Transcript: Jazzband - Matthias Kestenholz

I'm Carlton Gibson joined as ever by Will Venton.

Hello there, Will.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

I've got a new microphone, so it'll eventually be better.

It might be a little less audio quality than the past ones, but

Okay, you'll have to give us feedback, folks.

And today today we've got a special uh guest, um Matthias Kessenholz, with us.

Uh hello Matthias, how are you doing?

I'm doing very well and I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm looking forward very much to this chat.

Thanks for coming on, show you're nervous.

I'm a bit nervous because you two are all wearing Django t-shirts and Django hoodies, and I'm uh and I forgot to dress for the show today, so I'm

But you're wearing the DjangoCon Europe hoodie, Matthias, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

So all the virtual conferences, I think all their stuff is on there now as well as the default Django.

So check it out.

So Matthew, Matthias, tell us about yourself.

How what's your backstory?

Um I've worked with PHP previously, but I just enjoy working with Python and Django so so much more.

And uh the the community of Django was also an important just pull factor for me to decide to to start working with Django.

It's just a framework I really like, and it's a community which taught me things which I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise.

So that's great for me.

Uh later I didn't want to stay in programming too much because I wanted to become an environmental scientist, and things got out of hand a bit because I um got to know a few people and founded a political party with them.

And then we also founded a company which I'm still working at now, and I just thought it's it's more important to go into marketing and work for the good people than just go into um in into climate science and find out once again that we should really change something, uh change how we how we live a bit maybe.

And so so that the programming was just a thing which I always enjoyed, but uh the mixture of programming and uh working for a good cause is at the end what what brought me into web development.

And I'm still here 15 years later.

We did some work for for the WWF and Greenpeace, and maybe for the Greens and mainly for left-leaning political parties, um, or just for grassroots movements, NGOs, and so on.

Uh we are we're also doing work for for other companies, but we have, so to say, a denialist of companies who we don't want to work for.

We don't only yes, so that's that's quite important, and that stayed with us over the years while people changed and the things we do did change, changed.

Um I think that was that that's probably a thing which possibly also puts off the bad guys, maybe from working with Django, at least uh one could think so.

But it's certainly a thing which which uh keeps me here and doesn't so I'm not motivated to find other technology or the new stuff.

I I'd rather stay with uh Django, which is really stable and maybe a bit boring, but for us that's that's a good thing.

I'm gonna say it's super exciting because it's exactly because it's stable and we can have the latest JSON fields and all the rest, and we can update the first the day it's released and no, it's not gonna break it.

And I think you know that.

Let's rather agree that that boring mess can may can be really exciting.

This I before we move on, uh two things I I want to say.

But one was exactly that that feeling about the Django community.

I for years I was using Django, I never really got involved, I never went to Django Cons, never went to conferences, and then I I went to um DjangoCon Europe in Florence.

And you know, A, the diversity mix.

I've been to other tech events where it's like, you know, one female um and uh DjangoCon isn't like that at all.

And the the other was the the the range of topics where they're talking about you know diversity hiring and inclusion and you know by cognitive biases and all these topics which I can't hadn't really even thought about.

And it was like wow, well, I've been missing this so much.

Um that's that was the one thing.

The other was fine height.

In the notes here, you've got organized using uh holocracy.

What's that?

I didn't

Um it was invented, I think, by Brian Robertson, which who is an American entrepreneur.

Um an operating system for a company.

It specifies a set of rules how companies should should work.

And one of the uh important uh things about it is um there are or there should be no implicit expectation towards other employees.

You try to make everything explicit and you try to write all expectations down into in roles, and then you can um just energize these roles or you can just give them away freely.

So it it is a way just it's not a completely flat structure, but it is in a way a flat structure where people have a little bit where power and responsibility is at the same level.

So if if you want more power, you have to take more responsibility.

And if you can you can't have power without responsibility, and also you can't have responsibility without power, which are maybe the two things which are most problematic if you work in such an environment.

I don't know whether you have worked at such a place anytime.

Um I have, and it's really annoying.

And holocracy sort of is is one possible way of re reinventing the organization structure, and it works really well for us, and I think people should have a close look at it.

There are other other ways to structure companies, and holocracy isn't definitely isn't without fault, but for us it's working well.

One thing I was surprised about is that I'm I'm a self-starter, the founders of companies are self-starters, but not everyone who's smart and hardworking is a self-starter or wants that responsibility.

Like we had one very early employee in particular who the founder and I kept trying to give her room try trying to give her room to take on responsibility and not be told what to do.

And ultimately she ended up going to Twitter.

She just wanted to be told, uh, which was interesting because I think before I'd assumed that if you were hardworking and intelligent, you would want more autonomy.

But her mind, and I think quite a few people's mind don't fit into that.

So that's sort of the culture of startups.

One thing I learned after that is to really try to ask questions that get around are you the type of person that does well in an in an unstructured environment?

Which I I think overlaps a little bit with holocracy, where you take the initiative but also you take the responsibility.

It's not it's not for everyone.

So that he didn't want to buy shares.

I I I couldn't believe it back then.

These days I understand it very well, especially uh when looking back to the type of company we were uh back then.

But holacracy still allows you to not have many responsibilities, but then you don't have much power either, and that may be fine for you.

And also all these implicit expectations where other people expect it's it's it's not implicit, uh it shouldn't be implicit, it should be very explicit because if if your former boss comes uh to you and expects a thing of you, you can just say, Well, I don't see this accountability anywhere in my roles, and then you can go into a governance meeting which has uh quite rigid structure as well, and then you can pro

cess this this just this tension, how it's called in holacracy.

And there is just a way for everyone to if you know for yourself what you need, then you can more or less get it, or that's at least that's the idea.

But of course, uh well, not everyone is the type who knows what they want, and that will be hard for them anyway.

And yes, so we we have a few problems, but maybe that's tangential now.

I don't know.

I I have to think about that, especially when when speaking English, what I should what I want to say, I don't know.

So it sounds like it gives you a good framework or a framework for addressing the human interaction and the role interaction problems that come up in any organization.

Could you talk I

Uh but you just was it it, I guess it was a work problem you had, or what was the, if you recall, the specific issue?

You say in the notes it was to do with your master's thesis?

And it was just if you have had several foreign keys pointing to the same model, the query the ASQL query engine got confused.

And it was just an edge case I hit, and I think I just contributed a more or less detailed report, and the problem itself was fixed by someone else.

Um the first problem I think where I really tried contributing a fix was the the was a problem I encountered with the uh template language.

And since I had been working maybe as a programmer for several years, and maybe Django was a little bit younger or even pre 1.0, maybe it was less intimidating back then, and I just went into the ticket tracker and proposed a patch.

Um I it wasn't the first open source contribution either, either either because I already contributed a few patches maybe to Git and to other projects.

So it wasn't the first time I interacted with an open source project.

But later on I got maybe confused a bit myself with the Django contributing process and just the um the standard for the stability which is be is expected and which I also understand and uh like in the Django project sometimes did make it hard to um get the change merged, especially before the fellows project.

I mean, the fellows project that helped very much.

But it is, it can be a long process, you know.

It's like two or three reviews to you know dot every I and cross every T on your patch to get it merged, which I I understand could be frustrating.

But I guess I always say to people, well, what's the other side?

Is Django good?

But the problem a few years back was more one of you didn't even get any review review.

And for example, Jacob, one of the uh original authors of Django, um, I think they instituted this program where you could review five patches and then you had a guaranteed review of your own patch, but that didn't work really well either for uh obvious reasons.

But I mean it it was just an a good maybe a good try to to fix this problem of the patch queue.

No, I mean it's still difficult, like you know, Maris and I are working, you know, Maris is full-time, I'm part-time, and we've still all the time got 20 20 plus patches on the list, plus you know, 150 PRs that are at some stage of ready, not ready.

You know, sometimes what is really helpful, you know, is people come along and they they take five, ten minutes out and they look at a pat a PR and they say, hang on, this is not too bad, or this is okay, or this needs that, and it just bumps it forward and it it it enables it to pop over the um out of the sea of pull requests and it enables Maris or I to grab hold of it and say, Okay, that one's that one we can move forward.

Sometimes the the the pull requests feel like a bit like a denial of service attack.

And that's just sometimes I'm not sure, but but there are times when I feel bad for accepting an an issue or just um r reviewing a pull request and maybe leaving a positive message and then you have to come and fix everything.

No, that's it.

It just helps, you know.

And if there's something that you know, if you've got a PR and you think it's nearly ready and you mark it ready for check-in, Maris and I know that we can go and give it a review, and if it's not, we'll just bump it back.

But if it it really helps, you know, it really takes the because the difficulty is that there are so many tickets, so many pull requests, is identifying the ones which you can make progress on quickly.

So that does help.

Two things I wanted to talk about.

The two things you're known for, right?

One is that you're part of Jazz Band and the other is uh fine CMS.

Which which do you want to talk about first?

Okay.

Well what what's the what's the elevator pitch for

For example, you can if if you want to have a page or a blog entry, you can add a rich text content block, and then you can add an image block, and then you can add a rich text block again, and so on, and so on.

And these content blocks uh are reusable plugins.

Um and I mean the the interesting thing for me is just that there is uh that that all of this should be reusable not just for pages but also for blog entries, for for shop items, and it it is more of a content management framework maybe than a content management system.

What would you say?

Describe a content so content management system we kind of can use to make pages, we could use to make blog posts.

What's a content management framework?

What do you mean when you say that?

And if you work with Django, you have this possibility of creating a model for for each maybe uh real-world entity that you're working with.

You can create a model for a person, you can create a model just for a project, and then you can create a model for um just for some painting they did, and then you can create all these relations which connect these entities with uh each other.

That's what a really relational database is all about for me.

And if you got to know the power that you get when you structure your content well and all the automatizations you can make, you don't want to go back to structure your page content in the same way in the uh old way again, where you just have one big blob of rich text content, maybe, but you want to reuse this structured content and pull it into this CMS.

And many, maybe also Django-based, many CMS systems, they just offer you this list of features, and then when you want an additional feature, you're on your own, and find CMS offers you these uh tools and building blocks to uh build uh a customized CMS yourself for for every site, which doesn't have all these fields and checkboxes which you don't need at all.

It always feels like you know it it's just Django.

We didn't need to educate people how to use it, and we didn't want to build our own just our own administration interface, and then we because if we did that, maybe it would be better for a moment.

It probably wouldn't, but maybe it would be, and then we'd have to maintain this all down the road.

And we already did this uh a few years ago when when still working with PHP, we had our own framework, we had our own CMS, and it was just so much work, all this maintenance that we didn't have the time to to do customer uh projects, and because of this

And I mean if that's just a toy project, then that works well.

But but once you st once you start using it just on dozens of sites, you don't want to have all this maintenance burden.

Um so what are the big ideas with find CMS?

What's the how would you you know because you've got um the things that jump out for me the content editor and the the you handle tree the the tree structure of the site very well.

It's one thing I wanted to talk to you about.

So let's take the tree structure.

Tree queries and SQL databases don't tend to go too well together, right?

And um when when I when we started find CMS in 2009, or I think it was 2009, I started searching for for a management solution and I found Django MPTT, the modified pre-order tree traversal, or uh in in the literature, I think it's also called nested set, and it's just a way to add additional um attributes to a model

which should make querying a tree faster, where you don't have to you have to you you you have the root node and then you have to fetch all the children and then you have to fetch all the children of all the children, and that's really inefficient, or it was really inefficient back then, and you don't want to do all this back and forth from Python to the database and then to Python again.

So I've got to the stage in my old age where I'll just save everything as a flat, um, you know, flat items without the tree structure, and then I'll I'll sterilize the tree structure separately and just do an inquiry to fetch all the items and rearrange them because I don't like going back to the database and fetching all the children of the children of the children.

So, what's what's how how should I be doing that efficiently?

That's just a way to move the recursion which you need to build a tree into the database and not do it in Python, because the database is these days, it's it's fast enough.

And that was an idea I got actually from from one of the um guys.

So I don't know his name, but it's it was a it was a guy uh working on DISCAS because they said this even at Discus we we are using commentary expressions to do this, they are fast enough, and I thought if it's good for discuss, then it will work for us too.

Yeah, interesting.

It's it's only three, four layers at most.

If you're using Postgres or MySQL 8 or recent versions of MariaDB, they all understand this um this AskQL construct, and that works really well.

Um one of the problems you don't get when you use this tree queries CTE stuff, which and which you were prone to get with MPTT, is that AmpytTe has redundant values in the database and they are corrupted from time to time, and then you have to rebuild your tree structure, and that's really annoying.

And I'm saying this as a heavy user of MPTT and also a co-maintainer, uh, you can use it and I won't drop it, but uh, maybe if you don't need this performance, then maybe use something else which is normalized and where you do not have redundant uh values which are prone to break from uh every now and then.

So uh say I want to get going.

I've listened to the podcast, I want to get started.

What should I use?

Because there's kind of two versions of Fine, right?

There's the the version one, and then there's is the newer version.

Is what what's your take there?

And I think that's the best place to start.

Find CMSA.

One is just the old workhorse, and we will maintain this for years to come, I hope, especially because we have many or a few big projects which are depending on it, but it has a bit too much magic in it, and you really want to stay with fine CMS3.

It's it's simpler and has a better focus for what it wants to do.

marketing it.

But in a way, yes, it I mean it's just fine if it works for us and it's small enough to not be a burden for us regarding maintenance.

Or uh but I would love if more people would just learn about these ideas because for example, Wagtail gained a stream field a few years ago, and this stream field, as far as I understand it, does exactly the same thing the Fine CMS content editor does, and they they started to use the say or a similar model uh too, but just several years later.

And I mean the Django CMS from from DVO, uh which is Zurich-based company too, by the way, I know the founders as well.

Um they had they had a few of the same ideas ideas as well, but they executed them differently, obviously.

And they yeah.

I mean, so one thing I'd say about it is that it's worth giving a go.

If you if you um if you've already got a Django app and you just you want to add on these content management or these con this content framework stuff.

I find Fine is good for that because it it it kind of integrates with what you've already got it rather than coming along and to replace.

And that's that's for me, that's a nice selling feature.

It's like you keep do keep doing Django rather than replacing it with something else.

But you know, um anyway, well let's move, let's move on.

Tell us about Jazz Band as well, because Jazz Band, what is Jazz Band?

So what sort of projects are part of it?

Because there's there's there's lots of the classic third-party packages, right?

And Chas Banch just offers a place now to move these projects to, and there is a community of people who are hopefully able to take up the bat and continue maintaining this project.

And if you're if it's just you by yourself, it can be like ah

But yes, so what the projects, yeah, the jazz band projects where I'm doing um much work, or the the the projects where the project where I do the work I do is mostly just Django uh debug toolbar.

And I see my job may uh I I looked at the commit statistics uh a few days ago and I noticed that my contribution is mainly also in the place of I'm mostly doing reviews and merges and releases.

I don't write much code myself, um, but I got into maintaining this project because I was I think I wanted to upgrade to Django 1.10 where the middleware uh setting changed and Django debug toolbar didn't support it back then, and Jazz Band just offered me a way to jump in and just submit this feature or this fix myself, and the

previous maintainers uh were maybe burned or bummed.

I don't know out like a responsibility around it, and I just thought, well, that that maybe Django sometimes would be as as I said before, uh my quality standards maybe aren't well enough for Django, but there certainly are um so I I know Django debug toolbar quite well these days, and I think I can judge the the the pull requests whether the quality is

is correct or not, and then I'll just throw out a new release, and it just feels really good just to be a part of something bigger, and that's what Chazz Band uh offers to.

I think it's a really good way to give a little bit back to the community.

I always say I always describe my experience of getting into open source where it was like um it was just like a hobby.

I do, you know, a little bit here and there, just you know, on Stack Overflow or on the GitHub tracker on Django Rest framework.

And then, you know, the danger is get this burnout thing.

The danger is giving too much.

So, like any hobby, you know, if you were going to Tai G classes, you'd go on a Thursday night, you'd give it a couple of hours, you wouldn't do it, you know, four hours every day because that would be insane, right?

So if if you are going to get into open source, a you know, bracket it, say I'm gonna, yeah, I'll give it a couple of hours a week, that's fine.

And that's probably enough to contribute to a project.

And then Jazz Band is an awesome way because there's there's there's debug toolbar, there's Django configurations, uh, there's all sorts of awesome packages, I can't remember them.

A community of people who are um there to help you.

You know, you can do a bit, they can do a bit, and it's it it's not somebody on their own getting burnt out of the defening the project they they sweat it over.

So anyway, super, I'm all for that.

Brilliant.

Matthias, is there other stuff you want to talk about?

I just think well, don't don't feel afraid to try to contribute.

And maybe it's it's enough to just yeah, to just jump into the ticket tracker and submit an issue or just submit the pull request.

Uh I think you like the experience.

That's probably oh who knows.

We had it.

Are they open in Switzerland?

We have it's regarding the ratio.

I think we overtook the US uh a few days ago just the infection ratio ratio, and I don't know how long this will go on, so yeah.

We were talking about wearing masks yesterday evening, maybe in the office.

Um but I'd rather stay at home anyway because it's just I can work do so much better work and concentrate more as an introvert.

Um I sort of like this that now I can stay at home so much and go for a run instead of just drinking more coffee.

So that's great for me.

Okay, so right.

Well, well let's uh let's call it a day there.

That's two points.

Thank you.

Um and and uh folks at home, give uh fine CMS a good a try.

It's uh an interesting platform.

Thank you.