Transcript: Python Web Conference - Calvin Hendryx-Parker

I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson.

Hi, Carlton.

Hello, Will.

Hi, Calvin.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, thank you for coming on the show.

But maybe we'll just start with how'd you get into programming and find your way to the Django space?

And he gave you brought at the same time he brought over some like basic programming books.

And like I as I I have no idea what to do with this.

You know, I'm like, I don't know, 12, 13, and just didn't have the interest in it yet.

But you know, fast forward a number of years, go to college, uh, I ended up getting a degree in graphics, so like I like CAD and like drafting and and things like that.

But along the way, I took some CS classes because I was like, ah, these computers seem pretty useful.

Uh and then went the dot com boom was like right as I was graduating school.

So me and a couple guys loaded up to San Francisco, you know, started jobs there, and that's where I really started programming.

Like I started building little tools to scratch itches for you know this and that, so little web apps to like index images, you know, because I was doing UI work at the time, but I still needed to have some like niceties for like my workflow.

So I really started coding out of necessity to build tools for that that kind of a workflow.

Uh got involved in open source, um, probably like right around year 2000.

Uh, that's where I found Python.

Uh so I guess I'm kind of one of the uh the Python old school uh folks.

I started with you know Python 1.5 was my first Python, but I really started because of Zope, uh the Z word um that you know some people you know have a lot of history with.

Uh I think things have changed and there's not such a stigma associated with the Zope word anymore.

Um, you know, I got very involved in the Plone community.

Uh but a coworker showed me ZOAP.

He's like, check this out.

There's like a Python web application server that's open source and you can download it.

And I I think I understood every other word he said at that point in time, but I went and downloaded it anyway and started trying it out and started building stuff like completely through the web, like the kind of the ZOA dream at the time was you would do all your work through the web, you could rapid prototype and design you know quick little applications.

And so I did, and uh, I got hooked.

Um, that was really a lot of fun, you know.

Kind of put that all that all aside later, but yeah.

I don't know, it gets pulled in by like Twisted or something.

I don't know.

But what was Zope all about?

And like because it was really big, right?

It was really

How much time do we have?

Yeah, well,

This is back in the time, even probably pre-like Tomcat.

This was around the time like Perl was like the thing for building like CGI web applications.

Yeah, it was, guessboard.

So Zope was interesting because it was a long-running process.

You had an object-oriented database, there was all kinds of like oh, just neat innovations around security and permissions and fine-grained roles and access that you could really build through the web.

Now, obviously, that's frowned upon.

I I think it's frowned upon now.

I mean, we really want to be able build code on the file system and you know, make it lightweight and easy and you know, have source control.

But back like in the year 2000, like that some of that stuff just wasn't best practice or even you right now is about building an application that was useful for your coworkers so you could have a internet or a you know PTO tracking system or you know, some interesting small little app.

And ZOA enabled a lot of people to kind of kick that off without having to have a serious programming background, which was me.

Like I fell right exactly in that bucket.

And what's interesting is that you know, you talked about ZOP.interface.

That didn't come along until I don't know many, many years later when the ZOP 3 project kicked off, and it was basically a backward incompatible um release of a new the newer version of framework, which included the ZOP component architecture.

And so you'll see ZOA interface in a lot of other things that are not ZOAP because it provided a way for ZOA people to use like the interface patterns, like you know, define interfaces or contracts that your code would adhere to.

If you go look at the like Apple.com slash open source page, you'll see ZOAP listed on there because they've used Zope interface for you know contracts and interfaces in their code.

It was really a good way of like they trailblazed a lot of best practices, but they didn't feel very pythonic at the time, which is I think why the community didn't really like go that direction.

Uh, I think the community really saw things like Django and Flask and other web applications as being more, you know, in air quotes pythonic uh to how things are built.

I mean there's which I agree with.

And I feel like I'm a way I don't I I don't know, I've I got a deeper knowledge of the web because of it.

Fine.

I mean, there's a pendulum, right?

Because at the time it was all like in contrast to say Java, where you're defining, you know, these uh interfaces and you've got these massive inheritance structures, and it was like, ah, that's that's horrid.

You're like, I don't want that.

I I I'll duck duct type it all the time, and it'll just work, and it'll be 10 lines, and I'll import the library that does all the magic things that are difficult and wonderful.

And now in Python, we've got um the move towards type hints and and you know static typing with the the other modern languages that use that more.

And it's kind of like coming back to interfaces, and because you define, you know, you you don't want to pass string.orany into as your type in.

So you define a protocol of exactly the method you're gonna use and you use that for as your type annotation.

And that's defining a protocol, right?

It's like the same thing that we were doing all those years ago in Java and hated.

And I feel like we've still taken this path of make it easy for developers to wrap their heads around, reduce the amount of typing, you know, an actual code that you have to write to be productive, so and stay out of the developer's way, which I think I feel like still lays right in line with like Python's mission of being this language to just get stuff done.

I'd been a long hold out as well on like IDEs.

Like I'd I'd been just a Vim user for just, well, probably up to the last couple years.

And then I switched over to PyCharm, uh, mostly because of my friend Paul Ebert, who's like, you know, come on, let's do some webinars together, and I want you to check this out.

And so I did, and I got hooked because it finally was fast enough to kind of keep up with my brain.

And then I think that the the autocomplete, the code sense stuff that's kind of working behind the scenes inside of those IDEs has gotten really good and really fast.

Like it it seems like it's predicting what you want to type before you type it.

Uh it was a hundred people in a small classroom at uh some university down there, and it it was my first introduction to the community of open source.

And man, was I just like I was hooked.

I was on board, full in 100%.

How do I get involved and and like do more and get engaged in these communities?

I I that was my first, you know, how am I in?

I wasn't even using Plone at the time.

We were just using ZOA.

I was like, well, there's no ZOA conference, there's this Plone group getting together, like that's built on ZOA.

Let's go.

And so uh my brother and I actually went down to uh the Plone Conf in 2003, and then since then I've been to every PyCon and since 2004.

Well, um, slight interruption, but Carlton, I noticed right before we started, um, just an open source.

So you and I guess Marcus, so Django has changed, switched over from master to main.

Is there anything you just want to add about what it took to make that change?

And obviously, we know probably why.

But we moved um we moved Django Project.com over last week and code.jangoproject.com, which is the track.

We moved that over last week and nothing broke and it went remarkably smoothly.

So, you know, I just up, I bumped the channels repos, channels Daphne, and channels Redis over, and uh, you know, maybe one PR didn't automatically get migrated.

But GitHub's done a really good job.

I have to give them credit.

Um, they're maintaining the um the reference from master to main so that the old references they just redirect uh sign up.

You have to go and change the default branch on your fork.

But it could pop when you go to your fork, it pops up a big um you know overlay and it says, Hey, by the way, it's been updated.

Do you want to do that here?

And you just go, yes, and it takes a nanosecond.

So we did um uh Django Django, which is the main repo, and who knows?

I mean, I mean I'm I'm sure something's gonna break, but we haven't quite found it yet.

It'll be you know, it'll be literally like five minutes after Maris knocks off tonight, and it'll be like ping at that.

But oh well, that's it.

Like, what do you call the databases?

Really?

Like, you know, that was ten years ago.

So you're a progressive.

Well, you're progressive.

I'm a Vermont progressive.

So um, anyways, I Calvin, I did want to ask you, because I was out in San Francisco, gosh, 10 years ago, um, after that boom and bust.

And you know, given where we are now in the state of the world, so you were there through the boom and the bust.

I'm curious, you know, what was that like?

You know, you you stayed and eventually left, but you know, right now it's all these San Francisco is dead things, and it seems like it's just gonna probably rise up again in a different fashion.

I mean it was a good book, actually, one of the few I loved that was like kind of forced upon me uh as part of like you know English class or whatever.

And it felt like to me at the time reading that as a high schooler, nothing could ever be like the roaring twenties again.

Like this is crazy, like the stuff the stories of all the kind of like you know, opulence and crazy stuff they were doing.

I get out to San Francisco, I moved out there in 1998 and then rode that rode that through to 2003, and man, did I see craziness, like crazy launch parties.

We had, you know, our one of the offices I was in, we had adult-sized tricycles and pool tables and foosball tables and nap rooms and all this like crazy, crazy stuff.

And um, you know, from coming from the Midwest, moving out to San Francisco and like the salaries that they were offering to people who had zero experience, like again, my kind of a mind-blowing experience.

Like that there was truly this bubble, and like it was it really it felt like the time, like it was create just fun stuff all over, and no, you know, but you know, then it all kind of came down uh in 2001.

Actually, you know, no time like that to uh launch your own company uh during a dot-com bust.

Uh and then we had our second like for six feet up, we actually had our second kind of growth spurt during the 2008 um mortgage crisis.

So we've we kind of launched during a downturn and then grew during a downturn.

And so you

What's your what like what's your pitch like that?

Because that's worth knowing.

We love doing the Python, you know, work, being in the community, and I I feel like you know, just diving in and going all in on being a Python and cloud company has been really exciting.

Um now, just full disclosure, my wife founded the company uh back in you know '99.

Uh she was she'd gotten like laid off from one company or a company closed their doors, and she doesn't sit still well.

And so she took a hobby of mine, which was I had a server literally sitting in the living room hosting some friends and family, and she went and backbuilded them and turned it into a company.

And that's that was the start of Six Feet Up, was literally a server sitting in the living room that had then finally moved into like a a data center someplace.

But she turned that into a real company.

And then in 2003, I went full-time, you know, left the dot com world and we came back to Indiana and and started growing Six Feet Up and hired our first first employees and you know, really made it a a real deal.

So it it's it's been a fun journey.

Um, and I'm really happy to do that, you know, with my my life partner and you know, partner in crime in all things.

March 13th, uh 2020, we closed the doors of the actual physical office.

Uh we now have employees from South Africa to California.

Uh so with lots of time zones in there, but it's been we're now remote first.

We've always had a few remote employees and then kind of been growing over the years, but then we just went all in on it when the pandemic hit.

Although we had such a cool office, I really wish you all could have come and hung out uh at the uh the 60 bar uh where we had like you know a couple beers on tap and lots of whiskey.

So tricycles and nap tones and

Um what what was that transition like?

I mean, because I had somewhat I mean, I was East Coast old school, and then I was San Francisco and now back.

Um, you know, it's an adjustment moving back.

Like, what was it like trying to hire people, you know, right?

Because you still have that West Coast mentality of like, let's burn it all down, right?

But you know, mid Indianapolis is more of a normal place.

Like I imagine hiring people, you know, you're looking for different things than you would have hiring the same person in San Francisco.

Uh I think the mentality never left me like Midwest sensibilities.

Like I we at some point we wanted to buy a house hot in San Francisco, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it, knowing what I know about the Midwest and the prices of real estate here.

Um when we came back, we were making so little money, it was almost laughable, like probably below poverty line, but it was worth doing because you know it was it was our thing.

And so growing and and you know, kind of learning how to like get new contracts and sell and all these kind of new skills that you know weren't part of my day-to-day as just like a systems engineer working for a startup.

I'm now you know working on how to grow our own business, but it was ours, like and it really that does make a big difference when it comes to like quality of life and and living and like your stress levels and and doing the things you want to do.

And we actually, you know, at that point in time wanted to grow a family as well and own a house and all these kinds of luxuries you can do in the Midwest for you know a reasonable uh amount of uh dollars.

So, but then hiring has been tricky.

I mean, the Midwest has been solidly a Microsoft centric uh area, lots of.NET developers here, but that's changed.

I mean, when we came back in 03, um I was looking for that tech community.

So by 07, uh we I I launched our co-found the Indianapolis Python user group, IndiePy, and that that's one now one of the largest single language uh meetups here in the Midwest.

We've got over 2,000 you know members of our meetup.

You know, we still meet month you know monthly, and I mean even with a pandemic, we've managed to still maintain you know pretty good attendance and getting awesome speakers, and so growing, I don't know, I felt like I had to grow the community that I wanted to exist, so why not go just go out and do it?

And then we've we've you know we've hired lots of people through the Indie Pi community because those people basically it's like stepping forward.

Like I I am interested, I want to be part of the community, I do want to participate.

And those are the best folks to hire people who are involved in open source, people who are involved in the communities, people who show up.

Yeah, and I remember having that that culture clash, but also um got very involved in the so in Boston there's a large Python community, but not so much of a Django community.

Um so getting very involved and seeing people and I remember thinking, and maybe this is still the case, if I ever do a company, I feel like Boston is a great place to hire people because there's really smart people.

They stick around, they don't leave every 12 months.

Um, but I'd want West Coast investors because the people just VCs are are um, you know, they're like the MBAs versus the West Coast, they're like, Yeah, you know, I made a billion dollars, you can do it too.

Right.

Um like Frankenstein, you know, your location.

It's like either you're making money or you're not making money.

There's no VC investors involved.

Like, you know, it's like if you're doing work for a customer, you're you know, you know, the the timer's running and you're you're making money.

So I've seen a lot of people who've gone off and founded companies, you know, they're kind of jealous of this of the consulting lifeset style, but you know, they got a higher upside potential upside, but a lot more risk.

But running a consulting company is you know, relatively low risk, you know, but there's not like a super, super upside.

We're not gonna get an investor come in and bring us like 100 million dollars.

I I don't know.

I don't see that happening.

It doesn't seem it doesn't feel like that's the exit plan for like six feet up.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I worked for this company called Quizlet that is now hopefully gonna go public soon, but was bootstrapped the entire time I was there and had been street up bootstrapped before.

So we were, and we were on 2nd Street, you know, a block from South Park.

So we were surrounded by the very well.

You know, Instagram was literally right over, all you know, the node people right over everything was right there.

And yet, but we had constraints.

And I feel like it was extremely frustrating at the time when everyone else is throwing money and offers around.

Um, but that discipline meant that you know Quizlet's still around.

Yeah.

And so kind of got to see it wasn't it never felt like fairy tale money because we knew exactly where the money was coming in from, and the the founder and CEO were really disciplined about that in a way that you know 22-year-olds given five million dollars weren't.

Because why would why would you be?

Like you you live in your means, we we try and contribute back in the community with our time in any way we can.

Now we're finally now we finally you know have grown.

We were contributing back monetarily to the Django Software Foundation.

We're now a a silver sponsor for the DSF, which I'm super excited and very proud of the fact that we can you know help and do that.

It just means we've grown, we've matured.

But yeah, we did we didn't have you know crazy parties, we didn't have the launch parties with like ice sculptures and you know fireworks and all those kinds of crazy things, which I did see for these companies.

But it's hard not to look at that as a human and be like, oh man, that looks so cool.

But you know what?

If you look at the other side of that though that coin that they're sitting on, like you may not be very happy with the situation they're probably actually putting themselves into.

Like it may it may not be all you know fireworks and ice sculptures.

Especially sitting in Hilbert.

You know, the younger one, all his friends were literally, you know, the founders of Stripe segment, you know.

Yeah.

And he was like, Let's take money, let's go for the moon, and the older one was like, I've been burned, you know, let's let's play it safe.

Yeah.

Because I think that's the that's the thing is like when you're there, as disciplined as you are, you know, everyone else is doing it.

It's hard not to get like we even hired a PR firm at Quizlet to try to get press because we're like, you know, we're growing like crazy, we're doing all these good things, and we had no tech coverage at all.

All the ed tech was all these other companies that raised a hundred million are now out of business.

Um, but it's because you know what is the story?

Tech press story is raising money, it's not organically growing your business and doubling every year.

Yep.

I mean, she's she's definitely like the one who keeps me a little more grounded uh when it comes to those things.

I'm I'm more the visionary who wants to like go off and create crazy things and not that she like stops me from doing crazy things, like but as a combination, as a team, we've done way more together than we could have done alone.

Yeah, that's the way you do it.

Or when did Django start to take over the work that you do professionally?

Uh, we had our first you know kind of lead on uh some Django projects.

It was a small thing.

It was actually a company I worked with out in California had found me because I'd put Django like on my LinkedIn profile or something like that.

And so they they phoned up and said, Hey, we need help with a thing we launched.

It's built in Django.

I'm like, this will be fun.

So we we started doing more and more Django work.

Uh got went to my first Django conference, uh, which was the Django Con Europe uh in 2017 in Florence, Italy.

So I got to meet more of the Django personalities.

Uh I think actually that's where I met Carlton.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that was that was.

Right.

That was my first Django Con.

So you know, I'd been using Django these years and never been to a conference.

And then I went to Florence and absolutely blown away.

And then it was again, it was it was an amplification.

So I don't I I sometimes I dream and wonder what other tech communities are like.

I because I've never been to like a PHP commun, you know, conference or a Ruby conference or anything like that.

And I I just find it hard to believe that they could be, they could, you know, for me, I feel like the Python community is just like, I don't know, heads and shoulders above all the rest.

There's just such amazing folks who are in our community that are just giving of their time and their talent and like they've d developed these amazing like frameworks that we all just take you know use.

And I I I thank them, you know, whenever whenever I can for the the kind of effort they put into these things.

But yeah, Django is one of those things where we'd been a plone company for you know decades at that point in time, and I you know really like that framework for building content management systems, but I feel like the content management market has shrunk.

People don't want a full-blown, you know, CMS tool they want to build web applications, they've got specific needs, specific, you know, kinds of apps they want to build, and Django feels way nicer, way easier to spin people up onto to get them to be productive.

So we started doing more and more you know Django projects just because that they were things that weren't a good fit for Plone.

Now we still do Plone.

Um I still love it as a CMS.

It's the best one you could possibly install and use.

Uh no offense to the Django-based CMSs, but they're they don't have the full features out of the box that like say Plone does because they've really focused on that as their market.

But Plone's not the place to build you know kind of one-off weird, you know, applications that don't fit a CMS you know box.

Um I think for Because

Like for the case.

Okay, there's

a lot of things.

I found you know for a app that needs to have some content management in it, Wagtail's awesome.

Like uh, you know, it's a great way to add in user edit user editability to content inside of a Django application.

Uh Plone is full-blown, you know, workflows, fine-grained security.

It leverages all those things I talked about that I love with ZOA when I first came into like the ZOP community.

It transfers those really well into uh a very highly secure content management tool for building intranets and extranets and content collaboration tool sites and being able to build public-facing websites or research tools or content repositories.

And I see them actually working together, either using Wagtails as a CMS for a Django app, uh the newest version is a Plone support uh fully headless operation.

So you can actually run it side by side in its own Docker container, uh just using you know React or whatever interface you want on the front of it.

And it's got you know just full APIs into the content.

So you have an editor UI on the back end, but you could be managing content for some some front forward-facing application using Plone if you want it.

But I have not tried the latest versions of Wagtail.

I would do a disservice to any kind of review if I if I was to try and do a full-blown comparison.

I I'm thinking of it in part because um uh so so we just so NASA just put uh you know rover on Mars and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, their whole site using all that is built with Wagtail.

They sent something to to me and um Jeff Triplett.

We do the Django news newsletter.

Um so we should have them come and talk about it because a lot of those things, headless and all the rest, Wagtail um has grown a lot.

So yeah, maybe that would be see if we can get Tom on to compare versus Plone in in a you know.

I'm happy to participate since I've definitely got a lot of experience there.

Um anyways, well, so you touched upon it, but I was gonna ask uh, you know, so the the types of common projects people would bring you in on Django, right?

Because it was probably more we have an existing project that has issues versus uh Greenfield.

Uh was that correct to say?

Um, we first started it was people coming to us because they had a existing Django project, you know, they started off with some solo developer who maybe wasn't doing all the best practices or didn't know how to scale it to you know full-blown web, you know, web scale uh launch of their application.

You know, a lot of building of community type applications, you know, search and commenting and you know, activity streams and things like that, where those can be tricky if you don't know how to use caching and you know Reddit or the all the kind of like real tricks, which is nice because those are common between web frameworks, like you know, Varnish and things like that.

We would use those obviously to to speed up and deploy you know faster versions of Plone applications.

We can use a lot of that same knowledge you know when we came into the Django world and then we picked up more on you know how to tune for databases and these kinds of things.

That was a big change there.

You know, Plone and Zope are using an object-oriented database, you know, not not exactly a NoSQL, but it was kind of the granddaddy of uh what NoSQL databases are.

So I wasn't seriously a heavy SQL relational database user.

Uh I enjoyed my kind of uh ignorance is bliss of persistence.

And when I saved an object,

Yeah.

But luckily, Django's ORM is nice and simple.

And I I do love like SQL Alchemy as well.

So I've become a big fan of you know the ORM and you know it does a lot of that heavy lifting for me, so I still don't have to learn all the SQL junk um to to be productive with a tool like Django.

But it is a different mindset where you're creating models and that kind of relate to tables versus when I would create models before uh or create content types inside of Zopen Plone, you know, they're just Python objects, they looked like Python objects, they didn't have kind of this ORM-y, you know, syntactic sugar sitting on top of them that tied them into database tables.

It's it's

Like you don't you there's certain decisions and choices you have to make that you gotta be aware of like how that works on the backside with the database still.

I mean, and it's nice there's tools out there like Sentry and things like that that can help you trace and see where you've made an oopsie, you know, the Django debug toolbar.

That was that was scary.

Select related uh, one query, better.

Because you're talking about tweaking uh servers, so you're not using a platform as a service generally for your hosting needs.

No, not generally.

Uh that was a great day.

Oh wow.

Um we are full full fully in the cloud.

We have no more like switches and routers and servers and blinky lights.

I mean, I'm a big fan of like blinky lights, but I'm just kind of over managing servers anymore.

So yeah, we went all in on Amazon, oh I mean, numerous years back, and but it'd been a slow migration, finally getting everybody off of our physical hardware and a data center fully up into the cloud.

And it's been so much nicer since then, uh just from like a peace of mind and a standpoint.

I I also run the AWS user community here in Indianapolis called Indie AWS, and um I'm a AWS community hero.

So Amazon names they've got about 200 people globally that are heroes, and it's like it's a really cool program.

You know, they they give you cool stuff, and you you basically just are kind of a promoter for you know all the cool stuff that goes on in Amazon, but I don't have to work for them.

Yeah, right.

Carlton, that's what you need to be, because Carlton's got uh button.dev, which is simpler AWS hosting.

I mean things like cool

tools like that.

I I don't uh you know I couldn't possibly navigate all of those when I'm just trying to get up and running.

It's like look, here's a few, here's the few that you're gonna use for a default stack.

And then when you outgrow that, you've the you just step out to the console and it's there for you.

No, and that's been a goal for me as well, is like how can we s automate and simplify these deployments?

Because there's definitely way more moving pieces.

Back in the day when it was just like, here's your better mail server at whatever hosting company you're at, you ran everything on one box, the database, the web server, the Django app, the Plone app, whatever you were running, it's all in one spot.

But it means that when it failed, like life was miserable after that because a lot of times you couldn't rebuild the same exact server again because you didn't use like configuration management or best practices.

They were all unique snowflakes.

I think that the complexity overhead we've added in with all these kind of cloud native components is worth uh you know, the squeeze is worth the juice uh in this case because you're not I'm not messing it up twice, and it's also a lot more resilient.

And Amazon's thought about all these things on the backside, and they're doing all the database upgrades for me, and I don't have to think about load balancers.

You know, I just write some either cloud formation or we use Terraform, you know, for describing our infrastructure, and and I just say apply, and and you know, it figures out the things that need to happen to make sure that my infrastructure is sitting there ready to you know host my application.

And containers is taking that to the next level for us as well.

Like everything for us is going containers.

I was kind of another long kind of holdout on Docker and containers, but I feel like it's gotten mature enough that it's it made the developer onboarding process a lot simpler and it's made the deployment story uh just more straightforward.

Like you build something in a CI server, you put that into a repository, you push a button and you can now release or roll back.

Uh just that's that's that's so worth it, not having to now do apt you know install Nginx and apt install haproxy and figure out like all the little bits and then wiring them up myself.

Like the Terraform does most of that wiring for me, Docker does all the figuring out well of building the image so that I can deploy it to any cloud.

Like if you manually configured your server, yeah, you can't rebuild it.

And it's like for me, it's the test is can't okay, you've deployed it once, but could you tear it down and redeploy it?

And if you could tear it down and redeploy it, then you're okay.

Back in the day, I mean I used to be to the point like when we did upgrades of servers, I was building kernels you know on the box, like you know, make make install build world.

I'm more on a Linux camp now, but like back in the day we were 100% FreeBSD.

I would do build world, install world to keep our boxes up to date.

You know, I'd had source sitting in user local source that I was like compiling and you know installing from hand.

Like it's that that that that that was insane.

Like I I look back at those days.

I mean, sure, it felt like fun, I guess.

I don't know, you felt like a hacker, you know, compiling and watching all the stuff scroll off the screen, but that was not productive use of my time.

They're just never gonna know.

I guess now they have to deal with JavaScript front ends, so it evens out.

Hey, my day.

My day.

Coal off the roll.

Welcome to the club world.

I know.

I've got a I I've checked all the other boxes, now it's official.

Um, anyways, um, loud swarm, tell us about this project that came out of the pandemic.

Yeah.

So this was the this is the um conference video thing.

It's amazing because you they used it for DjangoCon Europe last year.

Um we'd have different topics like PyData or a web conference or you know, just uh automation.

And running up to 2019, uh, we kind of decided we would pool all of our resources in running these bigger events into actually running a real like multi-day conference, but make it virtual.

Um we we founded the Python Web Conference in 2019 and it was virtual on purpose.

I feel like we were you know leading the pack there before the pandemic even started.

Uh, but we were it was virtual by design.

And that design was because we're in Indiana and we were really focused on the web for us, like web development and web tools.

And I felt like PyCon had kind of strayed from that.

I mean, back in the days of 2004 PyCon, there was a ZOA track.

The keynotes were, you know, ZOA and web frameworks.

Uh that was the killer app for Python back in 2004, but the world has changed and moved on, and Python has been adopted for all kinds of awesome types of projects around data and automation, and you name it, then they're using Python for it.

And I feel like PyCon reflects that, but I still have a passion for Python on the web, and I don't feel like it's boring.

I feel like you know there needs to be more outlets for people to come and gather around topics that are specific to web and deployment and cloud.

So that's that was the kind of driving force behind the Python web conference.

And then so 2020 hits.

We moved our first cloud conference to Zoom, you know, in March of last year.

And the experience was okay when you had basically three Zoom webinars that people had to kind of know the URLs to to get in to watch the sessions, and there was a Slack channel, and then there was another website.

So it was like all these tools were all kind of scattered about, and I didn't feel like people were getting the engagement and like the integrated experience that you come to really love when you go to an in-person conference.

I mean, obviously, we can't reproduce an in-person conference, but we can leverage the technology that is available to can use those same experiences as a guide for how do we either enhance some of them or try and make some of them as good as we can make them for an online experience.

And so that was the thought process that went into why Loud Swarm became a platform we built to do our next conference.

So we started in April.

The first conference was in March that we did on Zoom.

April, we laid down a whiteboard ideas of what the project would be, and we launched it June 17th or June 15th when we did the Python Web Conference 2020.

Uh and it's full-blown Django.

Uh, we have video CDNs and we integrate with existing services.

So our day, my idea was to you know not rebuild some of these wheels.

Let's like leverage existing tools.

So QA kind of integrated with Slido so you could have polls that were interactive.

We had uh in direct integrations or integrations with Slack, so real time as you would message in Slack on the back channels, uh, whatever session you're watching, there's a feed of that tracks channel uh directly in the page, so you can actually kind of watch kind of back you know, back channel topics, you know, talk going on, which really adds to the experience.

Like while you're watching something live, you can ask questions live, you can actually interact with the speaker, even though the speaker's kind of in a room by themselves technically, giving the talk, they feel that there are people there and there's a moderator there helping to like you know say the ask the questions.

And then afterwards, we wanted folks to still have that face-to-face like podium experience.

Like when you after someone gives a talk at a conference, it's really common for folks to kind of go gather around the speaker at the podium, you know, much to the you know chagrin of the the track runner who's like, you guys need to get out of here.

Uh, we all want to talk to the speaker because they they've all got questions they want and they didn't feel comfortable maybe asking them at the microphone, but they wanted to ask them face-to-face.

And so we added in a face-to-face feature, which basically launches, you know, like a Jitsi meet room or a Zoom room where folks can actually like do a web meeting and and chat face-to-face with the speaker.

And those have been super popular.

I mean, you have every talk, you know, from a handful of people who'd come in to 20 to 30 or more folks coming into those rooms, especially when it's like keynote speakers and it's amazing talks, and you just like you want how you want to thank the speaker personally.

That's not a question, but you still want to like say thank you.

So you can you can say that face to face with them.

And so we made it just super easy for folks to be able to jump from session to session.

If you are in a session, that kind of law of two feet at a conference.

If you don't like something, you've got your own two feet, you can stand up and walk out of the room.

Uh, we really wanted to enhance that uh so that it's easy to move from one topic, one one session to another session and add it in like a D VR feature so you could actually go back in time and start at the beginning of the talk.

So you didn't feel like you missed anything, which I again felt like was a really great feature for leveraging something we can do online that you can't do in person.

Another thing we can

It's like the Irish goodbye but for which I'm I'm a fan of the Irish goodbye.

Python WebConf is next week, right?

So people can still sign up for that and uh we have a link in the show notes.

I'm I'm all humbled and honored that these people have chosen to uh participate and and spend their time uh with us as part of the Python web conference uh we do have four tracks this year we added an additional track um we have app dev we've got a culture track we've got a PyData track so that's actually official PyData sanctioned um you know mini event going on inside of the web conference and then we have a cloud track for folks who are interested in more cloud topics and you know cloud native deployment type things uh it's it's gonna be fun uh the last two years have been great

uh yeah last year was our obviously the first time we even used loud swarm to produce any kind of an event and so we've added in new features and you know all kinds of new cool stuff that is available for attendees and I feel like the the community really stands up for some of these kinds of events.

When when we do a Python conference DjangoCon Europe was a perfect example of having an awesome community coming together for a virtual event makes all the difference.

You've got people who know each other they engage there's just tons of conversations to start going there's gonna be great socials and we're gonna do a game night and we're gonna have you know all the speakers engage they're not just like there for their talk and gone most of the speakers are all around they're all in the Slack they all want to chit chat and so you should everyone should take advantage of that ability to talk to these folks because they they want to talk to you.

like that folks who couldn't travel to a conference could now engage you know with those people

I think it was the next year that I went to Florence but the um if there could be some sort of feedback from the people watching at home that would be kind of cool some some way of joining into

questions that go up onto the board you know that where the people in the room and the people who are virtual ask questions at kind of an even playing field.

It's all done yeah in one medium so that they don't feel like they're getting gypped out of you know asking their question.

There's one thing I saw which was um called uh I think it was called gather.town where there's like this kind of cartoon hallway and you could walk between the groups and the sound would come in as you approached the

I I found that with the Rambly dot.

I don't know if you've seen the Rambly app similar to Gather but it's more like you know it's an 8-bit adventure game it looks like you're in the 90s you know playing your your Nintendo which is perfect you know it's it's perfect for me and and there's there's what's kind of cool about that one this is Rambly they have like secret cheat codes if you know how to type some stuff into the URL just right you can get alternate maps and new worlds and all kinds of crazy stuff.

None of it's published you know it felt like I was getting my you know Nintendo you know monthly magazine and looking for the cheat codes again.

I think still to this day like every company would put in the the meta you know if you're looking at this you know we're hiring kind of things and sort of the the sort of the equivalent um so great yeah well that's that's an amazing you know equalizer.

I think that's I don't know I can't speak for Carlton for me one of the reasons of doing this podcast is to try to replicate a conference environment and make it accessible to anyone anywhere anytime um because they are fantastic but you know they're expensive and people have time commitments.

So like a professional ticket's $199 and a student ticket's 99 for every professional ticket that's sold or for I can't remember what the formula is but there's basically for some number of professional tickets that are sold there'll be a number of grant tickets available.

So if you are interested in attending but are afraid you couldn't pay don't you know don't fret please come and check it out and apply for one of the grants um because we're trying to get back into the community and make sure that you know everyone who wants to be there can be there.

today's the ninth

that this all exists and and we can participate.

Thank you.

Uh there's there've been some fun conversations on Twitter recently.

Carlton you you were very good about not no there it is there it is.

Not the sig well no but the not so not the post sig that I edit out the pre sigh when he has to say something important.

I guess we didn't have anything important today so so um thank you for joining us Calvin um really appreciate taking the time my pleasure all right we'll see everyone next time bye bye bye bye