Transcript: Freelancing & Community - Andrew Miller

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Carlton Gibson joined us ever by Will Vincent.

Hello, Will.

Hello, Will.

And today we've got with us Andy Miller, who's big but very active in the Django community.

How are you doing, Andy?

I am well, yes.

People are gonna know you as Nano Republica online, right?

So it's just, yeah.

That's teenage me.

You know, like you you got your GitHub handle, you got everything else.

I'm not that it's an anonymous.

Well, it's not anonymous because if you search Nano Republica, you will find me, but it's just something that I came up with as a teenager and it stuck.

So yeah.

Uh where to start.

I did CS at university.

Um half CS, half electronic engineering.

Um, so not your your classic.

I don't know, is it your classic or non-classical?

It's that's that one notch hot.

There was 20 guys in my year, and so that shows you how popular it was.

Um you basically did everything from the transistor all the way up to software, and I leaned towards more software in my third and fourth year.

Um I currently live in Cambridge.

I do like the I do like the the broad thing.

I currently live in Cambridge, um, wife and two kids.

Um, and I'm running, I've been running and being as a freelancer for the last six years and starting a startup um called Hamilton Rock, um CTO.

That's like the basic intro, I think.

Okay, that's brilliant.

Tell us about freelancing.

Six years is is long enough to um have sort of had the good times and the bad.

So, you know.

Um so those that don't know uh UK, Cambridge is about an hour on the train from London, or maybe like hour to hours.

I'm like, I don't want to commute that anymore.

I'd I'd had enough.

So trying to find a job for four days a week before COVID and maybe remote or maybe local.

Um not that Cambridge isn't a huge city.

There's a lot of tech here, but it's not all web tech.

Um so I was like, oh, I'll give freelancing a go.

And here we are six years later.

I stumbled through COVID, um, used some savings to kind of get me through some hard months, but then there were some good good times as well.

Um, and then I found regular clients um who have paid the way.

It's like what one interesting thing actually I kind of reflect on for us as software engineers when it comes to freelancing.

I have like a few on the go at 8 in one time, but they are much different to say a graphic designer or a copywriter or something, where they might have loads of projects in a year.

And when I say loads, it's like you're talking tens or maybe even get up to like a hundred in a year because they're short, sharp things.

Contrast that with us.

It's actually like more multi-year I found contracts.

You have three or four.

If you get beyond four, your brain explodes because you can't the context switching between different businesses is just like, nope, can't handle that, as well as running your own business.

So yeah, that's

And for me, the the big interesting question was always the pipeline was like, where's the next project, the next client, the next um thing coming from?

If you can do a hundred projects in a year, then it's kind of easy because you've always got a new thing coming on the pipeline.

And if anyone falls down, then no problem.

But if you've only got can have like two or three or four projects going on and they probably don't overlap that much, then one falls down.

So it's it can be really quite serious, right?

I well, yeah, that's kind of where so I had a bit of a I learnt a lot on like non-technical communities.

So there's like a few freelance communities, and I got one client through one of them, but also it's just been active on LinkedIn as we love or hate the place, just kind of being there, and maybe not trying to doom scroll, but just people do business there as um I ha I've got, yeah, I've got a couple of good contacts from from LinkedIn, but generally it's um that's kind of where my writing habit, one of the reasons for starting my writing habit, I read a book.

I'd have to go and get it, it's in this room somewhere.

Um, but it was a kind of like

my daughter says things like that.

It's like I don't want to get up.

Um, but it was called The Manifesto of No Pitching.

I I could we could put it in the show notes at some point.

Um but in it it said writing is a way to demonstrate ex expertise.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um I should say I also use like freelancing websites and stuff to find the initial gigs and kind of you just be everywhere.

But that's kind of what started the blogging habit, and that combined with there was two other people, a guy called Jonathan Stark, um, who is a software engineer by trade, um, and then he's gone into coaching and that kind of thing.

And he does a daily newsletter every day, sends a newsletter.

Some days, yeah, but but he it's very it's all plain text, like it's not fancy kind of like images and all that kind of stuff.

Sometimes it will just be like him asking a question of his newsletter and be like, I've had this idea, respond back, or like a question.

It goes over the same points.

He's just demonstrating his like he he he has a book called Our D billing is nuts, and but then sometimes it's just an advertising for his Slack community and what's been going on.

So it's like it's not, yeah, it's a newsletter every day, but it covers the same ground again and again from different perspectives, or it's advertising a podcast that he's been on, or that kind of thing.

So it it works quite well.

Um, and then the other one, I followed a creative called David Cadavy.

He's an American who's moved to Colombia uh, discovered him ages ago, and he put out, he's about to put out his third book actually.

He had put out three books.

Um, he's like, I'm gonna get them wrong.

The middle one is time management, not not no, mind management, not time management, get that the wrong way around.

He's about to do one about finishing and the first one was about starting, whole creative process.

But the he brought out a book called The Hundred Word Habit, which is where the hundred words came from.

It's like just try and write a hundred words a day and see how you get.

So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do this for a year and try.

I'm not doing every day because writing it the weekend when you've got small kids is just like

I have control over my weekdays.

So yeah, I started, where are we?

We're 26.

I finished it was two years ago.

Yeah, 25 years.

Yeah.

And then I had quite a lot of content loaded up because I'd been like active on the Discord, and some people ask the same questions again, and not the same people, but new person comes along.

How do I do user types?

Or you see the same mistakes like people using underscore all and don't do that.

Well, it's fine to start with as a prototype, but really you want to specify your fields because you're just gonna like bad habits that you see again and again and again.

So I was just like, right, here's the content, and you just write and write and write, and it's led places.

And then I it's just forced me to also put ideas out into the world, ones that were ready or ones that were not ready, um, but where I've had ideas for packages or for I don't know, community ideas, things that just yeah, you've you've both followed along.

Um, and people can go to my website and just scroll through and search.

But yeah.

You know, our early episodes were were kind of like that, almost like university courses or like sections from a book where we talk about Django Rest framework.

And then once you exhaust that, then I saw, you know, for you, then you you know, you do like a 10-part series on building something from scratch, or you'd have different ideas.

It's it really is that that muscle of like being forced to think of something and um because otherwise it's so easy to have a thought and then you know, something happens and then you know, off it goes.

And you know, I I find it's it's you have to think about it as doing it for yourself, and then everything else is a benefit.

But there are these huge benefits that you don't but you can't, it's not a one-to-one thing, you know.

It was just I'm doing this goal and I'm just gonna see where it leads and just try and just like keep keep pushing it.

It was difficult towards the end.

There were some, and over holidays it was like, what do I write about?

And there's some days I was at like 11 o'clock at night being like, I have to put word pen to paper or metaphorical paper and just get something out.

But yeah, it was just doing it for myself and just push and the benefits were just

I mean, I re I rem I guess you you started doing parts, but I mean I remember, you know, because a number of them we we put in the newsletter, I would regularly on some of your technical stuff be like it was like a cliffhanger, you know, it was like I was like, wait, keep going, keep going.

Like, how could you I I would almost find that the hardest is like because for me, if I finally get something going, I'm like, all right, let's let's just get it all out.

Um Yeah, it it was like poetry almost.

So like

Like you write it, and then it's like what's the next topic?

So doing a series was actually easier to some extent because you go, right, okay, I can just break it at different points.

And for me, it yeah, I was like, I could have written it all in one go, but it was nice just to kind of go, right, that's me done for the day, move on.

And you're probably like some of the later posts, like even the ones that I'm writing now, are probably gonna be slightly longer because I'm like, okay, this is my post for the week.

I'm not gonna intentionally split it up for a daily thing.

It's I should probably take some of those with long those series and concatenate them into longer posts at some point.

But you know, maybe AI.

I like people doing this.

Eric Mathis also has his mostly Python, you know.

I think I think there's room for a technical series of things.

But Carlton, you were gonna make a point there.

So you're working, you're doing doing startup now.

Is that is that are you still freelancing as well or are you doing the the startup full-time?

I am full-time on the startup and have been for like the last few years.

Yeah, I'm I have a couple of maintenance contracts uh and some people paying off bills, and then I've got like an advisory role.

I do need to go back and do a I think I'm tomorrow I'm looking at my financial planning for the year, and I'm like, I need to probably go and do a bit more freelancing this year just to yeah, cash flow.

And I wonder what what are you are you optimistic, are you pessimistic?

What words of advice do you have?

That kind of you know, how do you s how do you see the situation currently?

Because a lot of

Oh, that's a that there's a that's a big question.

That's a deep question.

Yeah.

I because I think I benefited from doing freelancing, what, 10 years, no, yeah, almost 10 years into my career kind of thing.

Like I had some experience to kind of go, yeah, I can build things rather than people going.

And I've seen it in Discord where people come in and like, I need to build this for a client, and I have no idea.

And you're like, surely you need to have some idea of how did you like, but it's blindly you don't want blindly in the blind.

That's just my but that's for me how I feel about the current situation.

Um personally, I I put it down to faith.

Like, I I believe I'm a Christian, I believe in that, but that's and that's kind of part of the reason I did like I I trust something else.

I I trust God, and that's part of my like kind of why I went freelancing as well.

Like, I was like, I'm just stepping out and trusting that money's gonna come through at the right time and the right decisions are gonna come, like people are gonna show up at my door effectively.

And that's kind of happened, like where like even the um kind of the co-founder, how my co-founder reached out or was looking for someone.

I was just like, I wasn't expecting to get that at all.

Um we can talk about that in a minute, but like it's just that I think you've just got to step out and just try.

It's not sitting still, it's doing the cold outreach, doing kind of applying to all the things, but it's then going, what's the right thing?

And just I I that's not really an answer I know, but it is an answer in terms of like it's you you gotta do all the right things, and there are plenty I'm not gonna like go look consume knowledge.

Like for those those that want to start businesses, there's like hundreds of podcasts.

And during COVID, I was listened, binged, listened to hundred like hours and hours and hours on general and not even and don't limit yourself to like software freelancing.

Like, listen to design freelancers, listen to copywriters, listen, like get why perspectives and be don't be the only be the only software person in that room.

Like I'm definitely part of some communities where I'm the only software engineer.

And it's like great, that's like if people are gonna come to me if they have software problems.

And you

In progress that you've been doing for a while.

I think I was one of your very first uh signed up.

And I was like, I want to experiment with this.

So I was like, I'm just gonna talk about and like experiment with it.

It was like for me, it's also with the content game.

It's like start with writing.

Okay, I'm comfortable writing.

Start with or then go to audio, and then maybe I'm not promising anything, but maybe this year I experiment with video.

Like I've kind of got the setup, I did get this all set up to do video, but I hadn't got the kind of screencasting.

I need to sort that out in the editing process and kind of that's the next stage that if I have some time this year, maybe I'd look at videos like one video I'd love to do or series I'd love to do is a video series of the official tutorials and just step that through and keep it to the LTS versions.

I'm not saying every change I'm gonna re-record a video.

But the idea of again, when people come to the Discord or to the forum, they're like, I want to watch a video.

And you're like, okay, YouTube's not great.

They teach a lot of bad practices.

We often come, people come and we come fixing like they're not using forms and that kind of like there's not a good set of community videos.

There are some, but they're a lot of them are, should I say, want people who want to kind of show how to be sell courses or want to be entrepreneurs or go from zero to hero, which isn't I'm not saying there's anything bad, but there's no one from the community that I see doing

Like there's a couple there's uh I'm not gonna throw out names on this, but there's a couple people, I see their content, and I'm like, this is this is amazing.

Like, why why would I ever do a course and yet they have a fraction of the views of someone who does a lot of things on a a lot of topics, and then you know, they get they're helpful, I guess, on Django, but they completely they're not Django people, right?

They're not even web people, so they miss so many best practices, and yeah, I I feel the same way.

Uh I mean there's some people who do good stuff, but it's interesting that like it like no one at a Django con is doing has like a million views on YouTube.

And same thing in Python.

Python's the same way.

No one who's at a PyCon or involved in Python is one of these people making a million views subscribers.

I yeah, don't know what it is.

It's just the community aspect.

I'd want to be someone in the community doing videos, if that makes sense.

Like we'll you're probably one of the top people in that.

Like I the I have visibility anyway.

It's yeah, anyways.

I don't yeah, I I that the the thing is video takes a lot of a lot of work.

It's a totally different skill set.

Also, the people looking at videos, I think, are younger than us, many of them, you know.

So like there's a whole bunch of factors.

Um, and as I say, I think the thing is writing, writing is so easy, like you can write from anywhere.

You can write from a cafe.

A video, like you need so much setup, and there's just so much more production involved for it not to look terrible that it feels like if it misses, it's like a much bigger, you know, it's like, I don't know, it just feels like a bigger miss.

And that's why I haven't done it today, because I've stalled on the kind of like I maybe recorded one video, and then I was like, what do I do now in the terms of editing?

And I'm just like, I was like, nope, okay, and just stopped.

So I was like writing audio, like because with the in progress one, I've automated all of that as well.

So I hit stop record, it churns a wave, does the trunk like AI does the transcript, opens a PR for me on my website or review.

So I just like blast through it.

So I appreciate that you have that.

But yeah.

Like you seem to like freelancing, right?

I mean, this is the thing is that when you freelance, you your mind is so activated with different projects and problems that to go from that to working for one company on one code base is you know, it it's a tough transition.

Uh because normally like the last couple of months I've been focused on it, but in the evenings I've been, I don't know, playing with other bits and pieces of Django or other little projects and side projects kind of thing.

But it's just been all focused.

And I've enjoyed it though.

I've been kind of enjoyed the progress I've made.

And yes, yeah, it's tough.

And I would have stuck stuck with freelancing, and I will probably when this startup runs it course, I will be back, I think, freelancing.

I've enjoyed it and I'll stick at it.

But um yeah, it's yeah, I've I've really enjoyed the freedom of kind of like freelancing and kind of family life and that mix.

Um, but it's yeah, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up kind of like as things went along.

Um and we can I guess talk about the startup for now if you want.

Yeah, tell us about the so come on, let's just we can't

Um I didn't come up with the name that was my co-founder's been working on it for years before I did.

I I came along.

Um and it's a I'm gonna call it a fintech.

I'm not gonna call it a bank.

While we do provide banking services, I'm gonna get like with the legalese here, it's we don't have we won't have a banking license in the US.

It's gonna operate in the US, it's targeting small e-commerce firms, and so we're building banking and then we're gonna add features and bits on top that target e-commerce firms and are specific for them.

Um to date, I have just built the banking piece.

That's enough.

There's just a lot to build when it comes to kind of moving money and storing money and onboarding and all the extras.

Um well, floating fields, decimal points, integer types.

I'm sure you have some.

You want to get your model fields correct.

Like, so yeah, big it.

Well, I learned from last year with Octopus Energy, and it was a I forget his name, but like big ints on all the primary keys.

Yeah, once yeah, there's a Tim Power.

Yeah.

Um big ints on all my primary keys and all of that kind of stuff.

Um yeah, everything's stored as sense.

Um, I'm not storing dollars and days, like, yeah, I'm storing all of sense and we're backed by Stripe, so Stripe do everything in sense as well.

So it's just that one-to-one mapping.

Um so far, yeah.

I think the biggest yeah, the biggest interesting thing is I've been building our own internal ledger as well.

And that's interesting.

We'll see how that goes.

Uh double

Um, I'm using PG triggers and stuff to make it append only and that kind of thing.

So it yeah, we'll we'll see how it goes.

I've like I've gone, yes, this is how I think it wants, but it we've not hit production yet.

So yeah, a lot of it is still theoretical in my head.

And it's the kind of case where people would argue about moving um moving away from Django to a certain extent and adding a kind of um service layer on top of that with a business logic in pure domain objects.

I was you know wondering if you might speak to that for

a moment.

Yeah.

Um the so everything is either I'm using your library, CRUDViews, and I've extended that with extra like Ajax, hate is wait, it's HTML, yeah, pure HTML, template partials, a lot of partials, a lot of HTMX, views.

All the logic is currently in forms.

Okay, cool.

Um most of the like internal logic is in forms, and then managers query sets.

It's all it's all there.

Whether and the time I haven't, I've still called it a manager, is there's an onboarding manager, which is like the only non-django, it's just a class which holds onboarding, but onboarding is just pulling together different bits from the code base, and it's just into one place.

Okay.

Um the place I pull out of it is in forms, I make a call out to Stripe when I need to do API calls, and that's wrapped with catters.

Um so catters is just its own serialization layer going from Django to Stripe data structures and back.

Um yeah.

Um and that's that's it so far.

And so, yeah, it's I will say I need to go.

One of my tasks for either this month or next month is to sit down and I've been using clawed code a lot um to get it all out.

And some of it I do need to go back and just read and make sure that it's doing it the way I'd like it to do.

So when it does come to compliance regulation, I understand what's going on.

I do like it's working as it should do, minus a few bugs which I'm fixing, but that it's that comp I I heard the term the other day comprehension debt.

So making sure that my understanding and the AI's understanding is in line, and I've been going so fast that I know it's not aligned right now, and so I need to go and make it aligned.

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But what I like about that method, that that approach is that it scales to quite quite nicely.

And then if you do need to separate those two steps, the data sanitation from the business rule, it's very easy to pull it, pull them apart later on.

I put it in air quotes because like without inventing a new class, that's the place I'd put it.

And if I was, I'd probably shift it into query sets or managers as like if it needs to across multiple models or multiple, like but um yeah, I've so far I want to try and keep to that that kind of architecture as long as possible until it kind of breaks down and we'll see what happens then.

But yeah.

I got other people

I I w I want to give you a chance to talk about.

I think you published this yesterday, model renderers.

Uh so component stuff around Django, which is really a deforms.

Do you wanna can we mention more about that?

I thought that was kind of interesting.

We'll we'll put a link in the show notes to this post.

That's I want I'm I wanna try and reduce the amount of templates that I'm creating.

So when it comes to rendering a form, I want the form to look the same everywhere.

Um ideally, you just do the brackets form and you're away.

And so I found myself, I created a project form renderer, um, which has some in it, and then I ended up in that same file, well, it's actually one template file using partials.

So I've got one template file with a load of partials defined, which define widgets and the forms.

And you're just referencing partials from the renderer and I'm monkey patching the widget templates.

So that's just two files, that's all your form styles done, which is quite nice.

Um and I was wondering, wouldn't it be nice, or I say nice, wouldn't it?

Would it be an interesting experiment to see if like you could define a model renderer?

So, like from your from Neapolitan Carlton, you've got two template tags of object detail and object list, I think.

Yeah.

But essentially taking that and making it configurable from a class like a form renderer, um, and then have maybe a link to the form renderer for that model as well.

I I don't know what this is just this was an initial idea that I had at the end of last year, and it's like the idea of you define that and then go, right, okay, if you want to customize how your model's rendered on a page, and you just go object or object list, and you you're kind of one one idea I'm generally playing around with, with the introduction of with form renderers, with simple block tag, with uh template partials, I think we're very, very qu

ite close to having components in core Django, but they're just not they haven't been drawn together yet into this is how you do it.

Um I actually have one tab from Django, it's Django Cotton's, I think it's their readme.

Um they have a table which compares.

I'm gonna pull it up now.

Uh give me a moment.

There we go.

And of course it's saying cotton ticks most of the boxes.

There's one which uh Django Components does, but uh cotton doesn't do.

But I'd like to just at some point spend some time going through that and being like, oh, actually, while Django like while partials doesn't do everything, but if you do partials and then simple block tag, you get mo like extra like it's like what parts do you need to bring together from core Django to actually have something comparable?

And yes, the DX like cotton provides a nice user like developer experience, but I'm like, how I think we're closer than we think we are in core Django.

So I'm just kind of pushing at those boundaries, and especially where like I take the another blog post I wrote recently about like icon packs using template partials.

Yeah, I didn't come up with that idea.

I will say Claude kind of came up with that idea and I pushed it a bit, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting.

I never thought to use partials like that, but it's just it did it, and so I'm like, okay, what else can we explore with partials and the newer things that haven't been experimented much with in the later releases?

I find, you know, uh I'm still finding template partials to be like revelation revelatory and like then the patterns they enable, and this this idea that you've got one template file with the part the related partials in it, and it's like, oh, it's that one, it's that one, and they're all next to each other, and it's like that's that's lovely.

Yeah.

And then for the full for the kind of the component problem, which I think is uh think of as the kind of problem of slots, you know, where you need you've got an out you've got a s a layout kind of and you need to inject bits into it, and still the DTL by itself, even with template partial, doesn't do that perfectly.

And I use um I use HT um Pi for this, which is um where you define these fragments in um in Python.

But I think it's it's really super, it's just a lovely time to be working in Django around this area, I think.

I'm just gonna every time I come up, I'm like, what can I do in Django and what can I patch in Django to make it work?

And I will probably need to install one at some point, but for the time being, I'm like, how far can I abuse what's there?

Um to see

I I so I used used to maintain um crispy forms.

I used crispy forms for a decade.

And when I started the new project, I was like, I'm not gonna install it.

I'm gonna see how far I can get with the renderers and template partials.

And and I still haven't installed it.

I'm like there are bits where I'm like, oh, I could just do that dynamic layout, but I'm like, okay, what do we do?

What do we do?

And how far can we push it without of dependency?

Sorry to jump in.

Like you were saying, you know, 10 years and then freelance.

Like, because a freelancer would just pull off the shelf, oop, solved, solved, solved, right?

Whereas with a little more experience, you're like, even if I later go to it, I want to play around and muck in there and have that deep understanding and know where that line is.

But you don't know where any lines are when you're starting out.

Part of it as well is that for me as well, I want to push, I want to see what Django, like I wanna like if I hit the edge of like say an um, it's like actually we need this small thing in Django to then.

into Django Core.

So it's an experiment in that way as well.

Yeah, this is the way, I think.

This is yeah.

Yeah.

It's yeah, it's win-win.

It's finding yourself the time to do that, right?

I think if you're if you're at a company, if you're just endlessly reactive and dealing with pull requests, it's very difficult to find the time to not to learn, but you know what I mean, like to to round it all out and to come up with these things.

And that's actually I I say one thing I'm in going to enjoy when when I'm I'm being positive when the company grows, is I want to carve out that time and make sure that Hamilton Rock gives back to Django and to open source and we make time for that thing because I know intrinsically that I wouldn't be here without Django, so I'm gonna make sure Django gets the support it needs within reason, like the but the business needs to function.

But it's good

You'll get you'll get a good Django person out of it.

It's like it makes complete sense, but you just you need to walk people through it and yeah.

Okay, so you talk about Django and you're you're big in the community.

Tell us what you're all the things you've been doing, because

So Yeah, yeah, go on.

I started, I joined the Discord, and I realized that was when I realized, oh, I actually do know quite a lot.

Because I was at that point in the freelance, I was like, I know what I know, I've learned.

And then you go and you're like, oh, actually I do know quite a lot, because there's beginners asking lots of questions.

And then I was asked to make be made a moderator, and I was like, sure.

Um and Tim was a moderator, uh Shim Schilling at that point.

So we both did we're both very active and both moderators.

Um I then went along along to DjangoCon, and that was in Edinburgh, and I really enjoyed that.

Um yeah, was there for just the conference days that time because I had family holiday during the sprints.

Um then and was just continued to be active in the community in Discord mainly.

Um kind of did the forum.

I'm more active on the forum now, but it's an open tab in my on my browser.

Um started a Django social in Cambridge after hearing John's interview with you two.

I was like, yeah, I could do that.

Again, another another freelance marketing to like local freelance marketing tactic.

I was like, let's just be the Django person that everyone knows in Cambridge.

Um and you're in Cambridge, like I mean, as an American, I Cambridge is like, you know, it's not like the middle of nowhere.

Um, but it's there's actually there's not there's a lot there's probably more Django here than you've you realize, but it's all big life science companies, so they don't realize

I mean, just in terms of Arm

But it's getting into those big places, and I've not been successful at all with that.

But that's kind of like yeah.

But I've met a few people in in the community and other people in Cambridge that use Django, and it's like, ah, we have there's some connection.

And yet when I've interacted with some of those people, it's like a different planet of because I'm like, oh Django, let's talk about it.

But yeah, I haven't bridged that divide.

I got I've given up trying, but it's it's weird that it can be the same thing, and yet their world and my world are just like so radically different.

I'm like, what uh

Um I I'm looking it out.

Last year I've got made an admin of the model uh of the Discord for because I also started the online community working group.

Um last year I did the lightning Talk at DjangoCon Europe about my hundred words.

Um we

Um, if that makes it like it's like not and I made it it forced me to make time for it as well.

I think that's why I got in as well.

Like Tim was like, you can do this, but I was like, yeah, but if you give me eight weeks to make sure I do it and I'm accountable to someone, then it will happen.

And that's what happened.

So you need

There's a freelancer talking.

I need a deadline.

So I you know, I really salute you in everything that you do and the effort

Yeah, it's I realize it's one of yeah, I've described it.

I uh this guy goes back to university.

Like I in my when I was a teenager, I was like, didn't quite have a I had friends, but it was like didn't quite feel went to university and I was like, oh, I found my people.

I feel like I found my people again in the Django community, where it's just like you had to walk in the room at a conference or even on Discord and you just like you feel like we have friends, and it's just like all talking the same language, same ethos, same community, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I think I even told you, I was like, I would would have put like almost all of them in there, but we can't just make it, you know.

Same thing, same thing with Adam Adam Johnson.

I'm like, I can't, I can't just repost everything you do, but um but I think of you know, there's I'm sure there's I'm sure there's other people out there who have some you know similar or more knowledge than we have, but they don't commit to doing something, right?

Or they write amazing blog posts and then five months passes, right?

And there needs to be some consistency and commitment to I guess get on the radar of people as oh, and then from there all the you know, I I think that's the thing is like it's easy as a practitioner to think I need to get better at coding, I need to get better at Python or Django.

And it's like

You can't just be narrow and in a cave somewhere hacking away.

Some of them are like, I did this on holiday because but it was I'm going to write every day and I'm going to and yeah, I could have dropped off after that, but it's just you after a few weeks or months, you just the consistency's there.

It's a habit.

And yeah.

I mean, because I think about this again, like I feel like Carlton and I, we started off with I think pretty high quality takes on Django, but at a certain point, you know, now what?

Right?

And it's like, okay, well now we'll talk to people in the community or and I I've uh come to be more accepting of the fact that there's nuggets of information.

Sometimes we go technical, but sometimes we're just chatting as one would in a hallway or at a meetup, and you know, many of us are working working remotely, so there's value in that, even if even if you know it doesn't have to be reinventing the core of Django every every podcast to be to have value.

But you know, part of me thinks like, oh, I should be like, you know, more hardcore with everything all

the time.

It's this is a really good insight into what we're thinking about as a community.

Like getting the breadth of voices is like uh this is where we're where we're thinking as a community.

And the the the con the the conferences are great.

Like you go there, but and Danielle kind of made this in the lightning talk in Dublin, it's like you it's it's it's very exclusive.

It costs what easily a grand even to get there, right?

For a conference.

That's and probably more in the US.

I don't know.

I've not tried to cost out the US one, but

And so having online community, and this is kind of why where the online community for me started, is like how can we make the online community replicate the in-person conference for everyone that doesn't get that wants to be there but can't be there for whatever reason.

Um, and how do we experiment with ideas that are just yeah, it'd be is it a like monthly onboarding like an onboarding call or a community call where people just get and the like the DSF or office hours is part of that to some extent.

Like that's one example of it, that kind of people just jump on a call once a week.

I don't get to join because it's dinner time.

But that's

There's just talking and checking in with people and you it's private because it's the staff channel, but like I could see that being replicated.

It's like you get a small group of people and you just you slowly build it up and you can have community online, but it just takes time and effort and on ramps.

We've talked about you've you both have talked about this before it's like smoothing those on-ramps into the community and it not being you have to do XYZ, it's like just help out, and but it is that consistency as well.

Like you so many people drive by, ask for the help of their homework assignment or whatever, and disappear.

The ones that stay around are the ones that become part of the community, it's and they're there and they choose to be a part of it.

Because you've got young kids, you've got a business, you've got another bit your freelancing business on the side that you're still doing, you've got all the all the time you spend on Discord, you've got to that you said you've got the forum open, you've doing these working groups, you're you you comment on almost every you know significant debate I can do, you've got your blog that you're running.

How do you avoid um doing too much?

Um I my calendar is an absolute mess.

Well, it looks like an absolute mess to but it's like very strict scheduling of when I do things.

what I like.

So like one thing that happened during my freelance career was one client was having a production issue, but I had at that point had a day rate to or my day booked in with someone else, and I was like, I can't have this.

So I've over the six years structured it so that people pay me monthly for a service, but then it then gives me the opportunity to choose how I run my day, run my week.

I have complete freedom, and that's not so it does mean I can jump on a call at any time.

Like it's not I'm I have some standing calls, like, but it also means I get to go climbing every Monday, or I can go out for lunch with my wife on Fridays because she has Fridays, like it I've worked to create that flexibility, and therefore it means I can stay engaged in different places and also worked with the freelancing to get my prices to a point where I don't need to be working every single hour of the day generally to enable me to do the other things like write blogs and

it's it's creating that margin, and then I fill the margin, but that's

I mean, there's a season to things, right?

I mean, I feel like at some point I was writing very regularly and you know, all these things, and now I just talk to Carlton and Jeff, and then everything else everything else flows from there.

I was like, I've done the year, but and I'd run out and I was like, I can't keep doing this because it was just all consuming for that year.

And I was like, now it's gotta be a weekly thing where I when I have an idea, and if I skip a week, so be it.

But it's like when I have ideas, I'm not gonna force them, but I'll write about them when they come.

So Yeah.

You know, you know.

Sometimes I would you know be like, oh, I want to work on this thing, but I'm at the playground or I'm I'm doing this thing, and obviously I want to spend time with my kids, but he would always be like, Oh no, that's when the deep thinking happens, you know, when you're pushing pushing a three-year old on the swing for 40 minutes.

You know, it sort of frees up the space.

It's the equivalent of like a Kantian walk or something, but with kids, right?

Our brains are always going, even when you're rock climbing, part of you is thinking about like, oh, big int.

Mm-hmm that's interesting.

And it's the same kind of thing with creative projects or code.

It's like you may be focusing on something, but there's always background work going on, you need to push them back.

You can't always be on something, so yeah.

I'll say yes.

I'll start.

I'll throw that one out there.

I have been working through so basically you in Python build like a GPT 2 equivalent.

So going through, you know, pre-training pipeline.

I'll be honest, I haven't finished it.

I'm like halfway through it.

It is technical, uh, but it's super interesting.

And I wish I'd, you know, instead I've been like I find myself drawn to, you know, like these books of like, you know, people making snappy comments on AI.

But anyways, build your own LM from scratch.

Really good, knows what he's talking about.

Um you don't really know a thing unless you, you know, code it yourself from hand, not with Claude.

So uh So

Yeah, there needs to be a name for this, right?

Like because even if the code is correct and let's just assume that it is, if I didn't struggle and type it like because I come from doing it beforehand, I'm like, uh I go into these code bases and I'm like, what is going on here?

Like, you know, it's like, am I losing my mind?

It's like, no, I vibe coded that.

Oh, that's why I don't I can't like just spin it up as much as yeah.

I heard it from a YouTube show on AI.

It needs some some term for that.

But uh yeah, it was an interview with um one thing on AI that I will say is that I follow a guy called Brian Castle, who's from Connecticut, and he has a site called Builder Methods that is he's doing very sensible takes on A.

It's not all the vibe coding, it's like he's targeting professionals like ourselves.

Um fairly sensible.

He's done like a million different like YouTube channels and

So anyway, shall I do book?

Shall I do my books or Carlton?

You do your book, Henry.

Um I'm gonna plug disclaimer the author is a good friend of mine.

Um for so for fiction, it's World of Astron.

Um it's a friend of mine, he has written a trilogy.

Um it's like Tolkien-esque fantasy.

Um, so he's got a trilogy out, which is now in one big book, and then I'm subscribed to his Patreon, and he's got a quadrilogy or maybe more that's like set 40 years after the Innette published book.

So I'm reading like a chapter, the first draft every month as it comes as he's publishing it.

And it's a very, very good.

You like these types of things.

Um yeah.

Micro stuff.

Um, I've just finished reading his latest, which is Exit Strategy about exiting a business.

I know I'm nowhere near that, but I'm reading it for context later down the line, preparing myself.

But yeah, his advice and his is just very sensible when it comes if you're interested in building a software business.

I'd highly recommend it.

Okay, very good.

It's about what's going on in Hungary and you know what's going on in the United States and what's going on you know around the world.

And the the methods that um these people use to undermine our democracies.

It's you know, about sort of halfway through it, and it's yeah, it's it's it's pretty good.

Uh, you know, it's it's anyway, it's the autoxy ink, it's worth reading.

It won the Pulitzer Prize, so it's um, you know, but it it lays down quite clearly the kind of um behaviors you see with like the crazy things that happen in the media, and you're like, why on earth is this happening in the media?

And it's all part of like a sort of standard playbook that you know it talks about, and it's like okay, that that that's interesting.

So um uh yeah, I've been I've been reading that and enjoying it

I'm gonna shout out Andy Yer's Django prod server.

Um I think we ran out of time to fully dive into it, but we'll link to it.

I've been following it.

I think you're still kind of working on it.

Like it's got a number of stars.

I am working on, I put an open PR with Django Cookie Cutter to get it merged in.

Um there's a yeah, I need to fix a bug.

But that's kind of my next phase.

I kind of I've talked about it on the forum in places as how do you market?

You've got a thing, how do you market where what to do?

And this is like for me.

Well, yeah, I was like, I could create my own starter project, but actually it would be better to get it into one that's already used.

So um, lucky I know I worked, I worked with Bruno who maintains it.

So I was like, hey Bruno, could we maybe shift this into and he's like, yeah.

He played around with it.

I think would be a good place for it to live as well.

Nice pairing.

Um, but yeah, that's it's there.

I just need to slowly chip away on it um this year, and so keep improving it, keep promoting it.

Um there might be a lightning talk or maybe something more.

No, I'm

Yeah.

going across Europe where the CFP focus this weekend.

Well I'll be doing a lightning talk, but we'll see if there's an actual talk.

Good.

And it kind of probably got lost, the announcement probably got lost between board elections and 6.0 release and that kind of thing.

Um but it's sitting there, you can submit issues of like, I want this to happen on GitHub or Discord or and so we can start tracking them and start implementing features and or owning people can start seeing what we we've got planned as well.

I have dumped a lot of ideas on there, but um yeah, go have a look.

But it's yeah, community ideas rather than stuff to go into Django, it's for around the community itself.

Um I think that's good.

It's given play people a place to put their ideas, and several ideas have been promoted forward, and we it gives a chance for discussions to happen and it's away from the sort of the main workflow.

And I can only see um ideas for the community having their own space as being a positive thing too.

So super.

Um again, it's uh uh coding Joe, what's his uh name?

Yeah, Joe Meron, Johannes Meron.

Um it's what is it?

It enables you to set up health checks for I don't know, um cat your caches, your databases, your disk space, your memory, and then you can ping those health checks and then you can set decide what actions you want to take.

Um in case, you know, we suddenly your disk space has gone to 80%.

Ah, I better I want at least a notification of that, or I want you know some automatic action to happen.

Oh, my cache went down and you know it's no longer reachable.

Oh, I better take action.

So it's a really good project, and it's very easy to write your own checks.

And um, you know, again, uh Joe puts an awful lot of work into keeping these projects updated.

So I wanted to mention that.

Um I guess last last quick thing, our magic wand question.

So if you had one power to change one thing in Django, code community, what would you put your foot down for?

I I don't think I honestly it's the for me, it's the funding and the budget of um because in the community as I see it, there's a lot of movement of a lot of ideas, but they're all limited because we're all volunteers.

I say all okay, the fellows are paid, but even them, it's like everyone is limited.

If we could hire an executive director, if we could hire more fellows or e or even hire freelancers, like take the marketing and the website.

It's like if you could throw cash at that, great.

Then think

And I think that it's there's I'm not saying everything has to go JavaScript speed, shall we say.

Um, but it's it's a bit Yeah.

People have been working on this.

Uh I know it's gonna be frustrating because there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that until something happens, you know, it's easy to say, why isn't something happened?

But I know that I know that stuff is happening.

It's just it's also a lot, it's a lot of work to get a bunch of money from a big company.

I think that's kind of almost the big problem is like if we had the muscle to get it, but we don't, and so they even if they want to give it, there's that disconnect.

And I'm like, if there was it's that I think the funding is the thing holding the community back right now.

So if I had to waive a magic wand, it would be money dumped into an account that people could then use.

Um I is like, yeah, I just see the energy in people wanting to push it forward.

And so I don't think we need any magic wand anywhere else.

It's just that kick up.

Yeah.

But well,

You know.

We're like, oh, there's just one little thing with fix whatever realm it is.

Other than that, I'm quite happy with Django as the code.

Like, generally, I was thinking about it, like, I'm quite happy with like, yeah, it's got its warts, but any 20 piece of software does have it have its warts.

I'm like, it does the job.

It's fun to work with, the community's great.

It doesn't, yeah.

I'm happy with it.

I wouldn't be here if it wasn't.

I'd have found something else.

Same.

Well, all right, we're gonna have links to all the things.

Um, thank you for taking the time.

It's fun to finally have you on.

Again, been reading your stuff for I guess over three years now.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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