Transcript: Resources & Mentorship
Hi, and welcome to another episode of Django Chat, a weekly podcast on the Django web framework.
I'm Carlton Gibson, joined as ever by Will Vincent. How are you, Will?
I'm great. How are you, Carlton?
I'm marvelous. Today, we were just going to talk about some resources that are available in the
Django world, the Django ecosystem, because quite probably you've heard of them, but maybe there's
one or two that you haven't so let's start what's your favorite resource will well my favorite
resource is you actually that's why i do this podcast i can pick your brain on django things
but assuming that's not available to everyone i would say is we've got the django django chat
podcast that's your number one django resource folks yeah and you can email us questions uh
django chat on twitter at chat django or django chat podcast at gmail.com hit us up um i would
say these days uh besides personal relationships i've developed it would be the django forum so
we'll link to that so it's forum.djangoproject.com this was set up only a couple months ago the
quality is fantastic i mean it's all the heavy hitters of django so if you have a question about
django and you don't see an answer or it's maybe more like a subjective question that doesn't fit
into stack overflow so for example i posted one on top third-party packages amazing discussion on
there, people should use this resource. There are experts on there waiting to help. And I think it
fills the void that Stack Overflow is good for tiny, discrete questions, but these larger ones
like architecture or logic, the community wants to have these discussions and this is set up for it.
So I would say right now, the forum is the number one place and it has use, but it's not being used
as much as it should. I'll throw in a number two and then I'll let you get some in. My number two
would be the conference videos for DjangoCon, PyCon. I've got a full list on the AwesomeDjango
repo, but these videos are gold. They are amazing instructions from the top people trying to make
it presentable. There's, what, 40 every year at each conference. There's going to be DjangoCon
Africa this year. Go on YouTube, do DjangoCon, and search for whatever is top of mind, and you'll
find amazing content so those are my top two what about you carlton well i'm gonna comment on your
top two before i so that's allowed it's allowed yeah well like the forum yeah totally um so there's
for years they've been the django users group uh the google groups yes so there's django users and
django that'd be number three um and that's they're still great there's lots of people subscribe to
those but they you know over the years they've kind of got a bit stale and i don't know that
google groups is the best ui or the best oh it's not i mean i i get those updates it's i mean there
are still people helping on there but it's i think just yeah the format is not um not what you would
do from scratch these days yeah and so the forum is was launched as an attempt to try and reboot
that and you know it is lively and there are you know you can get direct answers from andrew godwin
himself and you know what more can you yeah no exactly exactly people like that so yeah and then
that would be the other one i mean but it's yeah and that's much more active that is very i mean i
get an update i don't know 20 questions back and forth a day or something yeah maybe the i i don't
think the format is as good as a discourse or discord board would be so well yeah i mean it
allows the conversations are better and you get live updates and i don't know anyway so try the
forum.jangleproject.com and then yes absolutely plus one plus 100 on the conference videos you
You know, if you want to know how, I don't know, Django works with PostgreSQL indexes
or anything, just, there's a video on it and you can sit back, watch the video, you put
it on double speed, you can, you know, and you look at them and they're on YouTube and
this video on this absolutely awesome video on PostgreSQL indexes has got 428 views and
you're like, what?
It should have 4,000 and you know.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Seriously.
Well, we'll keep beating the horn on that.
people should check these out uh what else but then the other thing that i use a lot is um my
rss reader so i subscribe to blogs but how do you find out about these blogs well there's a great
aggregator so if you go to the django project website and you go to the community section
there's a uh a community aggregator feed which is like you can submit your blog to be included
your rss feed to be included in that and so it kind of you know it's it's got all number of blogs
on it and all of a sudden you'll be oh that's an interesting blog post ah who's this person ah
and that's so that's that's one thing that i've over the years have found awesome blog posts about
do you what what um rss reader do you use these days well i use one i'm on mac so or i am for my
rss reading and i use one called news explorer which is good because it syncs to uses icloud
to sync to um the iphone or whatever but years before that i used a thing called net news wire
and that's just recently been updated and re-released as an open source and free
app and i'm going to download that and give that another go because and they're going to have a
nice ios version of that as well um and you know people tell me that rss is dead but apparently i
still use it so i the people i respect still use it i mean there's also i'll plug a resource so
there's a new django newsletter that i'm co-running called so django slash news where we it's a weekly
newsletter we're curating all this so we're picking the top news projects security releases
so that's maybe a easier entryway if you don't want to get you know as much stuff uh we'll link
to that that's one option because there is there isn't one there isn't one that's not directly
related to um django itself and when you know django itself doesn't really and doesn't really
pick favorites and it shouldn't um so this is a more curated take and you do you're doing that
with jeff triplett from revs yes we had on the show um he's kind of a big deal uh he knows his
stuff um so i mean he's probably doing more more on it than i am to be honest so but we're doing
that uh and it's it's a lot of fun and um so check that out there's also of course twitter
so there's a django project twitter feed um that's not used all that often um but you should
definitely subscribe i mean what else there's i mean there's a whole i've got a whole a list of
external resources on my awesome django repo there's a bunch of sites that i you know personally
think are good um but probably the community blog post that you mentioned is that's probably like
the top you know external focus i place for people i would say right and then the other issues um
like so django packages which has been around forever is still a useful resource for finding
third-party packages right and so you you want something i know that handles rich text widgets
in the admin well you know go and type that into django packages you'll find the packages that
exist and you the options that are there and you can kind of see how many github stars they've got
and when they were last updated and those kind of interesting stats which help you choose your
packages so that's useful and there's another one which is kind of fallen by the wayside but it's
still up and still running and still really good it's called django snippets and it's got this
it's like a it's like gist or whatever but it's like code snippets but they're all django related
and so actually an hour spent browsing that you're like oh that's clever oh that's clever yeah that's
clever i agree i think that the the layout the ui is is not updated but yeah the content maybe is
still pretty solid right so here but here's the issue we have right so the django project has what
it has uh the django project um to maintain the django django django software it has the django
project website it has the docs that need maintaining and thing it's got django packages
It's got Django snippets. It's got, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80,000 users in just in, you know, your country alone, and yet very few contributors.
and do you know what django snippets could be a much better site if we had you know more people
coming along say hey i i'm happy to give a little bit of time i'm happy to give a little bit of time
i'm happy to give a little time uh it's it's a question of surface area and then human power to
maintain these things yeah well and i know you've done a bunch of work at at sprints um recently
trying to to improve the docs with others for contributions that's actually something i want
to work on this year it is still um it could be easier to contribute but it is not super hard
and that's definitely the goal is to you know instead of sitting there saying like what can
Django do for me think what can I do for Django right like if you have a nice thing you've figured
out add it if you have a thought like write a blog post um yeah I think especially if you're
early in your career those are really interesting blog posts to read I mean the best questions I
get are from total beginners who ask me you know sometimes you know out of left field questions
that um can often be really deep and make me rethink um things that i take for granted so
yeah um right right right right what you're doing and yeah and programming is lonely right so
you sit there and you if even if you're in an office in a team it's still like kind of quite
an isolating experience and you might be the back-end person the front-end person where you
can talk to them at lunchtime but you don't really you can't really communicate about the ins and
outs of the orm with them whereas if you write a blog post about your difficulty orm and you post
out on twitter all of a sudden you'll get some responses and you'll have a conversation you'll
find a couple of people who are into django that you can follow and they'll follow you back and
then all of a sudden it's like ah i'm part of the community yeah and it's a great way to get hired
too because what's the first thing someone's going to do is they're going to google you and if you're
applying for a django job and you've written some posts about django again it doesn't matter what
level you're at just the fact that you're writing about it they're having these conversations and
you will you know it's not a big community of Django experts out there and they are extremely
helpful they will they will help you right you know they'll probably see it one way or another
and jump in you know I had that with um when I was starting out so um so make the effort to reach out
to try to contribute to Django and then you will you know it's a better way to interact with the
community rather than just consuming yeah and if you've got if you've got you know a few blog posts
And then a few pull requests you can point to, you know, I fixed something in the docs.
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't primary research.
I mean, what's the best way to, you know, if you can say I've already contributed to Django, I mean, that's, which entails, you know, having a certain technical knowledge and being able to work with others.
I mean, that should jump you top to the queue for any job, Django or something else related, right?
I mean, I just saw a prominent Django person is the head of engineering at a new startup that's using Ruby on Rails.
and you know it doesn't really matter because he knows how to code he's really involved with jango
i'm sure he he probably knows rails he can certainly pick it up but the skills that you
learn being involved in a community and a framework directly apply across so yes
more and more i think more and more like people don't um once upon a time it was uh oh i see
who's he and it was always he he is smart and gets things done and that was the hiring criteria
right and these days it's not like that it's much more about are you able to work in the team are
you able to communicate are you able to you know do all these what we historically have thought of
as softer skills and blog blog posting contributing you know partaking in the community actually
demonstrates that to an employer or a prospective employer we've forgotten one thing though will
like we've mentioned the forum we've mentioned the conference videos we've we didn't mention
the conferences like oh yeah you've got to go to the conferences right what's the best resource in
the jang community it's jango con jang on europe jang on america if you can get there it's like go
three days of just amazing amazing talks amazing community a couple of days of sprints where you
can get involved you can you know learn how the open source project works that's a real resource
Yes, that's how we met. Come meet us. We'll both be at DjangoCon Europe. We'll both be at
django con us there's a django con africa this year i'm not gonna be able to make it but i hope
definitely to make a future one and yeah pycon there's a again there's a list on awesome awesome
django repo but that yeah that that's the best way because again it is it is sort of isolating
right like we all even the most introverted person it's nice to have a community and again it's it's
so welcoming so um especially these in-person things or actually there's probably there might
be a Django meetup in your area so I'm in Boston there's a regular monthly meetup I go there meet
people you know it's on Thursday night so I do think like do I really want to go out on Thursday
night but every time I do I'm glad I did you know so make the effort I'll apply that advice to
myself too anything else is that it that's the no that's the top ones they're the top ones yeah
like um you know the the packages are sort of an amazing resource but the django package is to help
find them the blog posts yeah i know yeah those yeah and i think i said reiterate what we've said
be part of the community right don't just like find a way to to give back even if it's just
sharing your experience as a beginner like for and i'll give it like an example so for me like
i'm i love getting emails from people i get a lot of emails sometimes people say
will you mentor me and i want to put a spin on that of will you mentor me or when you ask someone
for advice they will just do it out of goodness for a little bit but like a mentorship or all
these things it needs to go both ways right there needs to be something that both sides are getting
so if you are contributing to django and helping and being engaged it makes it i don't know more
i don't maybe i don't want to include this part i'm trying to say like be like don't just be a
taker but maybe no no but that makes it i mean i've one of my goals for 2020 is to think about
something around the mentoring realm but i don't want to just mentor someone directly because
every time i've been in that situation it's like it's like what do you want you just want me to
teach you no i don't want to teach you like there's lots of things but i'm happy to talk to
you and say look there's the there's the guide over there but you have to go and read the guide
yourself like i can't read it for i'm not gonna read you want an engaged and engaged student and
i think it's also the case that again as with all these experts on the jenga forum and all these
other places you know what i usually say is if someone asks me i say well ask me the question
if i can answer it quickly um and it informs my understanding as a teacher i will answer it and
if i can't i won't but it's it's sort of like uh you know if if people ask like an hourly rate or
this and that you probably can't pay me what my time is actually worth if it's just me giving it
to you even though i enjoy doing that so like tee it up in a way that i can use that to inform my
teaching we can talk about in the podcast you know just be part of the community and then it's a
totally different ball game rather than just i don't know a more direct one-to-one where you
know software developers time is valuable so so try to view it i guess i'm just trying to say
understand it from the perspective of carlton and me and others if we want to help but try not to
make it just an ask try to be involved in the community one way or another um it'll be better
for you and it's better for us and it's more rewarding all around yeah i mean i you know give
give out time left right and center just in passing but i well anyway yeah it's the commitment
we're commitment phobic yeah it's as i say it's all my goals for 2020 to to do something around
this area but i think it's it's got to be more in terms of resources and pointing people to them
rather than directly guiding folks if that makes sense i don't know yeah and we've i mentioned this
on twitter but if you are listening and you have a question send us a voice message to jango chat
podcast at gmail.com and we'd love to include some of those in the show and do it in the context of
you know answer it once so lots of people can hear rather than repeating the same thing over
and over again so okay that's resources uh let us know on twitter elsewhere if we've missed some
but those are the ones
that come to mind
for us anyways
join us next time
thank you
okay bye