeezing that that pain point.

Um, but it is it's interesting to see, right?

I mean, a little bit of the history, right, where it was open source for forever, and then the maintainer uh sold it and has stepped away and you know, selling open source.

And this has happened a couple of times, but uh I mean Carlton's made this point.

I mean, Redis is it's really a pillar of of the web, right?

So you sort of can't can't it's hard to think of that being in private control.

Um so I guess it's yeah, interesting to see.

So I'm

I I don't think there's anything wrong with throwing money at DevOps.

Like it's if you're not DevOps people and you can throw money at it, like do it.

Like, I you know, it's a whole separate beast, right?

It's separate from what you need, and until it becomes prohibitive, like why not?

I'm very pro and you're doing you know, you're doing billions, you know, you're doing real scale, right?

Like you manage services, you're using crunchy, you know.

We don't need to be heroes doing everything ourselves because no one does a good job of that.

I I'm all about services personally.

Carlton, uh, you agree with me.

They they well they stopped evolving because they got bought by sales or so that's a bit of a shame.

But um they got rid of the free tier.

Like free tiers are not not good business, right?

Like like they don't make any sense.

So I I'm not so worried that Heroku got rid of their free tier.

I mean that they stopped evolving is more of a shame, I think, overall, but it doesn't their product was good and it hasn't gone anywhere, right?

Salesforce kept it running.

And so that was a major hurdle.

Um, but yeah, Crunchy Data and Crunchy Bridge, uh, they helped us out tremendously with that.

And then um yeah, we haven't had the need to switch out Heroku yet.

Um it's been running well, yeah.

But that I mean

It's sort of amazing that Heroku was able to combine everything at a you know at scale, but like they're all separate problems, right?

Managing the database, managing this, managing that.

So and all of us kind of just want to build web apps and not worry about those things, unless you're at a huge company and then you can just only worry about worry about those things, but they're yeah, it's not what interests me personally.

Well, Carlton, I I I have to say, so you wrote something the other day about the in reference the money stack.

Oh, so I yeah, so I I managed to draft this.

Was um my my newsletter for the month was um stack report newsletter for the month was about uh avoiding RD in production.

I managed to draft it on the plane home from DjangoCon actually.

I was like, right, been taken away.

So I managed to block out the major points.

But yeah, I mean the the core idea there is you know stick to the the boring tech, the money stack, as Craig uh called it, you know, the Django's, the Postgres, the Python, the the mature, um sensible technologies because the their failure modes are known for for want of a better word.

The difficulties you're gonna have are known.

Your ability to plan around the risk that that involves is known.

And so you can actually plan it.

Whereas if you pick up new and shiny tech, it promises it's gonna be faster, but you know, who knows what goes wrong in the worst case.

It could be multiples of of time lost.

Um and it yeah, so anyway, the piece was about that.

But uh yeah, I'm a I'm a I'm a massive believer.

I think I think you know, I'm all for for doing research in bed, but just not on your production stack.

Is that that seems to be the next thing that's

We'll save it for then.

He just he just did a video.

Um, we should link to that.

He just did an all-in-one video, I think, making the case.

Uh but yeah, I I the you know, I think I I'm the same way.

Like, and it's sort of like what you were saying earlier, Tim, about like, you know, with Redis, like it's if it's you don't need to change for the sake of change.

And it's fun to try things out, especially on side things, but like on a real-world project, like you don't want change unless you have to have it, or unless it's clearly cheaper or better.

And often things aren't quite so simple.

What haven't we asked you, Tim?

We've we've covered some stuff.

I know we haven't delved into your origin story.

We we don't we can do that, or are there any other projects you want to call out?

What what would you like?

I mean, yeah, I don't really know.

Um, I so two questions.

So one is what is what is your magic wand?

You know, we just come out of DjangoCon.

I know you're working on a bunch of things, but what is something you're not directly involved with that you'd like to just change about Django?

It's okay.

It can be something you're directly involved with.

Go ahead, take the wand.

And like I'd really like for us to have solved the community aspect of like new person comes in and like here's everything you need to know and like where to go to find ABC and then XYZ, and if you want to contribute uh RST, like cool, like this is where you go, and this is how you do that.

Like, I think having that solved would unlock a lot of new people getting involved and then just kind of make everything else easier.

Um, and also I'm just I'm I'm really big on community, and so that would be that'd be really fun to see.

Maybe it's a matter of uh some love and care there, because it certainly could be could be could be improved.

Like this this is gonna require people effort of maintaining it and like communicating out and welcoming people in and making them feel like hey, yeah, you're seen.

And um, because it's it's more than just saying, like, hey, here's the open door.

Like you actually have to like step out and be like, hey, come in.

Like this is where you belong.

Um, right.

So I I think taking more of an active, I think in my my version of it, it would be a more of an active role rather than us saying like, yeah, we're really welcome, like come on in.

And it's like, oh that's that's quite a steep cliff face to climb up.

I just wanted to sort of help out a bit.

But I mean, like we we could also have, you know, uh archite like character architects, archetypes of like, oh, so like what how do you want to how do you envision yourself being in the Django community?

Like, do you want to be a contributor?

Like, okay, like this is a tough path.

Like this is our contributing guide, and like here are like the you can go apply it to DjangoNot space, and like if there's any meetups, like these are the ones you want to go talk to or go participate in, like submit a talk.

And then if oh, you want to be a community organizer, like, all right, where are you located?

Like, here's DjangoCon US, DjangoCon Europe, DjangoCon Africa.

Look up your all the various Django user groups, Python user groups, like go help them organize.

Um, and like kind of provide those different ways for people to learn, like to see themselves in our community, and then provide a pathway for them to go implement it.

So, like it, yeah, again, these are all ideas and we we just need somebody to go implement them.

And uh that was a joke.

I mean, just just looking at the homepage for Django Project, you know, down at the bottom, stay in the loop.

We don't mention the forum there, even though I would venture that most of the mind share is moved to the forum.

Instead, it links to these Google developer lists, which it, you know, it's like a fire hose of stuff.

It's not, you know, it's not that casual, you know, it's not what the newsletter is, for example, the Django News newsletter.

It's not this monthly thing.

Like that could be and again, Carlton and I were discussing at the conference because um Um Paolo was there and we're remembering that his consultancy had spent a lot of time um mocking up potential changes to the look and feel of the site, and it didn't quite get over the line.

But I think if I would one of my you know wands to wave would definitely be to have the website look as modern as Django itself is.

Anyway, so so so what's next for you, Tim?

So you're involved with all these things.

Oh, Carlton has a question, but well, no,

Go on, you do that.

You do that.

Are there other things?

Are you looking to hand off certain things?

Like what yeah, what comes next?

So I'm gonna run through a couple of things.

So, like, if people want to help uh with Django Commons, like if you want to move a package there, please do.

We're open to it.

If you want to help maintain another package, we're working on getting those, but definitely join, participate in the discussion groups um regarding DjangoCon US.

Like we just had, we as we mentioned, we've just finished up the conference for this year, but we are looking for organizers for next year.

We're also always open to new venue proposals, and it doesn't have to be for 2025.

Like, if you want to submit something for 2027 and take us to a different place, please submit.

Another thing my fellow board members mentioned to me, um, people can donate to us.

Like we had a tough year this year with sponsors.

I don't know if you all saw, like, we didn't have a single, I think it was platinum or diamond.

I diamond

Diamond's idea.

So like, yeah, that there's yeah, so we we people can donate.

Um, that that's always great.

Uh and then Django Not Space, yeah, we'll probably have the next session coming up sometime in 2025, early, early in the year.

And then hopefully maybe um I'd like to do like these streams of doing code reviews for Django to kind of like help other people see like what goes into it.

Um, I don't know.

After watching Natalia go through the one, I'm like, oh boy, this is this is gonna be challenging.

But so that's that's the next idea um to try to because Django Not Space, we need we're really good at having like the small group of people and getting them in, but there's so many more people that apply that don't get accepted.

And some of those people just need to be told like be held a little bit accountable of just I want to talk to somebody once a month.

Um and I think we can do that.

We just need to create some time for folks, and with the new session organizers, that kind of frees.

I'm I'm taking some time away for this session to maybe try that.

Um, so we'll see how that turns out.

I think I covered everything.

We haven't even mentioned that.

Um what's the name of it again?

Yeah.

I had I I've been trying to keep up with one per month.

And yeah, the the last one I I think it was after I said goodnight to both of you and a couple other people, and I had a different blog post in mind, and then this one hit me and I was like, yep, I'm gonna go ahead and write this about how Django and Django kind of like I can see there's a a group of people that really want to participate, and like they're starting to organize at like the grass loots level, and yeah, we just need to connect that to pathways to really just enable them um to have more uh to

affect change a little bit better.

Um and then the steering council is likely to have an election, you know, very soon, it seems, um, which is you know for the more for the technical direction of Django, I guess, whereas the board is more for running the DSF and looking after Django from a kind of organizational perspective.

So do you think we can encourage the the this this heads head swell of grass grassroots organization to apply for those positions and to to take up those leadership roles?

Um I it's a challenge.

Like we the thing I've learned about organizing, especially at like the top part, is a lot of it's not well defined.

Like I know Will, you have a post of like what it was like to be a DSF board member.

Um, but how much of it still is oh, this new thing cropped up, like we need to spend this month on this, and you work on that, you don't ever get back to the thing that you wanted to do originally.

Um, and like it it's hard to define that.

And so much of it is problem comes up, take the initiative and like go solve it, and then to the point of where could this all go in the future and making sure that we don't have those roadblocks in the way.

And so like communicating that to people is difficult, and then there's when you sometimes phrase it that way, then it's you're putting people off because like that's a little scary.

Uh so I think going and messaging people and be like, hey, I think you'd be good at this for this reason, but be aware, like these are the challenges you're gonna face, and but this is why I think you're good for it.

I mean, Dev Dev Nicholson came on.

Well, no, I mean, because I think I mean, you know, this is a fundamental issue is that a board is meant to be a board, not to be a board and do all the work.

And we need, you know, we have we have working groups that do great things, but to you know, to bring in this, you know, dozen, two dozen more people who, if for a little accountability and guidance, would be super involved, there isn't really a mechanism for that just yet.

Like, um, so yeah, but it would be you know it would be great to have some sort of tiers, some sort of public recognition, which is important to people, but then

I was really meaning more of like if you're in the community and you want to make sure that we have qualified people, like good people on these two boards or groups, like you can send these messages to people of who you think would be really good.

Um once they get on there, like, yeah, you're 100% right.

Like we we do need an exact director and

Yeah.

Like I now that we have that going, like it's it's not a far stretch than to say, like, all right, let's highlight this group and then stretch from there, like, all right, let's highlight this new person.

And before you know it, like we have a really good marketing team, like exposing our community and helping people see where they can get involved.

Yeah.

I I think things are looking up.

Like I know there's some uh flux always, but yeah, I'm I'm I'm pretty positive about this.

Yeah.

Anyways, I think we could keep talking, Tim.

I I wish we could, but we're at about an hour, so I think that's the the cutoff point.

But thank you for coming on.

We should have had you on a while ago, and thank you for all the work that you've done.

And as Carlton said, you really just came in like a tornado and are making all these great things happen that um yeah, I'm it's very exciting.

It's gratifying to see.

And thanks again, Tim, for making the time.

Thank you both.

Bye bye.