Transcript: How Django Really Works - Chaim Kirby

I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson.

Hello, Carlton.

Hello, Will.

Hi, Haim.

Hi, Carlton.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for the time.

So this episode is being more or less real time, so it'll come out tomorrow from when we record.

So that's that's a nice change.

But let's let's start with the Django Software Foundation.

So you're the president as of this year.

What what's the quick pitch?

Like I thought Django was just code.

We hold hold the copyright, we hold the trademarks, we police both of those things.

Um and somewhat more importantly, I think we manage the community or help to manage the community around Django.

Um, the steering committee is part of the DSF.

The steering committee sort of leads technical innovation.

Uh, the fellows with Carlton.

Um, I think I can say that for another four days, being one Carlton and Marius.

Two days, two days.

I don't even know what today is, the 20th.

There you go.

Um, Carlton and Marius are our wonderful fellows.

And um, we do have a a new fellow joining us.

The announcement will be coming out uh very soon, but I think this podcast will probably come out before the announcement.

Um, but we've had a wonderful time with Carlton, and we hope that process will continue uh in an amazing way.

And yeah, but yeah, so the DSF, everything that isn't Django code specifically in the Django ecosystem and world.

How does one get on the DSF?

So you you and I were on it together for several years.

Uh how did you how did how did you find out about it, right?

Because you're programmer, but I I think it takes a while before a Django person even knows about it, maybe at the Django Con, or how did you learn about it?

I have an engineering background, but also a legal background, and so stuff like that sort of jumps out to me, or I make a purpose of looking at it.

Um, but more to the point I found in my life that things that I'm interested in, I tend to fall into positions of leadership or something like that.

And I think more it's if I'm interested in it, I'm going to go all in.

And so I discovered the DSF fairly soon in my life.

Um joining the board, well, I guess there's two different things in joining the DSF, right?

Because we have members and then we have the board, and then we have committees and stuff, which we can talk about.

Um, and membership is a place where I'm really interested in growing the DSF, what it means to be a member, um, our membership right now, what the bylaws say membership is, and what our membership is right now isn't even fully aligned.

Um, but right now membership is kind of a lifetime achievement.

You've done good things in the community award, for lack of a better term.

There's probably about 250, 300 individual members of the DSF.

Um, and then the board, separate from the steering committee, is charged with all these sort of legal and bureaucratic aspects of running the DSF, like we said.

And anybody can run for the board.

We have elections once a year.

Um, don't have to be a member.

Anybody in the world can run for the board, only members can vote.

Um generally speaking, I think people who are elected to the board are people who are known to the community, but if you can write a good personal statement, you'll get elected.

We made a change last year and we'll participate in this change.

It used to be we elected to one-year terms.

And over COVID, that seemed to us who were on the board to be a bad idea because you know there was a huge potential for burnout of everybody doing everything.

And the idea of the entire board deciding one day to be like, I'm done, that doesn't bode well for right the life cycle of an organization.

Um, so we switched to a staggered two-year terms.

Uh so this year was our first election that kicked into that.

So this year half the board that was elected, well, there's seven of us.

So um, four people who were elected were elected to two-year terms, and three people were elected to the final one-year term for us to set up the staggering.

And so most people when they they're new, which makes sense, don't aren't proactive because they're just learning the ropes the first certainly six months.

And so that second year where we had the same board, I felt like you know, changing the bylaws and all these other things, it was much more productive.

So having you know two two-year term made a lot of sense.

And again, you know, Django relied on your legal background because you're certainly the only Django developer I know with a legal background.

Um Yeah, I

I mean, right, it's it when you say Django developer, this is something that always interests me.

Um, so right, there's seven board members, three members of the steering committee, a few committees here and there, like we have our fellowship committee that there are three people.

Um, we have uh a few others, the code of conduct committee, and there's overlap among them, right?

Then 300 some odd DSF individual members.

Then we saw Jeff Brain's Django survey, and I think correct me, but there was what?

I think about 50,000 respondents, 20,000?

I forget the number, but a couple tens of thousands.

But there was there was um I think like 7,000 last year.

Okay, something like that.

So what is a Django developer?

And this is a big deal, and I know I sort of spoke about this in in my uh talk in um Porto that you you're gonna link in and thank you for that.

There's probably one or two million Django developers at any time in the world, right?

And so so who are we doing this for and who's participating in it?

It's an it's an interesting question.

Um anyway, yeah, sorry.

A bit of a tangent, but

no, it's not.

You've contributed to Django.

There's an awful lot of those people that aren't currently involved in Django, correct.

Um, which is fine because there's no obligation to keep being involved in Django forever, right?

You move on, you go and do other things, and even if they are just away for a bit or they come back.

But what we don't have, I think, and what I think somehow we I don't know whether it needs to be an official thing, but I think it's really missing, is something that's more is for who's active now.

So, okay, there's the Discord and the forum, and you can hang out in those places, and you can come to the conferences, but there's an awful lot of people beyond that who are active in Django now.

But I think we for me, I'm like, how do I reach those people?

Because, say, for example, now we want to move the translations um uh machinery from TransFX to WebLate, and they've offered us hosting and all the rest, but there's a um there's a workload to be done in moving that.

Now I can email the um members of the Django Software Foundation and say, hey, anyone gonna help me?

But most of the people on that list aren't perhaps active.

Whereas if there's another forum where I'm like, hey, you're all active and we've got this issue, I'm gonna get a better response.

And it's difficult to know just from a pure maintenance perspective.

If I want volunteers, the the Hall of Fame isn't necessarily the place to ask for those volunteers.

What's your thought on that?

I think, and to call it a hall of fame, that that's a difficult, and I've I've had that feeling too.

But yeah, there's always this danger of when we have an initiative, when we decide we want to do something, either on the work side, on a committee side, whatever, um, we reach out to the membership.

Why?

Well, we have a mailing list.

Um, but it's it's hard to say, okay, we're going to continually ask the people who have given, have been recognized for having given in the past and ask them to do more, right?

That's a really excellent recipe for burnout.

And we aren't giving, not we aren't giving other people the opportunity to to join that membership by not giving them anything, but we don't have the channels to tell people, hey, there is things that are can be done that aren't code, but that you can can give back.

Um, it's kind of like political donations, right?

You give one donation of five dollars and suddenly like everybody who wants money emails you, it's like, oh, because this is someone who'll give.

It's like, but suddenly that's half a million dollars if I gave to everybody.

What's going on?

Um, I have another, I think, good example, maybe to illustrate it.

So I'm an admin on a Slack called Py Slackers, um, and 50,000 people on that Slack.

Um, which we can talk about the Slack pricing and stuff at another point, but we don't pay anything.

Um, but 50,000 people on that Slack.

If I go look at the metrics, about 200 are commenting, right?

There's like 200 core people who like put whatever.

But every week you get this message about new act new new users in people who moved inactive, however, Slack means inactive, probably haven't touched it in the week, right?

And usually we have about 50 or 100 new users or 50 or 100 inactive, which means that community, people who are seeing these messages, yeah, it's 200 people driving it, but there's 49,000 people who are like seeing it.

We in the DSF don't have that 49,000 in a channel.

There is the

Discord in the Discord.

I find it really difficult to be in Discord.

And of course, it's about the software, but there's so much that can be done without writing code for core Django.

Right?

Translations, that's something.

Writing your own libraries, or just you use Django, right?

If you use it, it matters to you in some way, shape, or form.

Maybe just you want us

to be able to read it.

Just to get updates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's like it's really hard to guide them in the right direction to well as the contributing guide, which is great, but it's like reading the Bible, it's massive, it's big, it's intimidating.

And we don't have that easy on-ramp for people who want to volunteer.

And they want to learn, you know, about a career, they want to learn they went to school or not.

Um, what do we tell them?

We tell them, you know, scratch your own itch.

That's the only hack where you're going to do something that's interesting.

And then that's lost, maybe to some degree, right?

Like, oh, write a package.

You don't have to contribute to Django.

Like, that was my entry into Django.

I mean, I was using it for work, but I wrote a few packages, and you know, maybe one other person has used them, but they're on PyPI and that's cool.

Um, and that's maybe lacking.

And I, you know, I know we were in San Diego.

Carlton and I, I think I forget if we met there, but we sort of became close in San Diego 2019, right?

And we were talking about contributions and stuff, and Carlton was like, oh, there's this effort to move the Postgres specific RM bits to be database agnostic as much as possible.

You know, maybe you could take some effort there.

And I looked at it.

Um, but my time is finite, and certainly we could talk about that.

And like there wasn't an itch I had there, right?

Um, and that was actually, I think, around the time where I was like, yeah, I'll run for the board instead to some degree, because that sort of interested me more in scratching an itch um in in the the communal aspect of things.

I mean, that's how I got pulled in.

And so not having the conferences, we really felt the the lack of other ways to bring people in.

There's a group of people and and you want it to be right, you can meet anybody in the room, and and that's wonderful.

It's not like this, you know, 10,000-person conference.

Um, even PyCon is not 10,000 people, but it's too many, and there's too many

Um But even there, how many people are new to those?

Probably not too many, right?

Maybe they've been doing a little I don't know.

Maybe, maybe, maybe No, no, I'm gonna argue

Is it and yeah, first of all, it's like, oh, there's all these all the old faces, like brilliant.

It's so good to see.

And there were some people who didn't come, it's like, oh, so-and-so's not here.

Ah, that but they were all the old faces, and that was wonderful.

But also there were masses of new people and masses of youngsters as well, which is really important.

Yes, there are a lot of new people to the conferences.

I don't think there's people come to the conferences, usually, I think maybe I'm misreading, right?

Because I've not run the conferences, I've been to them.

Um, people come when they've had an entree into the Django community.

The conferences are not their entry point to the Django community, and especially, you know, and and I say throwing ideas out and putting more work on other people's plates.

I don't know, but I I remember in San Diego there was a student, I think a local student, I said, Oh, like was there advertising at your school?

Was it something like that?

And they said, you know, no, I just happened to see a link.

It's like, why don't we do local community advertising?

And yeah, sure, there's numbers and whatever, but you know, have a local cut or a student rate cut for the local university or whatever, get their computer science students to to show up at a conference.

And that's that that's how I uh there there we used to be a Django Boston pre-COVID, and um that's unfortunately gone away.

So there's I I which I I think my main point I was gonna say is that you know, Django is all volunteers and it's it is this big thing.

But if when I ask people who aren't in the Django world, even Django developers, like where do you think Django comes from?

Like they just assume, you know, it's tech.

There's money flowing, you know, out of fountains, right?

They just assume that Google or somebody is has a you know financial incentive to make it all happen.

But you know, we're not we're not even Python, right?

Python, Python's or step, you know, a big step up.

And then there's other things.

So Django's huge but tiny.

Uh and that's a that's a hard thing, even for software developers.

It's like, well, it's just there, so I it'll always be there.

Yeah.

Um because it goes into something I was thinking.

It's you know, you you mentioned, oh, local chapters.

So when we were on the board, when Will and I were on the board, we got a request.

We get grant requests, um, and we could talk about funding and stuff separately, but but I think it's an important discussion.

We got a request from somebody who wanted to start basically a Django club, Django Club at their university.

And I don't even know that they were asking for money per se.

I mean, yeah, we might have thrown them a couple hundred bucks if if you know it made sense, but they're asking for, you know, resources or mentorship or something like that.

And being the volunteer, and I know Carlton, we can talk a lot about mentorship.

I know that's something top of mind for you and I, I think we'll, you as well.

Um, I mean, cards on the table.

We run on about a quarter million dollars a year.

That's what we raise, and there's a bit of a budget shortfall.

We could talk about that, um, because of inflation and various other things.

It's interesting to think, and I know these are conversations that we've had.

What could we do with more?

What would we do with more?

Um, what work would it take to raise more?

Um, because I think there's a whole lot that could be done, but who knows?

Yeah.

Because, okay, let's say we raised half a million extra, like three times the budget.

Okay, what would we do with that?

What the point?

Who's gonna do it?

Excellent.

Right?

Who's gonna who's gonna do that work with the money that we raise?

It's yeah, like we'd we're kind of so I guess the question is what do you think the scope of the DSF should be?

Because clearly it needs to defend Django and the trademark, and clearly the fellowship program, or I absolutely believe that the fellowship program is the reason why Django's been able to succeed over the longer term.

Um, and then there's the Django cons, which I think are absolutely vital.

But beyond those things, what do you think the scope of the DSF is reasonable to take on?

Um, so first you're you're you're scooping uh I think something that I'm gonna bring in at the next board meeting, so I apologize to the rest of the board members.

Um I will say these are my own thoughts.

This is not, you know, the DSF or the board's thoughts.

Um but yes, first and foremost, what do we need to do?

Um, so the fellows are the driving force behind our roadmap hitting its target dates.

Yes, the steering committee sort of is the final arbiters, but the fellows are doing the day-to-day work 100% and and all everything to them.

Carlton, Marius, I could not do what you guys do.

It's amazing.

So thank you for all the work you've done.

Um separately, yeah, doing grants are sort of big funds, grant-wise, DjangoCon Europe, DjangoCon US, uh, DjangoCon Africa.

There's going to be a DjangoCon Africa this year.

Very exciting.

Um, and then primarily uh Django Girls events.

There are a few others here and there, but those are are sort of the big grant monies.

Um, and then small things.

We pay for hosting, uh, things of that nature, a few places.

So, what could we do with more?

Well, the DSF, by its founding articles, has four mandates.

Um, to protect Django, so trademark, copyright, things like that.

And I'm gonna get some of these wrong.

Um, to um develop Django, so the fellows, people contributing the steering committee, what have you, to further uh the cutting edge of modern web development, which I think gets kind of close into just developing Django, but things like async um falls into that broadly, right?

And then and then finally, and I think this is where we drop the ball uh continuously, and I would suggest for whatever the the 17 years the DSF has been a thing, um, is promote Django.

Um we do a little promotion by way of giving money to Django girls, by giving money to the conferences, by letting people under our rules of trademark use the trademark appropriately.

Um but that's it, right?

And again, it's because it's volunteer and that's fine.

If we had more money, some ideas.

And there are various places that we could place the money.

It depends on what scope and what we prioritize.

One would be um, I think there's a recognition that there may be some scope for more fellow effort.

So so certainly, you know, sort of more people paid to work on and with and around Django would be very appropriate.

An idea has been floated a number of times about an executive director to handle more of the day-to-day, so it's not wholly volunteer the sort of running of the Django world.

Um and then what could we do with money, right?

Around promotion?

Could we run more events?

Do we bring cons back under the umbrella of the DSF?

There's been, you know, conversations going both directions of that.

Like, like the Python world, the PSF runs PyCon, right?

Um, we don't run Django Con.

DEFNA runs DjangoCon US, and we sort of manage DjangoCon Europe by finding a committee to do it every year.

Um, maybe we could do outreach, maybe we could have community liaisons, developer relations, um, right?

Maybe we little things.

Put out a PR blurb every time there's a major release and send to like tech news channels.

Right?

We don't do that.

Tiny things that would cost nothing but time, but we don't have the time, so let's spend a few bucks to do it, perhaps.

Uh Anna, the past um DSF president and I had a really great call with her, I guess last year, where we, you know, and asking, you know, what, you know, coming new into this new, like what can executive director do?

And she really, you know, I mean she got the PSF job, so and she's worked in this space for years.

So she really could lay out what such a person can do, right?

And it's really just someone full-time organizing the trains, doing all these little things, delegating, you know, making making hard calls that need to be made, you know, operationally, not around the code.

Uh so it's certainly when you're on the inside of the DSF, it's it's definitely like, ooh, it'd be nice if there was, you know, it's hard to know if it's just like a white unicorn, um, or like how much do we need these things?

But like so it's a definitely oh Carl can go for it.

Yeah.

Is that because technically speaking, the framework is in as strong a position as it's been four years.

Like we the last few releases, just so many things, tick, ticks have been ticked, you know, boxes have been ticked and improvements have been made.

And it's actually it's really exciting.

And it's like, yeah, we should be promoting Django.

It's like actually, it's it's not old and crusty and withering.

It's like you know, new bloom.

Let's let's promote it, let's get people excited about using it.

Yeah, and

Right?

People look at the DSF and they say Django.

And maybe they say, yeah, it's exciting, but it it's it's difficult to get into.

It's opaque because it's robust, it is large, right?

Um, it is and it's working.

And so how do I get into it?

Python, certainly there's a lot going on in the Python world, but it's all about the community around Python and PyCon and the PSF, right?

Um, and I made this comment for anybody who listens to my 2022 Europe talk, um, that let's go really dour, the death of Django, right?

It's not gonna be because the code base dies and withers.

Like, honestly, we could do no more work and it would be long-lived.

It does what it needs to do.

We want to continually improve it and make it modern and and you know, do everything that anybody would want to do, but it's it's good, it's excellent.

Um, if the Django dies, it's gonna be the community that dies because people are like, oh yeah, the code's done.

What else is there to do?

And there's so much to do if you care about the community, if you care about using Django, right?

If you don't, it's a bit of a tautology.

There's nothing to do if there's nothing to do.

Well, if there is, if you want to do stuff.

Precisely.

I mean, it's it's a democracy in all its strengths and weaknesses.

And one of the weaknesses is sometimes it's hard to get something done.

I mean, even, you know, in a sense, well, not me anymore, I don't matter.

But if there were ever people to get something done, I mean, Carl, you know, Carlton's a fellow for another two days.

You're the president.

We two days go.

Hey, let's have a let's have a newsletter on the Django project site, because we don't have it.

That's that's a big reason why I have the Django news newsletter, because we don't have it.

But like, you know, how are we gonna reach someone if we don't do that?

Like, how does that actually play out kind of behind the scenes?

Absolutely.

Hi, maybe maybe you can or both of you can elusive, you know, illuminate that for people.

Um, but the board and the couple other people who work on committees, steering committee, uh like again, our fellowship committee, um, it's how much time they're willing to put in, right?

There are minimal expectations.

Yes, our bylaws say we can remove somebody who's not performing their job, but I don't think that's ever happened, right?

Um, and so the expectations are really how much we expect of ourselves, right?

Is it we're on the board and okay, great, you go to an hour-long meeting, or you know, I guess Will was the treasurer, the treasurer has a little bit more and the president has a little bit more.

Um, but or are you actually going to to put that time in?

Because right now, hopefully we can get to a place where it's not just about people who come up with a couple hours here and there can do something if they so desire.

Hopefully, it can be a little bit more uh robust for lack of a better term.

Um, but let's speak in specifics.

We the board last board meeting approved some changes to the bylaws.

The bylaws had some interesting language around committees that were restrictive and we can change the bylaws.

So now we just we we eliminated that section and they'll get published soon um on the website, and we look back to the higher article of the bylaws that says the board can do anything basically for the good of the DSF.

So we are going to start expanding our committees and expanding the support um for Django, both for opportunities for people to give back, hopefully, also to allow the board, hopefully, to become more of a um proactive and directional force in the DSF and less less of a bureaucratic, reactive, oh, we have to like figure out if we're gonna give this grant kind of thing.

Um so one immediate place where people can maybe come back and we're gonna ask for volunteers will be on some of these committees.

The ones that are obvious that we're gonna put off.

Um, we're gonna build up a funding committee who will review grant requests.

The board will finally approve them, but we're gonna have a funding committee.

Um, the one that goes immediately with that, a fundraising committee.

Because fundraising, I just said it's important.

We actually did have a budget shortfall.

We have savings, we're okay, but right, so fundraising is important, and and fundraising is uh needs to be a concerted effort.

So if we're bringing on an executive director, right, we would do that.

Um then we can start thinking about things.

A lot of it is going to be a question of the membership and greater Django community, how much they want to give back in various areas, right?

Do we have a swag committee?

Do we have a promotion committee, right?

Like we have a Twitter channel, Twitter with all its dumpster fire of everything, but we also have a presence on um, I think Mastodon.

We have various presents.

Maybe it's just one or two people that once or twice a month put together a press release, a tweet, whatever, start in that promotional direction.

If people were interested, you know, I'm related to the education world.

My mother's an educator, my wife's a principal.

Um why don't we have teaching materials?

And I know that starts to get into a very weird space, and especially for Will.

Will's like, hey, that's how I make money.

And but that's not what I mean.

Um, that's good.

But again, I go back to this kid who who requested stuff for a club at college.

Like that could we, you know, it would have been probably five or ten kids, but it's like, hey, this is a community that's welcoming, that you know, the software does what you want it to do.

It's very open for you to do what you need to do.

Um, but we didn't have anything to give them, whether it's swag, whether it's finances, whether it's we had nothing.

Right?

And and I I'm using them a bit as a touch point because it seemed like an interesting they they came to us and we're like, we got nothing.

It's just that actually I don't really know where to guide you to immediately begin.

That's kind of the problem with the non-code part of Django is that it doesn't scratch your particular itch.

Like you're helping to help.

But setting up a merch store, doing the div doing a developer survey, all these things, it's largely invisible and it doesn't, it's not something that is helping you day to day in your job.

So, you know, you can do some of it, but to do all this stuff, it's just it's it's not sustainable.

Someone unpaid isn't gonna do it, and that's kind of the problem, uh I think fundamentally, is that like no one can really expect even fellowing, right?

I mean, why do we have fellows?

Because it's just unreasonable to expect volunteers to push out these these updates.

And so yeah, high highlighting what the you know, but if I could if if I could push you on, so how what what is how does something actually get done?

So if I put in a PR on Django project for uh here's a box for a newsletter on MailChimp or something, what is it?

See the thing is is like I don't you know me I or someone else, I actually know how things are, but like I don't want to do put in the work to do that unless I know it's gonna be approved, but it's hard to know in advance if it'll be approved and who even approves it.

So that's an interesting question because um

Because that's that's an approval for a like code change to the website, but it's also asking for approval to a change of how we use the website, right?

And and what its goal is, which is a little bit different, um, and is a very interesting question.

And I think part of that is there are two large things that are very conflated on the website that make it difficult more for one than the other.

Um, one is Django, yes, Django Projects.com.

It is Django, it is the code, it's how to use the code, it's how to look at the code, it's how to think about the code.

But then you go to the footer or the side, it's like, oh, and it's the DSF.

Um, and it's fundraising if you click, you know, 14 links plus maybe, you know, put in a code that we never send you.

I mean, I'm being facetious, of course, but it's not obvious, right?

And so when you bring up a newsletter, that has a weird maybe overlap of both, right?

We're talking about Django in the context of making it available on this website, but it's about the bigger DSF community thing.

So who'd approve that?

The ultimate change on the website, uh, you know, one of the fellows would merge it, I guess.

Um, but the I I I I I don't know.

I'll tell you what would happen in that exact case.

What would happen in that exact case is we'd go, uh, code looks fine, but there's nowhere I can merge this without the board's approval.

And we try and get the board's approval, and it probably wouldn't happen.

And we'd be we sort of go round and we'd be stuck, and it just it'd be like ah, paralysis.

Yeah.

Unless someone really, really pushed it.

And I I think unfortunately, something like that, exactly how it would come about, you know.

I don't know, but but spitballing needs to be part of a larger organizational community, whatever, overhaul.

Um, so like I said, our membership is sort of a it's uh an unusual in-betweeny place, right?

There's plenty of people who what do they mean by members?

Oh, I want to get the email or I want to just be aware of what's going on, right?

We don't really have that, but there's probably a space for that.

Um there's also we didn't even talk about corporate membership, which is a whole other thing that that is hopefully getting an overhaul.

The website is, I believe, getting an overhaul.

There's a process in place um that we're doing that.

I don't know exactly the exact timeline.

I mean, I have a sense of the exact timeline, but I don't feel comfortable sharing it.

Let's put it that way.

Um, but so there is gonna be an overhaul.

Whether that overhauls some of these larger questions is a big dependency.

And again, it all comes back to everyone's a volunteer, and everybody who volunteers for these various roles, be it on the board, be it on the committee, um, the fellows aren't a volunteer, um, but even they have a ton of work to do.

A lot is like, yeah, we can keep talking about this, but you can talk about something for an hour, but if it turns out that it's going to take somebody 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 hours to do, that's a much bigger ask.

Yeah.

Like, so I had just to come back to the idea about the merch store.

Like, I had somebody suggest to me at um Django Korn uh US about doing t-shirts, and they were prepared to do the t-shirts and they got graphic skills and all the rest.

Was then they asked

And um, like I was like, that's not that's all brilliant, but they're asking me as the fellow to sort of facilitate that.

And it's like I I just don't have any bandwidth or capacity or authority to do any of those things, and I don't really know how to enable you to to to step forward and make that happen.

And we could have we could have released t-shirts like Django 4.2 LTS new t-shirt, but we there's people who who it does scratch their itch to create such a thing, but how do we enable them to actually do it?

Well, so like we're talking about all these things we can't do.

When I when I ran for the board, two of the things I wanted to do was re rebring back the Django developers survey, which I only knew from talking to Tim Graham had even existed, um, and to get the merch store up.

So like I set up the merch, or people had already done quite a bit of work on it, but it wasn't live and there needed to be a final push.

So the Django merch store that exists, like I did that.

I think one or two other people have access, but like, you know, I set that up.

So if somebody wants to do it, it's like, okay, come like should have been come, you know.

Here's the cross channels.

Like, ask me since I used to ostensibly run it.

I still have the login, and like we can put the designs up and make it happen.

Like, I actually I spent I spent quite a bit of time with um what is her name?

Um Libby, who does the beautiful shirts for the Australian ones trying to get a little bit nicer things.

Um so it's totally doable.

I think that's that's the problem, is that there isn't yeah, there isn't like a place to ask, or it isn't clear, there isn't a committee.

Um like I was gonna ask with the committee, so how does uh are they formed?

They're gonna be formed, how does someone get on them?

Like what's the plan?

Um one thing that we decided, at least in the short term, is that every committee will have a board member as like a liaison member just for to get things going and you know, sort of corral for lack of a better term.

Um there will be an invite probably for the first two or three or an open call for interest, I guess, for the first two, I think both of the funding ones.

Um, hopefully coming soon.

I don't know the exact time um that's been uh delegated to another board member, but but hopefully, hopefully coming soon.

A lot of that is going to be level of interest.

And it's hard to say, oh, here's two committees and use that to evaluate level of interest for committees in general because people might not be interested in those.

But if we went whole hog and said, hey, because we probably could envision five, six, seven committees in different spaces, but if we went whole hog and they got zero interest, that's really hard, right?

Um, but it's going to be, you know, we'll post it freely.

It'll show up on Twitter, it'll show up on the news, it'll show up on the mailing list.

My expectations is it's going to be a lot of mailing list people who are going to be the ones who feedback.

Um, and we also have to make decisions on who can be on different committees, right?

We haven't set any hard and fast rules, but like people who decide funding grants, we probably want those to be individual members, right?

They have skin in the game, for lack of a better term.

Um, fundraising, that could probably be open to anyone, you know, who has an interest in or uses Django.

I don't see why not.

And also that becomes an entry point potentially to becoming an individual member, right?

You gave back, you were on a committee.

Like you definitely did the work.

But yeah.

Um, I will say, sort of going back to to who to contact.

So this is gonna be, I guess, an Easter egg for people who actually listen to the chat, so please don't put it in the show notes.

Um, feel free to, and I hope I don't regret saying this.

Feel free to email president at jangoproject.com.

Um, I know when I was, you know, not on the board or anything, not often, but once or twice, I emailed um Russell, I emailed Frank with a thought, with an idea, whatever.

And it took a while to get back to me, because of course, right?

It was just a random thought.

Um, but so yes, please, if you have an idea, if you have a thought, if you have a question, not just a random question, right?

We have the correct channels for that.

But if there's something that doesn't seem right, yeah, email me that you think it's a board or it's a community thing that that's a question.

Feel free to.

Um and I do want to say that I think me saying that is reflective of I think the Django community and the Python community more so, which is I feel comfortable saying that because the people in our community are good and nice and and helpful and not, you know, negative.

Um and also I say that because before I was president, I felt comfortable doing that, and that probably says a lot about me, but anybody in this community really should feel comfortable in saying, yeah, I'm gonna reach out with an idea.

Your ideas are valid.

They might not be actionable, that's a separate discussion, but they're valid ideas.

So yeah, bring them up.

Then I'll be that sort of sounding board.

But if they can, you know, it's already a huge lift to just organize.

But I think if you have these committees and you know, the the remit, the point is like you're gonna make recommendations and then things will happen.

Because I think it's that things will happen, right?

Like if there's a marketing committee and they make a recommendation, they do their thing, they make a recommendation to the board that says we really think that we should have an email cat a newsletter, an official Django newsletter, and then that goes through the process, right?

That makes it a lot easier to do the work if you know it's gonna be list, like something's gonna happen.

And like someone wants to object, they can object, but like there is a process.

Um, so all that is pretty exciting.

I did want to circle back to Carlton, because at one point you were, you know, fellows, if they had more time.

Like, since you're this is your swan song, like, you know, we could, and you and I have talked privately, like, what you know, if money was no object, how many fellows should we have?

Like what or what what's the scope of things that could be done that aren't being done?

Because people don't see that.

They just see, oh, there's a new release and it's relatively secure.

We hit um the we hit the releases every month, we hit that we handle the security issues very well, we've um got the the issue tracker under control.

And I did a post a while back about the difference between so I did a talk in 2018 on your web framework needs you, and we had, I can't remember exactly, let's say 1250 tickets open, open accepted tickets, which is the metric, and now we're down to about 900.

So the five years later, it's but down by about a third, which is you know pretty good going, I would I would say, because historically it been it had been building up.

Um, so we do all of that really well.

But then there's other packages in the if you go to the Django GitHub org, there's other packages which I maintain the channels packages, and I don't get as much time on those as I want.

I'm hoping to have more time now.

This morning, though, because Django Django is under control, and we had um there was a Redis Pi security release.

I'm like, right, I really need to do an update for channels Redis.

So this morning I spent working on channels Redis.

It's like, do you know what?

That's amazing.

Because if I could do that just, you know, occasionally, it doesn't have to be all the time, but if there was sort of fellow capacity to occasionally make sure these other packages were better looked after, that would be amazing.

That would just be, it wouldn't have to be a lot.

There's the whole jazz band orc, right?

Which are massively under um uh underment, not for for lack of love or what, but just one person doing it, two people doing it.

Like if a fellow had from time to time a bit of capacity to just sort of be at large amongst the jazz band packages, that would make a

And just do you know what?

I'm gonna sit and merge these three, I'm gonna sit and resolve these three hard ticketes on, you know, debug toolbar, which everybody uses.

Debug toolbar is fantastically maintained, so but it's perhaps not the best example.

But you know, everybody relies on this, it needs, you know, somebody to sit down and do two or two hard days on this, and actually it would be resolved.

If there was capacity for a fellow to do that, what a difference to the ecosystem it would make.

You know, like all Django War off, which is massively well maintained and well sponsored and whatnot.

But do you know what?

That's so crucial to the Django ecosystem that if a fellow needed to spend a bit of time on it and had that capacity, what a return on investment to the Django ecosystem that would be if that was available.

It's not oh

Yeah, yeah, it's

Not that in a way that the triage can be like dream.

The triage is intellectually rewarding too.

But if you if you're doing the triage and the pull request review on Django Django all the time, it can be like, oh, do you know what?

I may not have the capacity.

Ultimately, after five years of it, I have to stop now.

I've had okay, that's enough for me.

I'm moving on to other things.

I'm very excited to be, I'm not leaving Django, I'm very excited to be building stuff with Django as it now is, because it's a lot different than it was in 2018.

It's like, oh yes, this is this is fun time now for me.

Um, but if you have if you were fellow, you know what, you know what you've got an away day over in the Jazz Man Dex project.

Brilliant.

I've got a couple, you know, what a refresh.

Because one of the hardest things is dealing with people, right?

People turn up, they've got an issue, and again and again you have to, in goodwill and good spirit, reply to them, saying, No, this isn't an I already, you know, and people, oh, they they get really upset when you say no.

And it's it's hard to handle that, and you know, it's always with with the right response and all that, you know, you want to rage out and be like, ah, just go away.

Uh, you can't do any of that.

So to go off and just do some coding on a different project, wonderful, wonderful.

And what a difference it would make to those other projects, and what a difference it would make to Django's secret source, which is third-party packages.

Yeah.

His and I think it's come up on the XKCD, has come up on your podcast before.

The with the one it's like, you know, the huge tower with the one little tiny piece that's like, you know, some random developer in Ohio.

But like, there's a recursive version of that, right?

Like that might be Django, but then like you say, Carlton, it's like, oh, there's a third-party package that actually everybody relies on that we can't do a ton of work.

Um, and there have been questions, you know, about bringing various packages under the DSF umbrella, but then it gets into a question of time.

And again, comes back to mention it comes, it's a question of funding.

Um, and I know we've discussed this before and you know, will in board meetings, and I it's I'm certain it's come up uh on Django chat before, right?

Like there's this there's a chicken and egg problem.

Like, a do we want to raise more money?

Do we have reasons to do it?

And I think potentially, yeah, there's probably earmarks, but more fellows, or even for the fellows to have, like you say, you know, one day a week, one day every two weeks, whatever, instead of working on Django, go work on a jazz band project or like sort of the 20% time, if you want to call it that, right?

Um, but it'll be good that we start a fundraising committee to work on that, but like honestly, to do any initiatives that we've talked about that we've thought about, whatever, um it's like close to doubling our budget like right off the bat to feel comfortable at a minimum.

But I mean, it's doable.

I mean, our budget is it's less than it's less than a big corp, a single big corp software engineer.

And like more to the point, like if somebody goes and I'm so I'm very excited about these committees because that's been a wish list for a long time.

But and like I'm at you know, I'll I will put my name in for at least one of them.

But you know, there's an issue on uh Django Project repo right now that Carlton and I have filled out saying, okay, if we need more money, like we don't need to reinvent the wheel here.

Like we have all this real estate on Django Project on the sidebar, and right now it's just a random thing of some random person.

Like, just do what every other site, like look at Vue.js, look at like just say if you give a certain amount, boom, you get a little more placement.

Like, you know, like it's not it's not rocket science, it's been solved.

Or for example, we need another fellow.

Let's have a three-year thing.

Python has done this, like sp brought to you by Microsoft, right?

I mean, maybe maybe the timing's not great now, but like we could totally do that, right?

I mean that's and that gets back to the democracy democracy thing, is that like it's really hard to rely on small donors when there's these huge piranhas, you know, these great white apex predators out there that want to access our community, that if we structure it correctly, like fine.

Like, you know, we do the jet the pie chime promotion every year, right?

Like, I don't think people have a problem with that.

That's been a great partnership that's led to them helping with the survey.

There's no reason if you know we couldn't do that, sponsor the fellowship program or some of these other things.

It's just that, you know, it's all this extra work for the board.

And so we talk about it and it doesn't happen.

But I'm optimistic that if there are these committees, we can have a newsletter on the website, we can fix that sidebar.

Carlton and I have done the work on it, it just needs to be approved.

Yes, Carlton?

There are people in the Django community who have the ability to communicate with enterprise companies and do the the long thread that's necessary to get the sign-off on the funding.

But without the thing is these these kind of big companies, they can't, they just literally can't give you the money unless you go through that process.

But it needs somebody to bit say, right, I'm gonna be the front person to speak to Company X, which we know uses Django.

So like they want, like, I know this, they want to be asked, give us a half million dollars or give us mid-six figures to fund the program for three years.

Like, do it once, boom, all this amazing placement.

Write 50,000, 20,000, like it's not worth their time to respond.

And that's partly why they all give their money to Python instead of Django, because they assume we're part of the PSF anyways, and also because it's easier to write a million dollar check to Python and get placement at a conference and you know, than to deal with the small fish.

So good.

Before I let you speak on it, I'm just gonna say, you know, that not reinventing the wheel thing.

The mailing list on the thing could just literally be RSV, RSS fee to email on the blog.

That could be it, wouldn't be too much.

I know Jeff Triplett.

I know me.

Like, it's trivial.

Like, yeah, no, 100%.

There's a ton of places.

I I have concern potentially if the focus becomes completely like huge enterprise people, because if we make big changes due to a whale, and then they're like, oh no, you need to change this or we're gonna pull our money, like suddenly you're you're stuck in the water.

Um, it's definitely a direction to go.

I think the other direction, right?

Talking about materials, we don't have a one pager, which is like I'm a random developer at a random company that uses Django, but that has been using Django for years and everything's built on Django.

Just hand this to your COO, your CTO.

Here's the one pager that you know, if nothing else, right?

We could legitimately say you're getting $200,000 of fellows' value a year, right?

Minimum by donating five thousand dollars.

Right?

Like we want the big, we want the little.

We want everything.

Easy.

It it's it's it is a chicken and egg problem.

We the money's but we're

Like, so maybe it's partly we need to articulate not just what's being done like more clearly, what's not being done if for want of some money, but also if we just stuck the sidebar on there, we could get some more corporate money.

Yeah.

What about like sponsored releases, right?

Like we put a re you know, some amount for for port releases and a larger amount for an LTS.

This release brought to you by so-and-so, and they gave money for it, right?

That's a simple one.

We put a

Exactly.

It's just

They're very interested in understanding specifically to some degree how the money's being used and talking about fellows, right?

They're interested in it can pay for another fellow, not that it's going to continue paying for a fellow.

So so that's it, right?

And and and frankly, how we and do we publicize our financials in what way and to whom?

Like that was one thing I wanted to do was was do a public post on the finances.

Um, I did do some work behind the scenes to tidy things up, and maybe maybe Peter will do this.

Yeah, people are unaware.

But how could they?

Like they don't sit on board meetings, like you know, so

Well, that was part of he mentioned that he was thinking about running, and I was like, well, you know, we could use you.

Yeah.

Um so yes, anyway, so it's it's all all all those things.

But I you know, and it is true that there is a risk that if the funding, you know, right now it's a third to a quarter comes from the pie just the well, maybe not, but a fifth comes from the just the pie charm campaign.

So if you have all your money from a couple fish, then like that can be a weakness.

Like that was Python's problem.

All their money came from the conferences, and so with COVID, they didn't have conferences, and so that was a problem.

But you know, having more money gives you more options too.

Yeah, absolutely.

It and it's it's the you know, they hired like Python, they hired someone who like there are people we'd probably would need to hire a consultant who does this all day long and knows how to tee it up and deal with these companies because they know what they want, but they just can't be bothered unless it's put to them on a platter.

But if it's on a platter, like they're looking for I think wins and Django is a pretty feel-good, you know, story.

So absolutely.

We we it it's not.

We have money in the bank, we have backstop, we we could run for a while at current levels in a while, you know, years.

Um, but it it limits what we can do, what we're able to do, you know.

Fellows, we you know, are in the process of hiring a new one.

Can we pay even approaching competitive rates in certain areas, right?

Right, there's all sorts of of questions on on where that goes.

Um, but yeah.

I think, you know, that I remember speaking to Frank when he was the president at I must have been 2018, something at DjangoCon, and um we were having this conversation then about, you know, why don't we raise more money?

I think you must have been you must have started it well.

Um but Frank was saying, well, you know, we could raise more money, but what for?

I think at the time there was a kind of feeling, well, Django's sort of you know getting old in the tooth and whatnot.

But then the the the time since then, it it's really kind of um refreshed.

You know, just the 4.2 release, what we've got going on, Psycho PG3, the the the async changes over the thing, the forms changes have come through the last few, you know, it's it's an exciting time.

It's not like that.

Of being it's reliable and it's got things like LTS releases, and you know that a couple of years later your code will still work.

Those kind of things.

But Django is cool and we should be promoting it, and we should be out there saying, no, do you know what we want to 3x the budget in order to be able to do these things.

And 3xing the budget, while it sounds that hard, isn't really because the budget's so small, it's easy to get exponential growth from a small base.

So let's do these things.

Like, I honestly I'm I'm really excited about Django.

I really it's such a vibrant place.

It's like I haven't felt like this since the the DRF Kickstarter all those years ago, if you remember that.

Right?

We really are in a ripe and fertile time.

Let's maximize it.

Um we we can't endlessly rely, like I mean, you know, behind the scenes, Haim, we talked last year, like a bunch of board people stepped down because COVID and other things, and thank God that you're still there.

Thank you because you know there's only a couple of you with that institutional knowledge um to do it.

And you know, but just because somebody needs to take a breather on one of these things doesn't mean they're stepping away from the community, but they need to be asked and it needs to be someone needs to kind of structure it.

Um, and it can't we can't just rely on the board to do all that as volunteers.

It would be quite easy to reach out to the wider community, uh those all those people who are active now with using Django and say, hey, look, there are these projects that need people power.

Come and come and help.

Yeah, I it's like chicken and egg again.

I mean, we've used that phrase 58 times already.

But if we had those those calls to action, we'd be able to put out the call for volunteers.

I I forget the the research, but basically, you know, the idea is in any community, like you know, 2% or like do everything, another 10% sort of participate, and the rest are just sort of like vaguely aware, right?

Um I'm an optimist that if we do make give more opportunity to the greater community.

When I say the greater community here, I'm saying explicitly people in this world that use Django, whether that's a hundred thousand people, two million people, I can make arguments in both directions, right?

People in this world that use Django, what can you do in an hour of your time?

Say, yeah, this has helped me in my career, this has been fun, this is whatever.

You know, yeah, it'd be lovely if you come on and give five bucks.

That's easy to do.

Um, you could do that, but you know, what if you don't want to give the money?

What can you do in an hour that gives something back or that gives you, you know, a little more exposure to the community to help us out, us help you out, whatever.

Um maybe I'm wildly starry-eyed.

But I wouldn't be doing this if I weren't, right?

All communities, all volunteer communities have this power law, like where the top contributor, they do do masses and then it drops off almost to the bottom and it tail long tail out.

But you can move that head outward, right?

So that and just by moving that head outward, you've sort of, you know, massively change the sum of work that's done over this over the whole graph.

Yes, it's always going to be a power law, but what we don't, what or what we haven't historically done, I think, is try to be open to moving the curve away from the axes.

And we could do that.

It's not this just this altruistic thing.

I mean, we all met each other through Django.

Like, that's enriched my life, right?

You meet people, like it's it doesn't need to be just this thankless thing because it's not, because it's a ch it's an opportunity for you to meet people, to learn how things work, like to have to sit in on conversations with Microsoft and Google or you know, whatever level of things you're doing.

I mean, you know, it is a community that is you know, obviously we think is is worth being a part of.

And so finding that way to do that first thing, uh, you know, it's nice to be work around a common goal, you know, however it is.

So it, you know, I'm very happy to hear that the board is uh putting in place plans to like tap into that a bit more and um I mean I know we're we're basically yeah, go ahead.

I said to Will, um, you know, life is busy, you're both friends.

I love talking to you guys, but I have no time.

Can I be on the podcast just because I want to hang out with you guys more than anything?

I've made friends deep friends long lasting friendships you know I think I hope um when we travel around Carlton with the family I know we've talked about this we hope to visit you guys but yeah

Will gotta bring those numbers up nob

It's just like just like I'm like God three is so hard and you're like yep and four.

So we gotta walk in the shoes.

All right well it we're we're basically at an hour.

Haim is there anything that you wanted to I didn't get a chance to ask you why did you went to law school because I

Yeah so um um I have some lawyers in the family um I so to be clear with everyone I did my undergrad and I did a master's uh sort of four and a half year joint program um in computer science started my career uh in software and then law had always been something interesting to me um I sort of love learning and continuous learning and yeah and I was like hey I'm gonna go to law school um Boston Suffolk University in Boston has an official law school night program so that's unus

ual most when most people when they go to law school at night it's like oh yeah if you put classes together over a period of time you can eventually get a law degree um at Suffolk it's a four-year program as opposed to a normal three-year day program it's a four-year night program so I did that while I was working um deep focus in intellectual property as one would expect which was lovely and wonderful and I'm very happy I went to law school and took the bar and all that fun stuff um I happened to finish in May of 2008 you take the bar in August of 2008 uh between the time I finished

and the time I took the bar uh there was one Friday in Boston and sort of the greater community at large in the US that some I think 900 attorneys were laid off across various firms because it was 2008 and I said okay that was a fun idea I'm not interested in just like putting up a shingle and doing you know personal injury law.

If I was going to be a lawyer that's the only area that is worth it

You go patent prosecution which is writing patents um USPTO things like that you do litigation trial um litigation interests me a little more and honestly for my background is the only one that's available to me for patent prosecution you need to have a background in a hard science and a BA in computer science does not satisfy um a BS does but most universities in the US at least at the time we're not a BS in computer science and actually it's why I did my master's MS uh an MS no well

ester beyond what I would have done normally so I did the master's instead.

ast but right like you have places where there's five or six or Google right there's 11 I think engineering steps on their engineering ladder but their ultimate one only two people have ever been like a Google Distinguished fellow or whatever and so they bought YouTube and their CTO became that role um the first half of that are very much you do software right and their software skills and you're getting better and basically you're expected to get better over a period of time till you reach that senior level or whatever.

The steps after that principal staff whatever people call it bring in very different skill sets that people may or may not want to exercise or do even if it's a considered an IC role um and you can have a wonderful career as a senior you don't want to do that extra stuff don't because a lot of times it can be annoying getting into the business role I like it but I think law school brought a lot of those skills that we don't learn uh as just sort of you know engineer trainees for anybody who did traditional university.

Well nobody on this podcast well I guess you did but sort of didn't but Carlton I didn't so anyways Carlton do you have anything to add I know we're no we'll have to have you on again Haim we don't have any plans to stop doing these podcasts yeah we can

that I've never noticed

He's not going away but Thursday is his last official day.

Yes okay we are at DjangoChat com and we'll see you next time bye bye everyone bye bye