Transcript: Freelancing & Community - Andrew Miller

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Carlton Gibson joined us here by Will Vincent. Hello, Will.

Hey, Carlton.

Hello, Will. Nice jumper, by the way. And today we've got with us Andy Miller,

who's very active in the Django community. How are you doing, Andy?

because it doesn't have any numbers after or anything like that. So it's just, yeah, that's

teenage me.

That's still an achievement, though.

not anonymous, because if you search NanoRepublica, you will find me, but it's just something

that I came up with as a teenager, and it's stuck. So, yeah.

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

one notch up.

my year, and so that shows you how popular it was. 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. I currently live in Cambridge. I do like, the broad thing, I currently live

in Cambridge, wife and two kids, and I'm running, I've been running and being as a freelancer

for the last six years, and starting a startup called Hamilton Rock. I'm CTO. That's like

the basic intro, I think.

is long enough to have sort of had the good times and the bad, so, you know.

Yeah, I started in 2019 because I quit my job, and we'll say no more about that job,

except that I wanted out, but I also wanted to stay four days a week and not commute to

London. So those that don't know UK, Cambridge is about an hour on the train from London,

or maybe like an hour, two hours. I'm like, I don't want to commute that anymore. I'd

had enough. So trying to find a job for four days a week before COVID, and maybe remote

or maybe local.

Yeah.

It's not that, Cambridge isn't a huge city. There's a lot of tech here, but it's not all

web tech. So I was like, oh, I'll give freelancing a go. And here we are, six years later, I

stumbled through COVID, used some savings to kind of get me through some hard months,

but then there were some good times as well. And then I found regular clients who have

paid the way. It's like, 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 any 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 big interesting question was always the pipeline was like,

where's the next project, the next client, the next 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 can be really quite serious, right? Yes. I, well, yeah, that's kind of where,

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 I've got, yeah, I've got a couple of good contacts from LinkedIn,

but generally it's, 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.

But it was a kind of like, my daughter says things like that. Oh, it's in my room somewhere.

In the office somewhere. It's like, I don't want to get up. But it was called the manifesto of no

pitching. I could, we could put it in the show notes at some point. But in it, it said writing

is a way to demonstrate expertise. Yeah. And so I was like, this is a way you show how good you are

or like that you have the expertise to not have to pitch for things. 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,

guy called Jonathan Stark, who is a software engineer by trade. 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 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 has a book called

hourly 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 works quite well. And then the other one,

I followed a creative called David Kadavy. He's an American who's moved to Columbia,

discovered him ages ago. And he put out, he's about to put out his third book. Actually,

he had put out three books. He's like, I'm going to 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 he brought out a book called the hundred word habit.

Which is where the hundred words came from. It was like, just try and write a hundred words a day

and see how you get. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to 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 you have a little

support group moment there. Yeah. It's like, no, no, I'm just doing weekdays. I have control over

my weekdays. So yeah, I started, where are we? We're 26. I finished. It was two years ago. Yeah.

I had quite a lot of content loaded up because I'd been active on the discord and some people

ask the same questions again and not the same people, but new person comes on.

How do I do user types? Or you see the same mistakes like people using underscore all

don't do that. Well, it's fine to start with as a prototype, but really you want to

specify your fields cause 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. 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 and people can go to my website and just scroll through and search, but yeah.

you know, models, templates, URLs, you know, our early episodes were, we're kind of like that,

almost like university courses or like sections from a book where we talk about Jenga 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.

Yeah.

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

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 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?

And just try and just like, keep, keep pushing it. It was difficult towards the end. There was some,

and over holidays, it was like, what do I write about? And there were 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.

but I mean, I remember, you know, cause 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 would almost find that the hardest is like, cause 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 was like poetry almost. So like,

week or something because I'm thinking about it all the time. Like you write it and then it's like,

what's the next topic?

So doing a series was actually easier to some extent, cause you go, right. Okay. I

can just break it at different points. And for me, 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'll probably get some of the later posts, like even the ones that I'm writing now

are probably gonna be slightly longer. Cause 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 long, those series and concatenate them into

longer posts at some point, but you know, maybe.

you know, I think, I think there's room for technical series of things,

but Carlton, you were gonna make a point there.

slightly to the freelancing just before we move on. But you're working, you're doing,

doing startup now. Is that, is that, are you still freelancing as well? Or are you doing the startup

few months freelancing as well. 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, 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. Cashflow.

because you've been, you've, you know, six years is plenty of time to see the ups and downs of the

business and see how it works. And you know, you go through a, you know, quite a bad recession

previously, and then there's this current situation 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, how do you see the situation currently? Cause a lot of people are worried and struggling.

there's a, that's a big question. That's a deep question.

On the face of it, I wouldn't recommend freelance. If you're freelancing, seriously, I wouldn't,

for me, I wouldn't recommend juniors do freelancing because as much as it is easy way,

it's an easy way to then kind of give freelancing a bad name or contracting a bad name. I, because

I think I benefited from doing freelancing, not 10 years. No. Yeah. Almost 10 years into my career.

I think 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, 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. 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 trust something else. 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 going to

come through at the right time. And the right decisions are going to come that people are going

to show up at my door effectively. And that's kind of happened like where I even the 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. We can talk a little bit about that. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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

step out and just try it. 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 that's not really an answer.

I know, but it is an answer in terms of like, you got to do all the right things and there are

plenty. I'm not going to like go 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

hunt 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 copy

with writers listen like get wide 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 going to come to me if they have software

you've been doing for a while i think i was one of your very first uh probably signed up

put out like a private podcast i was like i want to experiment with this so i was like i'm just

going to talk about and like experiment 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 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 and 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

going to 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 the

forms and that kind of like there's not a good set of community videos there are some but there

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 is not i'm not saying there's anything bad

couple there's 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 would i ever do a course like this

and yet they have a fraction of the views of someone who does a lot of things on a lot of

topics and then you know they get they're helpful i guess on django but they complete they're not

django people right they're not even web people so they miss so many best practices and yeah i

feel the same way 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 yeah youtube and same thing in

the same way no one who's at a python or involved in python is one of these people making a million

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 will you're probably one of the top people in that like

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 like you can write from anywhere you can go right 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

maybe recorded one video and 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 away does the trend like

ai does the transcript opens a pr for me on my website i review it i like your transcripts by

you know actually often i i just i like reading more than podcasts or vodcasts so i just like

of i was like whisper cc whisper cpp does the audio to text and then i pass over another does

another pass i think with the local model to kind of categorize it and do the section headers and

the heavy questions but i think we're sort of circling around 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 yeah i what's been really interesting is that the last

thing week in week out day in day out kind of thing because normally like the last couple of

months i've been focused on it but in the evenings i've been i'm like 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

i think freelancing i've enjoyed it and i'll stick at it but um yeah it's yeah 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 that so come on let's just okay

it's called

hamilton rock 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 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 going to operate in the us it's targeting

small e-commerce firms and so we're building banking and then we're going to add features

and bits on top of that and then we're going to add features and bits on top of that and then we're

going to add features and bits on top of that and then we're going to add features and bits on top of that

target e-commerce firms and 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

like we've heard some horror stories i'm sure you have some right you want to you want to get your

was a

bit like big into all the private yeah there's a timber yeah um big ints on all my primary keys

and all that kind of stuff um yeah everything's stored as cents um i'm not storing dollars and

it's like yeah i'm storing all the 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 interest in the banking industry is the banking industry

i've been building our own internal ledger as well and that's interesting we'll see how that goes

double book double book i hope yes double book um i'm using pg triggers and stuff to make it

append only and that kind of thing so yeah we'll see how it goes i've like i've gone yes this is

how i think it wants but we've not hit production yet so yeah a lot of it is still theoretical in

um you know uh a complex domain in and of itself and it's got quite strict business logic rules

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

so everything is either i'm using your library crowd views and i've extended that with extra

like ajax hate is 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 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 caters um so caters 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 claude code a lot um to get it

all out and some of that 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

it's that comp i heard the term the other day comprehension debt so making sure that my

understanding and ai's understanding is in line and i've been going so fast i know it's not aligned

right now and so i need to go and make it alive this portion of django chat is brought to you by

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that delivers see what's possible at six feet up.com guide you before you cut in well i just

view that's like horror because the forms are sanitizing data as they come in and then you've

got the the sort of the business logic in the save method or whatever to check that your business

order implied 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 it's very easy to pull it pull them apart yeah i found it's like for me it serializes all

in django 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

i got other people then yeah yeah

talk about i think you published this yesterday model renders uh so component stuff around django

which is related to forms do you want to can we mention more about that i thought that was kind

of interesting we'll put a link in the show notes to this post so one thing that i played around

curling up the start uh hamilton rock i was like i'll play around with form render form renderers

because why not that's i want i want to 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 you can do that and then you can do that and then you can do that and then you can do that

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 it would

be an interesting experiment to see if like you could define a model renderer so like from your

from neapolitan

carton you've got two template tags of object detail and object list i think yeah yeah just to

render a table or a single instance yeah 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 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 is rendered on a page and you just go object or you can do that and then you can do that

on your object list and 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 quite 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

from django it's django cottons i think it's a read me um they have a table which compares

i'm going to pull it up now uh give me a moment there we go it's got cotton django components

slippers and template partials and of course it's saying cotton ticks most of the boxes yeah

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 wild django

like well partials doesn't do everything but if you do partials and then simple block tag you get

moat 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 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 and 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

you

experimented much with in the later releases yeah no i mean i'm totally with you on all of

then the patterns they enable and there's this idea that you've got one template file with the

past 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 think of as the kind of problem of slots

you know where you need you've got an out you've got a layout kind of and you need to inject bits

into it and still the detail by itself even with template partial doesn't do that perfectly so

that's when the cottons and the one on i use um i use ht um pi for this which is um where you define

these fragments in um in python and i like it there's cotton there's django components there's

several options out here and it's just all of us together struggling towards

what are the patterns that we'll be using in five years time and i think it's really super it's just

a lovely time to be working in django around this area i think yeah i i'm just i'm resisting

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 yeah but for the time being i'm like how far can i abuse what's there um

forms for a decade and when i started the new project i was like i'm not going to install it

i'm going to 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

you were saying you know 10 years and then freelance like because a freelancer would

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 when you're starting out

django like i want to like if i hit the edge of like say and it's like actually we need this small

like template partials like template partials but like what's the next is is it like um defining

variables in uh in a template or something like that which means you don't have to necessarily

define i say a template tag's not a big thing but like what identifying the small gaps that then

if we do patch that if we do decide to patch it i'm not saying it's a definite but it's like

understanding where the edges are to then round them out and then you go ah here's the component

solution that we're looking for rather than

lumping more than we need into django core so it's an experiment in that way as well

but it's how you develop your own mastery as well yeah it's yeah it's win-win well and part

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 because because the business imperative is not for you to do that

when 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 going to make sure django gets the support it needs within reason like and

your business on right yes exactly that it's it's not a stupid thing to do no it's not at all it's

the community tell us what all the things you've been doing because right i read off the list right

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 as beginners asking lots of questions and then i was asked to make you made a

moderator and i was like sure um and tim was a moderator shilling at that point so we both did

we're both very active and both moderators um i then went along to django con and that was in

edinburgh i really enjoyed that um yeah i was there for just the conference days that time

had family holiday during the sprints um then i was just continued to be active in the community

in discord mainly um kind of did the for i'm more active on the forum now it's an open tab

in my on my browser um started django social in cambridge after hearing john's interview with you

i was like yeah i could do that again another another freelance marketing 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 no um but it's there's actually

there's not there's a there's probably more django here than you've you realize but it's all big

life science companies so they don't realize and arm has a big office there too right i mean just

has a big office and the university itself uses

django a lot as well but it's getting into those big places 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 it's the same thing

just the infrastructure 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 in my world is like so radically different i'm like what

the model of the discord for because i also started the online community working group

um last year i did the lightning talk django con europe about my hundred words um we have a link

we have a link to that timestamp so and then um also did django not sessions which was like that

was the starting point of me getting into contributing more back to the community as

well like code wise and being less scared of those things um if that makes it like it's like not and

i may it forced me to make time for it as well i think that's why i got in as well like tim was

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

more people are given more time so you know i really salute you and everything that you do and

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 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 get to walk in the room at a conference or even

on discord and you're just like you feel like we're friends and it's just like all talking the

same language same ethos same community right yeah yeah and i would i would say from an outside

like knowledge with this like hundred words where you know because jeff triplett and i do in the

newsletter we're always hunting around for stuff and suddenly it was like oh i was like oh again

again again again like i think i even told you i was like i would have put like almost all of them

in there but we can't just make it you know same thing with adam adam johnson i'm like i can't it

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 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 cut you gotta like put your umbrella wide and uh see what falls in you can't

just be narrow and in a cave

blogging or it was just like i'm just going to be consistent and some of the posts aren't about

django at all 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 um yeah i could have dropped off after that but it's just you after a

few weeks or months you just the consistency is there it's a habit and yeah but it's a community

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 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 i should be like you know more 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 ah this is where we're where we're thinking as a community and

the 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 it's it's very exclusive it costs more easily a grand

even to get there right for a conference that's and probably more in the u.s i don't know i've

not tried to cost out the u.s one but well yeah yeah yeah but getting to these places is very

expensive for me

most people and so having online community and this is kind of why where the online community

for me started it's 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 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 and i think that's a really good insight into

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 that american bias i know yeah but but it's like like for example i know i've got

community inside on the discord we've built up like a staff team of helpers and moderators

and the private staff off topic channel is active like pretty much every single day there's just

talking and checking in with people and

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 like you've both 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 so many people drive by

ask for the help or 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

you've got a business you've got another bit of freelancing business on the side that you're still

doing you've got all the all the time you spend on discord you go to that you said you've got the

forum open you're 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

it looks like an absolute mess to but it's like very strict scheduling of when i do things um

so time boxing everything though time boxing like i for example um yeah every night of the week is

probably there's something there but it's like doing either date night or i'm doing django stuff

or it's uh i do cub scouts so doing cub scouts or it's like or but then i've architected my life

that between 8 30 in the morning and 3 30 ish i can do 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 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

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

what you want to yeah with what i want to do and what i would like to do

i was writing very regularly and you know all these things and now i just talk to carlton and

daily down to weekly of the post 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 got to 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 going to force them but i'll write about

his kids are a little bit older than mine you know sometimes i would

you know be like i want to work on this thing but i'm at the playground or i'm i'm doing this thing

and obviously i won't spend time with my kids but he would always 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

in that's interesting

in one of his books he talks about front burner and back burner when you're cooking

and you have like the things you're focusing on the front and you might move something to the back

when you're just you need to let it simmer or something like that when cooking and it's the

same kind of thing with creative projects or code it's like you might be focusing on something but

there's always background work going on and you need to push them back you can't always be on

something so yeah all right should we go to

scratch i'll throw that one out there i have been working through so basically you in python build

like a gpt2 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 you can't i was gonna ask can you get claude to implement

yeah well no i love it i love your phrase comprehension debt because i was i've been

thinking about like what what is that

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 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

show on it needs some time for that

yeah but 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

followed a bunch of his stuff he's done like a million different like youtube channels and

yeah he's done a lot but it's he's a

using so anyway should i do book should i do my books or you do your book honey you do um

i too many to choose um i'm gonna plug disclaimer the author is a good friend of mine um for so for

fiction it's world of astrum 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 inept published

book so i'm reading like a chapter the first draft every month as it come as he's publishing it and

one author i recommend i think i might have mentioned earlier rob walling um oh yeah

his book right micro microconf um i've just finished reading his latest which is exit

strategy about exiting 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 entirely recommend it okay very good

ann appleburn called um autocracy inc which is about the dictators who want to run the run the

world 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 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 it rings true to the yeah and i mean it's out in 2024 and you know the start of 2026 it's

all the worse uh you know it's

anyway it's the autocracy inc it's worth reading it won the pulitzer prize so it's um you know but

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's

interesting so um yeah i've been reading that and enjoying it a lot uh quick uh well quickly

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 yeah i need to there's a few bugs

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 is how do you market you've got a thing how do you market

what to do and this is like for great your own starter project

yeah 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 he's like so that i'm also thinking of getting it um i need to work on django simple

deploying and get it into that as well i think 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 heard you there might

be a you know the cfp is not till sunday yeah before you joined will carlton was rubbing me to

submit a cfp yeah yeah he's going to con europe with this yeah this weekend i will be there but

whether i'm doing a talk or not we'll see well i'll be doing a lightning talk but we'll see if

we'll talk good um my project is the at the end of last year the us in the online community

working group we opened a repo very similar to new features but for community ideas and it kind

of probably got lost the announcement probably got lost between board elections and six point

error 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 only people can start seeing what 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 i think

their ideas and several ideas have been promoted forward and it gives a chance for discussions to

happen and it's away from the sort of the main workflow and i think that's a good thing i think

that's a good thing and i can only see um ideas for the community having their own space

as being a positive thing too so super i just my project i just wanted to mention django health

check which um came popped up again this week um again it's uh uh coding joe what's his uh name

joe meron johannes meron um it's what is it it enables you to set up health checks for i don't

know um 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 suddenly your

disk space has gone to 80 percent ah i bet i want at least a notification that or i want you know

some automatic action to happen oh my cash went down 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

could easily go for another hour but we'll try to keep it try to keep it to under an hour slightly

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 was thinking about this a lot

in the community as i see it there's a lot of movement

a lot of ideas but they're all limited because we're all volunteers i say oh 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 even or even hire freelancers like take the marketing and the

website it's like if you could throw cash at that great then you've written some posts around this

idea too yeah yeah it's just like the idea of i think that's the one thing i would change is just

give django a million dollars or whatever it needs

to just grow and then and i think that would allow us to just i like the leisurely pace that

django takes but i think we could be a bit faster if we had more and we would be probably naturally

faster 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 well i know that um you know jeff triplett is the new

working on this people have been working on this uh i know it's going to 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 this 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

else is just sitting there like there's energy in different parts of the community 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 wave a magic wand it would be money dumped into an account that people

could then use um i it's like yeah i just see the energy and 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

pieces

and someone has a thing that's one billion dollars you know my wife and i like often

like share that we're like oh there's just one little thing would fix whatever realm it is

i'm quite happy with like yeah it's got its warts but any 20 piece of software does have

its warts i'm like that's the job it's fun to work with the community is great

yeah i'm happy with it i wouldn't be here if it wasn't i'd have found something else

the time it's fun to finally have you on again been reading your stuff for i guess over three

years now so um it's been a pleasure to be here yeah so django chat.com on youtube and we'll see

everyone next time bye-bye bye-bye thanks again to six feet up the python django and ai

experts you call for the hardest software problems from scaling applications to simplifying data