Çağıl is a Lead Backend Engineer at Kraken Tech, Django Software Foundation Vice President, and Django London Meetup co-organizer. We discuss her background studying computer science in Turkey, organizing DjangoGirls and Python events in Istanbul, and her current work today.
Carlton Gibson 0:06
Hi. Welcome to another episode of Django chat podcast on the Django web framework. I'm Carlton Gibson joining us. Everybody will Vincent, hello, Will.
Will Vincent 0:13
Hi, Carlton.
Carlton Gibson 0:14
Hello, Will. And today we've got with us. Charles ushahim Sonmez, who's lead developer at Kraken, with on with octopus, and member DSF, board member, and many more things beside. Welcome to the show. Char, how are you?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 0:30
I'm good. Carlton, how are you? I'm
Carlton Gibson 0:33
marvelous, marvelous. Excited to talk with you. We I've just given you a whole load of things that you are. But tell us for the audience, who are you? How do you? How did you find Django? What's your what's your origin story? We always I'll start with that. So let's go there. Yeah, you
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 0:48
only start with that question, right?
Carlton Gibson 0:50
Yeah.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 0:51
Well, I'm chill. I'm a software developer of over 20 years almost now I'm a computer science degree, also masters and PhD. So nothing surprising. There
Carlton Gibson 1:14
no that is surprising. Most people are like I self taught myself doing PHP and MySQL back in the so actual, no, just got the PhD in computer science. That's
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:29
okay, maybe PhD and Django doesn't go as well as PHP and Django. Very good, very good, very good. But, yeah, that's the thing. I didn't know PHP. Good enough. So I thought maybe I
Carlton Gibson 1:47
no. Go on, carry on. I've totally not described what. Wait. Let me
Will Vincent 1:53
ask. Let me ask. It's because it's a big question. When we just say, like, what's your origin story? Start talking. Let me be more specific. So did you work with computers before you went to university? Or is that something you discovered there?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 2:06
I did have a computer since when I'm 10 years old and when I was going into uni, my claim was I didn't know everything about computers, so I don't need to study. I didn't even know it was called Computer Science back then, but by like, by chance, I got into the computer science department in big university, and I think that was the best thing happened to me. I love programming. I love Django. I think it was around third or fourth grade of uni when I first got exposed to Django. It was the web programming course. But when I first built my app, I remember it very well. I was a faculty member, and, like, I've been asked to build this web page for students to submit their assignments. I don't know why, because we were using Moodle, a good CRM for, like, everything Course Management. Like, why we couldn't use it. I really don't remember. And I think, like, 2007 2008 i i worked again, like, not full time. I worked at Marco funny, built their authentication system. It was a Django powered app. It then turned out a really, really big company, like, I don't know, 2030, 1000s of employees. It was a big, big hit. It was a Turkish e commerce company. So yeah, since 2008 I would say I am using Django. What is, what
Carlton Gibson 4:06
was it that appealed at the beginning? What's your sort of what? What was the bit that you remember building? You think, oh, yeah, I like this. Okay. I
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 4:16
mean, coming from a computer science background, like you don't get to build software until, like, very, very, very late in in the process, like and like that. I was super lucky. I, like we, they started teaching us Python on the first day of uni. Okay,
Carlton Gibson 4:41
that's quite progressive back then, because back then it was all C and Java and
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 4:45
yeah. I mean, like, really want to mention some of those people who then I work like, that's, that's, that's the good thing, if you, if you build a good curriculum, if you build a good. Software. Then, like, You, you, you get the other people, like, like, good people, people, interested people, like, like minded around you. So, yeah, then, like, then I stayed in faculty as a faculty member. So I was saying, you said
Will Vincent 5:22
talking about just actually building things with, as with software, as opposed to abstract studying. Yeah.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 5:30
So they taught us Python. They thought like they taught us computer science using Python, Java, Lisp, scheme, but like, end of third year or something like, what can I build with all that knowledge? Like, it was almost impossible to build, like, desktop applications. And then suddenly I met with Django, like, with just like, 1020 I don't know, maximum, 1550 lines of code, bam, you have a website working with, like, a database connection and everything fascinating. I like, that's it. This is my thing.
Carlton Gibson 6:12
Okay, so the reason I wanted to ask, I want to ask all this time later, do you think Django still got that?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 6:21
I think Django still got that. I might like. My position in life has changed.
Carlton Gibson 6:30
I have, yeah, I guess you're not building apps in 50 lines with octopus. Less
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 6:34
interest in prototyping. I have less time for teaching. But I think, I think Django still has it, maybe not as like this incredible uh framework that works super easy, out of box for it, for even a beginner with no previous web development web application experience, but with all the ecosystem, community, knowledge, inspiration, I think it is actually more than what it used to be. Can
Will Vincent 7:13
I ask when? So you said you started when you were about 10 with computers. What? What were you building at that age? Right? Because I have, like, I have an 11 year old daughter, and I can't even think of anything she would want to build on a computer now, let alone back then. But there must have been something that, like, like, we often hear with guests that, you know, maybe it was building video games, or they had a parent to expose them to it. It must been something, right, that hooked you in at that age,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 7:41
well, sorry, I'm going to disappoint you. So when I was 10 years old, it was only me who had a like desktop around my friends at their home. I was building any any application. I was just like you like using it for, okay, well, that's
Will Vincent 8:04
normal. That's normal,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 8:05
like, for navigating in the web, for chat, for like, Solitaire, sure, playing games. What is funny is, as a teenager, I didn't know that. Using desktop is different than okay programming is about So, like, back then, I was super naive and like thinking so being able to solve uh, problems with windows like you probably remember, like, sometimes even connecting internet was a challenge.
Will Vincent 8:45
Yeah, I remember when dial up came, that was a huge thing, and then the sound, and then it was slow. Installing
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 8:52
application, like I said, what I taught computers and programming was was limited to using Windows in an advanced level then, and super naively, I thought like, Okay, that's it. I don't need to know anything more about computers or programming. That's it. But maybe it's maybe it's still the same, right? Maybe there are people who thinks like programming is about Tiktok, like content or Minecraft
Will Vincent 9:25
or something, yeah.
Carlton Gibson 9:27
But there were as well. There are courses that, you know, I remember a few years ago at local libraries. Of course, it's like computer driving license thing, and it was like how to use like Word and how to use Excel and how to use PowerPoint and how to use these apps. And, yeah, okay, well, that stuff's important, but they didn't even touch on any of the other stuff. And it's like, but this, that stuff's important, but surely you could mention, you know, I don't know, one of these development environments, Python being the one I would, you know, if I was running. That cause I would throw it in. But there are plenty of others.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 10:03
Actually, there is something I always remember that, no, I think it's actually super related to Django. When I first started my bachelor's degree, Chris Stephenson, our head of engineering at Cambridge alumni, I think again, it was first febrix, he told us, like, computer science, like, computers can use you, or you can use computers. Yeah, nice and like, sometimes I feel like, over the years, when I use Django, I feel like, like I am using the framework and some of those other, like, I don't want to give a name, because I'm not super addressing any other framework, but sometimes I play with some other, maybe easy to say, some, let's say Microsoft program. I feel like they are using. Like, I don't know if you, if you know what I mean.
Carlton Gibson 11:04
Well, the.net framework is very rigid, right? It's like, you've got to do it this way, and it's part of the class based thing about but
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 11:12
I don't know that's the thing you need. You need to decide, like, if you're like, your framework, your mindset, will lead you to way either you will use the tools for yourself or tools will use you, so you need to pick carefully. And I think Jen, Jen, like Django and all the Python ecosystem, we are super lucky about that.
Carlton Gibson 11:38
Yeah, this, there's one of the things that initially appealed to me about Python was the lack of ceremony about it. So I was programming at the time, Objective C, and there's a lot of boilerplate. And, you know, at the time, there was a lot of boilerplate. There's a lot of long method names, there's a lot of class construction. Before you get to write the code, you get want to write, and you fire up a Python script, and it's like, I just want to bang it out. And it's like, 20 lines, and it's like, Oh yeah, and it does exactly what I want. And, you know, it might be a throwaway script, but you'd never get that expressiveness from, you know, one of these other environments. Before
Will Vincent 12:12
we move on, I have to ask your research topics for your PhD. I see, like, deep neural networks and stuff. This is back, you know, a while ago,
Carlton Gibson 12:23
yeah, you know, what
Will Vincent 12:24
was that like, right? Because you were, you were a little bit early to that party, right? I mean, what do you what was, what was the appeal? What was it like studying that then and then, what do you make of, you know, the current chat, GPT world, which is sort of like, all that promise now, actually being actualized,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 12:40
I don't know, like, I'm still skeptical if it's been or not, but that's the thing. My PhD was between 2013 and 2018 Yeah, I did a lot of work about deep learning, deep neural networks, CNNs in particular. But I also have a slightly still burnout, to be honest, like I didn't, I didn't finish my PhD. It was one of the top, toughest decision I did after five years into my PhD and moving to London, I I decided to leave it so. But yeah, super hot topics lately, and as a researcher in the area, the story is a bit different from my perspective. I think, yeah, there are great success and improvements on the field, but it's not magic, like, it's not, it's not working 100% it's, it's not even working 80% of the time. But that's not how they mark back to the marketing to you, no, yeah, and that's, that's actually why I didn't want to like, after my PhD, I didn't want to work around data science or data engineering, or what they call it. At the moment, it's mostly about using the tools of like, big companies. So like and you need to, like, you need to go with how good their performance is. It's it's not like, from my perspective, I was building models and evaluating systems and like, as a researcher, that's what you need to do. You need to put something new on top of what's. On. But in the industry, it's more like using that output at the moment, and I see only little progress from little companies, other than the big ones, on improving on that. But with the data all those big companies have, it's actually now easier to produce better results, and that's what we are enjoying at the moment. And of course, they will keep getting more and more and more and more data and will improve the results. But still, I don't like, Yeah, let's say I'm a bit skeptical on the ARIA being, being too much into the topic, okay, but yeah, no, I quite like being on the web application development side of things rather than AI. Let's say maybe, yeah, super unpopular opinion. Tell
Carlton Gibson 15:59
us about your work. You work at Kraken octopus. Kraken, which is what like quite seem to employing everybody. It seems, one of the biggest users of Django. You know, high high, high traffic, really stressing it to its limit, etc. It's quite exciting. So that's about Kraken. What
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 16:16
I think most exciting thing about Kraken tech is, it is almost maybe after Instagram, I don't know, maybe bigger than Instagram, not biggest Django shop. And yeah, I've been working in Kraken tech as a lead back and engineer since for almost two years now. And we have approximately 900 engineers. That seems like quite a lot. Yeah, under Kraken tech, this includes data engineers, back and front end, Customer Success engineers, etc, I would say roughly we have five, 600 uh Python, uh, developers, wow, globally. So that is why looks like we are hiring, uh,
Carlton Gibson 17:17
everybody. It's,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 17:22
it's, it's, yeah, it's bigger because it's, it's not a quite big team. And we are, we have, like 10, like we have engineering. We are tech team 10 different countries now. So the headquarter of engineering is the UK, London, but then from Tokyo to Australia, ministries, Germany, Italy, France, Spain,
the United States.
Unknown Speaker 18:02
Us getting bigger and bigger there, and even Dubai now. So yeah, and I don't know I quite like it. I see Kraken tech as the feature Google in terms of like technology, like building technology. And I quite like our engineering culture. That's, that's why I joined the team. Of course, every company, every engineering team have, like a team stay to grade and and it's improved from other other points. But, yeah, it's, it's quite a good team I'm working like the wider team I'm working with. We have good conventions, good culture. I think that's why retention rates are super low and easy to convince my other fellow Django Python developers who are fantastic to join, to the team,
Carlton Gibson 19:06
I think, for big company, the trick is retention rate. What's the turnover? Do people stay or do they move on? And if people stay, then, you know, okay, that's a good sign. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 19:17
I think, yeah. Like we're doing some things right? Like we are working super closely with the community. We're using Django, Python, which is the best thing about crack and pay.
Will Vincent 19:34
Can I ask what are what version of Django Are you on? Or are you on a private fork already? Because that usually is what happens
Unknown Speaker 19:41
now. We are not on a sorry, let me actually check. I'm curious with us. We are, we are trying to upgrade and having issues with my pi, which we can we can talk in detail.
Will Vincent 20:01
Uh, well, because as as powerful as Django is, when a company reaches internet scale 4.1 good. That's quite that's that's very impressive for a large company to be
Carlton Gibson 20:14
latest patch version as well, we know.
Unknown Speaker 20:20
So, yeah, we are actually trying to upgrade Django. Currently we have, we have issue, major issues with Django stops and my PI right, there's actually a team of volunteers working towards the upgrade. So probably there are other smaller, big issues blocking the upgrade, but it's going well. I think we're down to 1000 issue 10, 5000 issues. But let me remind you, it's a, it's a, it's a big monolith. It's a it's a big repo. So, yeah, no, but
Carlton Gibson 21:09
those are cascade as well. You'll fix one thing, and all of a sudden, 1000 of those will clear up. No,
Unknown Speaker 21:15
no to start with. We had 1000s. Okay, yeah. So, yeah, maybe that team can throw a good talk on how they upgraded from Django four point something to Django five point something in later in the year. Okay,
Carlton Gibson 21:38
so do you, can you talk to the typing question. So, I mean, a lot of the the issues are around Django studs and typing compatibility issue, update or not, sure.
Unknown Speaker 21:47
Yeah. So that's not something I'm working day to day. But for example, like I remember from a chat, from the fix, one of the issues was Django Object Manager. You can, you can Django start isn't willing to type objects of Django models, object model of Django models, because with some not super recent feature, you can actually change the objects class of model, and for example, that like this, this, this One took us like weeks back in forward upgrade, because I remember exactly, but you need to then type it with a super unfavorable way, or like there were other there were two other alternatives. So coding practices, best practices, library restrictions, Django features, uh, today they reach out to me and ask if Django Can, can change, like, default assignment of, uh, reassignment of the objects. Are going,
Will Vincent 23:13
Yeah, you're on the board. You can do it right?
Unknown Speaker 23:18
I am on the board of directors. I'm not on the steering Council? Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, that was a super valid question, and the correct place to talk about this is the forum that is currently, forums used over the male groups. So I did the redirection, I think, like, that's half of the half of my jobs thing in the board, like connecting people with the correct resources or correct ways, and like making sure, like, we have a sustainable way of doing this as Like, not everybody has access to a board member,
Carlton Gibson 24:02
sure, but as well, I think that there's, there's like, with you, with you there, there is a, you know, not just you, there, members of the contributor community who are working at Kraken or in contact there. It'd be massively interesting, I think, to get opt with Krakens experience about typing in Django, and what, you know, what we can learn? What are the difficulties? And is there a way forward? I think there's, you know, there's some. There's kind of like a chicken and egg problem at the moment. It's like people know that it's nice. But how do we begin? And, well, one way we can begin is by looking at a super big instation saying, well, the, you know, these are the actual problems we face. Can we address some of those?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 24:44
I think, yeah, I agree, and I really wish we can, like, work a little bit closer with Python and Django community like Microsoft does? I mean, I know what you were. Referring to, wasn't that some kind of from feedback rule, but I think like we can also feed in our experience directly into the like Gen Jen Go code base with proposals, improvements, ideas,
Carlton Gibson 25:17
and even engineering time to make those happen, because there's lots of ideas and little little bandwidth to get them done. So
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 25:24
yeah, that's, that's what I would like, and that's what I really like to see happen. But as every mid to big size company, there's always another agenda. I think I like, I'm getting into other people's minds on that as I think, yeah, soon, soon, we might have some steps towards that. Also, like, it's it's not carton, it's not just us, which is something okay, you can cut this part out later. It's not only about crack and tech or people in in the team. It's also about the Django community, the ways of working, the ways of working is different. So we always promote contributions into the Django, but we don't realize it's not that easy to like. Like, like, yes, we are all using Django and Python, but contributing to Django, it's, it's not only time or willingness, it's also like, ways of workings are different. There are hidden conventions in the Django community, and it's not super easy for people who doesn't have any contribution background into that community to, like, come up with super advanced feature requests. Like, yeah, no, got it so, like, that's, that's something that I've been thinking lately about. I made a talk last year in europight and Python Spain about coding conventions. I think it was the first day of europython. I was in a workshop about PYtest, which is my favorite test, and I was listening to workshops, and I just realized, like, we need like, conventions for open source communities too. Like I don't know if you're familiar with our coding conventions. It follows Google's coding conventions, basically just some recipes around best practices, the ones that we get to get to the wrong often so that, like it's a good reminder, and we use it very much during our day to day practice as part of, mostly part of PR reviews. We really need a convention for, for example, like for Django for even, like for Django project.com Like, even for small projects like djangoproject.com Like, what's the convention here? Like, how do we contribute? Or, like, what's the preferred way of a specific thing that way I as a first timer. And again, first timer doesn't necessarily mean I'm a junior or mid level Dev. I can be like a lead Dev and still be a first timer. What? How should I contribute to be welcome? Because also, like over the last few years, in most in like DjangoCon sprints, or like other sprints, or some other events, I I have pushed people towards contribution, like more senior people, and like, sometimes they received feedback, super surprising feedback, and then, like, I started to, yeah, like, motivating people to contribute, contribute is step one. Then do we also need to, like, manage the communication or relationship after the How shall we do it? Wow, what's the sustainable way? Um.
Carlton Gibson 30:00
Yeah, no. I mean, I remember, we were in Copenhagen at the sprints, and it was a bit like, well, you know, how do we I was a newish fellow only a year in then, and I spent lots of time going around to individual people, trying to help people get going. But I was doing the same thing time and time again. And I was by the end of the day, I was exhausted. I can hardly speak, but yet, there were still people there, you included, who were like, well, how do I get, you know, how do I join in a project here? How do we get because it wasn't, it wasn't organized off the back of that. I hadn't, you know, I did a couple of workshops which were getting contributed, starting workshops at the sprints, and they went well. And my sort of hope is to, you know, that that can be something that other people will pick up the baton on, but we don't have a good on ramp still. I think, I mean, the Django nauts project, the Django notes space project, is an amazing thing, is to try and bring people on board and help them over these, these hurdles, but they're real hurdles, right? It's not, oh yeah, I'm just going to contribute to Django. It's, it's not as simple as that, yeah, but
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 31:00
I'm super optimistic, like being in a team this size and following a super unconventional ways of engineering, like We are super flat. Yeah, we don't have managers like, we don't have product owners. We trust. We put a lot trust to developers and like, but still we are super organized, like their teams, their conventions. Still, we have clients, etc, and looking at the open source community and seeing how it works, it's a miracle. Like, they're not paid, actually, they're not part of a team, or, like, official teams, they only use their like personal time and still produce such quality software. So I'm, I'm super optimistic that we can fix things forward. But yeah, going going forward in my software development journey now, like different topics is are becoming my interest. And like different I'm looking into improving the ways of working of community in different ways. Okay,
Carlton Gibson 32:39
good. Well, that's a nice segue there, because you've been massively active in the Django and Python communities for years now. So it has how you got involved in the community side.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 32:52
That's thanks to Django Girls. I think if, if we go really back in time, I think I've been taught like I've been taught this community feeling by again, the team in my uni. We were, I was happily part of some free software days for years, which was a big event back then in Istanbul, and I met, I met people like I Murdock, Richard Stallman and like, Literally, help. Sorry. What's the word chaperone? But that's the thing I was, I was a secondary great computer science department. Department was running this local free software days with like, like a DjangoCon Europe, but on free software, and we were having like, FSF Europe, present, or like, I'm Murdoc. I even met that like that, like daddy of Dean, I'm murdaugh is the author of deviant, and I'm a long time Linux person, since I switched to OS X years ago. I think I I've been told about value of community and role models back then, but really like it was younger girls. I was, yeah, I was doing my PhD back then, and some other woman in the department reached out to me to organize the first ever younger girls Istanbul. And over the course of five years, we organized and helped. Organize over 10 workshops in Turkey. We build a small community of our own of organizers and mentors, not only women. I like a mixed, good, diverse, like not so small group. Then We revive paistanbul, which it was a meetup group that was deserted. I don't know how many years ago, started weekly meetups, like I went to paistambo meetups for six months every week with my other six younger girls, Roman fellows. And I, I think, I think things like this has big impact, because we talk about a lot about like diversity at about like feeling included. It doesn't always happen organically. That's also how I become volunteer to become organizer in London jungle meetup. I spent like five years with the community in Istanbul before moving to London, then in London. Of course, the first thing I did was to, like, come to London during the meetup. And I was a bit disappointed, because it was a big one. Like, we don't, we don't have that many people every month. It was a big one. Or, like, 120 or 100 people. And I was the only other woman in the room, and the feeling wasn't great. So I'm like, Okay, I need to do something to change this. And like, over the course of the years, I learned, if you want change, you become the change and yeah, really, I think, like that six women changed the scene. And like, their commitment to the meetups changed the scene long before they changed the scene by organizing the pilot, generous workshops. But also like, yeah, it works. I try the same thing, yeah. Also, my other co organizers in London meetup was super allies of diversity of and like women representation in the scene, so we work together towards making the meetup more diverse. And last meetup, I think there were, like, 1415 women out of 80 attendees. And I think that's like, that's, that's good, one out of 100 to 15 out of 80 in
Carlton Gibson 38:01
that certainly, that's certainly the right direction. But this is what I want to ask you. I think, you know, we do well in the Python community. We do well in the Django community, compared to, you know, how it used to be, and in other other areas of tech, where it's not so, um, open, but where are we still failing? What more can we do? Like, what's the like? Where do you think? Do you know what, if we did this, it would help. If we did that, it would help, because we want to keep promoting, keep working, right?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 38:30
Yeah. We need to keep working. We need to keep educating ourselves. We need, we need, like, good role models, not necessarily woman, but a lies, yeah, like carton, you're like, you're one of the few people in the community that made it super welcome for me, both into the community and bought into the like contribution side of Django. But I can almost hear like you were doing great. But I think you also see that it wasn't super sustainable. So you need, like, hundreds of carltons around, not just like 1234, we need to, we need to work more towards, we need to keep it always in the in the agenda, always, like, in the top five priority, both on the technical board and on the like, board of directors. Like, that's, that's the only way we need to make sure we have women all over the processes. Like, for example, now we are looking for a new fellow, and now I'm a year, over a year into the being a director on the board. It's time for me to like the dig deep, deeper into our for example. Interview process. Do like who, for example, who writes the ad for the new fellow? Is there enough diverse proofreaders who does the selection? Are there enough diverse like people in that part of the process and the last part of the process? And I think having a diverse group of us help us in like help us come up with those questions with not everyone can. Not all of us brings the same question into the table, right? All of us will bring different questions and more diverse. We are more quest, more different questions, more different perspectives, hopefully towards improving and hopefully towards on to the constructive side of the things. But yeah, diversity is the key to diversity. Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 41:05
no, I think that's just absolutely brilliant. You said that I, you know, I was welcoming and whatnot. I spent the whole time while I was a fellow, trying to bang the drum of getting more contributors from different areas of the community. Because, you know, go and stand at a DjangoCon, you stand on stage, and you look at the the audience, it's quite a diverse audience, but then the contributor base, it's still the same white English speaking men. And that's not, it's not to criticize anybody, but it's largely that way. And I always felt like that. I was stood there going, come on, you know, come and help. But I'm a white English speaking man. It's like, I can't stand there and in group proof things. I can try say You're welcome. I can put out a welcome map, but it doesn't change anything because it I'm not the right person.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 41:55
I disagree. We need a life. My role models, there are great women, but also like great male allies without them, like, we, can we? Can we? Can we can make this work? I don't know. Maybe you need to build a, like, bigger feedback group. I don't know if you know of your impacts. Uh, all the efforts you put in actually had a lot of impact in the community. And for example, we changed the I don't know if you have seen DSF membership guidance, yes, exchange now community contributions, as stated, as valuable as code contributions, and I think that's a big milestone. We need to start giving those people some credit, because they like they're built. They're building the future of the community. They're building the next generation of contributors. It's it's not any less than contribution. And I tell this from like engineering management perspectives. I'm a hands on tech lead, like my 30% is hands on. 40% is people management, and other 30% is just project management, networking
Carlton Gibson 43:43
and working in a big comp.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 43:46
And what like one is not has less impact than the other. I don't want to quit hands on, uh development, because that has a big impact. Like, if you don't have contributors, Django will not improve. But also, if you don't have people running the community, I also don't, yeah, we can improve further,
Carlton Gibson 44:21
right? But Django is not the code base, right? It really isn't. It's, you know, that's, yeah, that's one part of it. It's a good framework. It's great for building your web apps, but there are other options out there. So why do we keep going with Django? Well, because there's more to it than just the web. I
Will Vincent 44:37
think there's just just to build on what you were saying, I think there's also a, I mean, Carlton has given talks on this, the sustainability piece of being involved in the community, so you can come in and and be on the board and do a lot of code, but the it shouldn't be implied, like it shouldn't be expected that you do that indefinitely, because people do burn out. So one thing I've been. We're happy to see, and I guess Carlton and I are both living is having been very actively involved, and then stepping away a little bit, but still being able to contribute and help so that there's a people can see the ramp and the process where you can still be part of the community, but you don't always have to be driving the change, because it's unrealistic for someone to to do that all the time, right? So the things you're doing right now, I mean, I hope you keep doing these for years and years, but maybe you just want to attend Django London. You don't have to be the organizer for forever, because you won't be able to maintain that, right? So I think it's also important to for people to see that there's an option other than just stepping 100% away and not going to conferences and not contributing, which is what I have seen with some previous generation people. Instead, there's a way to be involved, but less involved, if that makes sense.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 45:55
No, yeah, it makes sense. And also, those are things that I keep thinking a lot lately. And but,
Will Vincent 46:02
but it's not, it's natural. It's natural, right? It's
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 46:05
right, you don't, you don't. You're not the real it used to be, like, 10 years ago, I'm not the children I used to be 10 years ago. Like, I like, it was a challenge to build, for example, the community in Istanbul, the comment in London, or, like, I, I put a lot of effort into that. But like, of course, it's not the same as it was six years ago. For me, I'll reach out of ideas. I think community had enough leadership from from me. At some point, it will be a good time for me to step down and for someone else with more enthusiasm and more energy to come in and share their wisdom, ideas, energy, motivation, time. But how do we how do we keep the loop? How do we motivate people? Now? Maybe it's time at least for me to think more about those things. But also we see combat, like Jacob came back into the board after years, and like he's working with a great enthusiasm. So that's also inspiring, because it's not all. It's not always. The newcomers sometimes asked, I don't know, I think I can call myself an old time enough. We also need to see, see the future, like, what is it for me in 10 years time?
Carlton Gibson 47:48
Yeah, no, entirely. You
Will Vincent 47:50
saying that makes me think too of just with meetups in I live in this in Boston, and there was a, there was a very active Django Boston meetup before covid, and then covid happened, and organizer left, and it didn't happen for three or four years, and now it's coming back again. And there's some lead organizers who I've been helping, but it's, yeah, it's interesting to be a long timer, and you, you get these, take these pauses, but then, like, right now I'm very active in trying to help, like, I just gave a talk, helping find speakers, because there has been that period of rejuvenation or of rest on one, you know, for me. And yeah, it's not you can do that, right? That should be the cycle, right? You're very active and OUT out there, and then you step away a little bit, so it's, I can understand I'm now living that right? Where, for a while I thought, Okay, I need to take a break from the local conferences. But now I'm like, No, I really want to do it, and I have the energy, so it's good to not just say these things, but live these things. So I feel like I'm living, living that a little bit, but it's a lot of work, right? Even, you know, we're we, we've only had one meetup, and we're gonna have more and more and more. But even, even in Boston, which is a big programming town, it just takes, I don't think I can go weekly for six months, but you know, it takes a lot of effort to get it off the ground. And then you but then you find these people who say, I feel like every meetup I meet someone who's been using Django for a long time at a company I didn't even know of that's quite large, and they say, Oh, I didn't even know about the community, and yet they're using Django every day. So it helps, yeah? Helps bring things together. Yeah?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 49:36
Hearing about the Boston, London, Boston Django meetup. Is that the name?
Will Vincent 49:42
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Django Boston, Boston Django meetup, yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 49:47
one, yeah. One thing happened recently that I've been pushing forward since a year now is now we have a list of local Django groups, meetups under djangoproject.com Which is an interesting story. Do you want to hear about it?
Will Vincent 50:03
Yes, please.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 50:05
So non in general, meetup, I think it was actually not last year, but previous year. Every, not every, but last few years we are running hectoberfest. So instead of a meetup, we do a hackathon. And that edition, John gold came in and said, Okay, I want to do a non coding contribution. What shall I do? And I literally, I wasn't prepared. I was like, can you make a list of all the Django meetups globally so we can, like, put it on the website. He prepared the list then in the Django consprints. Dave Turner, actually, again from creatintech, worked on the page, like the backend required to display it on the Django project website and item recently, Sarah filled in the event, and now we have good lists which we need to improve and keep maintaining list of like Local Django communities meetups, which I think is one of the next steps that DSF should be focusing on, like how we can improve, how we can help and contribute to local communities. One
Carlton Gibson 51:33
good thing is telling people they exist, because it's to get the word out. It's quite difficult. So there's a saying on the Django website that's kind of handy. Well,
Will Vincent 51:41
one of the I don't know what how the time is spent on the board currently, but when I first joined, there was quite a lot of time was spent on funding requests for events, and that's one thing that the board can do. But also, as you've said, facilitating and telling people about existing things is is another thing that the board and the community, you know, people are doing the work, but if nobody sees it, then it's not fulfilling its full potential.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 52:07
Yeah, that's but, well, that's the that's the other thing I'm sitting in the board. I'm running the London Django meetup. Good comment is going to junglecon, Europe, europaton. That's one of the things I'm living in London. Like, yeah, I don't know how many people you know in the community, based in Turkey, based in Sudan, based in no China, Korea, Thailand. There are great communities. They're great people. It's important that we build a better connection. Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 52:57
no, but you're hitting one of my old bugbears as well, is that we've got this. We still have this kind of English language silo. It's not 100% but it's kind of still English dominated us, dominated Australia, dominant, like, just because it's, that's the old base, and there are so many users around the world, and what can we do to a facilitate them, and be connect with them? It's,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 53:18
ah,
Will Vincent 53:19
yeah, you know. So, so you're, you're not a native English speaker. Like, what, what can we the native English speakers do? Or are there some, are there any obvious things that you and the board are working on to to facilitate this? Obviously, having, having showing, the showcasing, the meetups, is one. But are there, like, what are we what are Carlton and I not seeing? As you know, stereotypical Django contributors,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 53:45
we need to work on that more unfortunately, there is not a structured work happening in in the board of agenda, in the agenda of the board. At the moment, there is a slight move on DSF members Group. We are going to open a few non English speaking discord channels. Yes, Discord, I think we are going to start with Turkish and French. I'm 100% sure about second language. I know about Turkish because I volunteered for it. Yeah, I being on the board as a Turkish woman is my first step. I don't know we need to. Like conferences, has actually a big impact on the community. I saw in your notes about my talk in DjangoCon. Yes, that's actually a good example. So that talk was on a topic that I wasn't super comfortable with. We. I led the team building a mobile backend with Django for the first time, and I was super aware. Like, if you're doing a NIV thing for the first time, your lesson learns are super fresh. I wanted to give the talk, even though, like, I wasn't an expert on the ARIA. Also, like, put a lot of extra information in mobile development with Django that I learned over the course of a year, unless I was a mom of a newborn, super, having super, super, super difficult time. And I don't I think that's the worst talk. I remember recording in a super difficult condition, like, I don't know, Robin was in the other room crying. I was having a hard time coming from a maternity leave, but really, like that talk should be there, because, like, life is not always flawless, and not all the people are great speakers, or, like, native English speakers, and that's, that's one thing I bring into the speakers committees of the conferences I volunteer for. If I do that, that task, I try to, like, motivate the group into not picking, always the best of the best of the talks. And it's trying to see, like, what other like, maybe the speaker is not the expert of the domain, but like, what else they can bring. And sometimes you should just have, like, not great speakers. That's That's life, that's the reality, that's the person, or that's the person, like, sometimes working next to you? Well, I
Will Vincent 57:03
was just thinking that I wish, I wish it was less of a barrier entry to giving a talk. And I don't know if that means that, you know if that we like having a channel where people who don't get accepted for a talk, but still have one they want to give. Can be on an official Django YouTube account, or maybe there's a way that meetups can showcase the video. And the expectation is not that it has to be in English. So if the Django, you know, Istanbul meetup happens like we should, show that these things are happening, and it doesn't have to. You're not forcing someone to speak a second or third language for it, because it's all happening. But maybe there's a way to find it. I mean, even just the talk I just gave, you know, we didn't record it, but I wish, like I'd like to see the Django London meetup talks I and again, maybe just the fact that these talks are happening again in other countries where you're not forcing people to speak English, would be helpful just to have it somewhere, or just say, if you are running a meetup and you want a talk to be put on a channel, like, here's a way to do it, because the bar is, the bar is, is too high for the DjangoCon events. I think there's way more people who want to talk, then there are spaces for them and the communities, yeah, bigger than that, yeah. I
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 58:27
mean, europight is doing a great job about it, but, like, compared to DjangoCon, they are super privileged. They have, like, I don't know, 500 speaking slots or something like, it's like six, six rooms going for four days. But we like we still need to hear from those speakers too. So,
Will Vincent 58:54
yeah, having it live helps, I think, right, because I don't know like your your talk you gave virtual it's a lot of work to give a virtual talk and not get any feedback, right? We, like you need that needs to be part of it, especially in real time, or maybe just having a clear way for people to give feedback, because otherwise it feels like you're just giving and not receiving in the moment. I
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 59:16
mean, what I'm trying to support, I'm trying to mitigate in London, general Meetup is you want to give a conference talk, come and practice your talk in the meetup like less people, more comfortable surrounding. You can receive feedback and you can improve your talk. But yeah, we should, we should. We should have more of those. But yeah, I think we also need to improve, not improve, but like, we are great as a community, but need to still, still work on it. Like, that's that. So that's the jungle chat, right? Like, I like to hear more diverse speakers. I like to hear better keynote speakers. When I say better, I mean more diverse, yeah,
Will Vincent 1:00:18
well, I think it's just about the board, or someone having the infrastructure so that it's easier for people, right? Easier to contribute to Django, also easier to to give a talk, easier to easier to do a podcast, right? I mean, it's not that Carlton I are the only two Django people who should have a podcast, but it's a lot of work to do a podcast. Like, are there ways focused? Sorry, Yep, thank you. Yeah, that's true, Yep, yeah, stepping up a level and thinking about, you know, from an organization, how do you make it easier to do these things is important, and again, especially when it's volunteers helping volunteers volunteer, right? So, yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:01:00
I mean, the one way that I know is please, please, please do support and motivate those speakers around you who's not as comfortable with the language or with like their competency because I think that's, that's the only way forward, uh, telling a person you can do it is the yeah is the best way that, so far, I know, to support them. Yeah, brilliant.
Carlton Gibson 1:01:42
Yes, you can. Okay, I think we're coming up slightly on time. So I just wanted to pick your mind on the technical, more technical side, perhaps we can for a few seconds, you mentioned pi test, which is your, your favorite framework. There is, that's your go to, right? Yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:01:57
that's my go to. I think I've been using it since, I don't know, eight years. 10 years, I don't remember. And it's something I use day to day. I think I know something about it. I never okay, oh, yeah, I think it's one of those software that works out of all bugs seamlessly supports us to the end, and when you ask the question, I, to be honest, I don't know anything super, super, super technical about it, other than all those features that I use without even like not To think
Carlton Gibson 1:02:39
so can you? Can you spell parameterize without looking it up? Yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:02:47
I can say it doesn't mean I
Carlton Gibson 1:02:49
can spell it. Every time
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:02:52
I write that, I have to look up. I used to look up PYtest is great, but it's also, it's also the like, like, the engineering culture you're in, for example, I'm like, I'm writing more tests since last six, seven years. And I still, I think there are a lot of things that I don't know. Yeah, sure, sure,
Carlton Gibson 1:03:25
but that's always true, though. Yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:03:29
one thing for sure, that's something that I'm looking into. Interviews tech tests as well. Like the more more senior to Canada, the more senior the developer, including myself, they write, rely more on tests and write better tests. And I think I also quite like the Django package, pytus, Django. Django, pytus, yeah,
Carlton Gibson 1:03:57
because it's got
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:03:58
the helpers and whatnot. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's just those are things like Django, it works out of box, and it's super seamless.
Will Vincent 1:04:09
Did you were you? Were you expecting a different answer, Carlton, or like, because
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:04:12
I know, I don't
Carlton Gibson 1:04:18
know, but I just wanted to you mentioned it. You said it was your go to I just wanted to sort of get you to paint your picture. You like you like it. Give you a more technical then or different one octopus you're using DRF for. Is that the case?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:04:34
If you're going to go into Django ninja stuff I don't know anything about it. We do more GraphQL at the moment we this is off the record, but like, yeah, we do have DRF, but we don't build new endpoints using DRF. Okay. Well,
Will Vincent 1:04:57
next time, next time we have you on, we'll just talk about the. Building graph, QL stuff, yeah,
Carlton Gibson 1:05:02
okay, go on the go with, go with the magic one.
Will Vincent 1:05:05
Wrap this up. Okay, so final question is, always, you have a magic wand. What do you fix about Django? Does it could be more than one thing, but what would you want to fix?
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:05:16
Oh, that's a tough question. I wasn't prepared for this. Actually, one thing I will I know, good. I would fix class based views.
Will Vincent 1:05:35
Okay, how would you fix them? What specifically not that
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:05:39
they need any fixing. But currently we are having a lot of issues people just like picking any class, basically, if they think appropriate, and using it. But on a scale that we have, actually it's not feasible to push Django objects to templates. I know for most of projects, that's a super great feature of Django, but for us, that means extra hidden database queries. Has been a few occurrences that took three of clients down. So we have super strict conventions towards not pushing Django objects to templates, but like half of class based wheels seamlessly contributes towards that which we don't want. So sometimes you don't need this to happen seamlessly in our scale. Okay, so
Carlton Gibson 1:06:46
that's a fascinating question then. So just quickly, how do you enforce serialization prior to this to the view, like in the view, or prior to rendering the templates, you must be fetching all the related properties and serializing to something. Yes,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:07:06
we do use. We used to do, we used to use instead of Django objects. We used to do data, data, class, classes. Now we are using authors to serialize all the concepts, and also, like domain driven design is big in teams in Kraken, so like, it's, it's, it's a team base option, but there are A lot of components in the monolith that actually doesn't persist where we write data to database, into domain and interface layers.
Carlton Gibson 1:07:50
That's fascinating. Cool. We could have another podcast just on that.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:07:57
I wanted to give a talk in layer architecture with Django in last year's DjangoCon. And didn't get, you didn't get,
Carlton Gibson 1:08:10
well, you do know this? I know what? As we record this, there's two days left for the DjangoCon Europe. CFP, yeah,
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:08:18
no, but yeah, we, yeah, we can. We can talk about more, more technical Django stuff in another
Will Vincent 1:08:28
episode, the community stuff is equally important. So I'm glad that we focused on that, especially given you're on the board and and all the work that the board is doing, which is also can be hidden, just like code contributors. Code contributions can be hidden. A lot of community work also isn't seen, but it should be celebrated, because it's important. So I think, I think we are out of time. We have links to everything in the show notes, and thank you so much for coming on and taking the time to chat with us.
Çağıl Uluşahin Sönmez 1:09:01
Yeah, thank you. Also, I like to celebrate you for all your contributions to the community by not only the podcast, but all years of work. Thank you. Thanks
Carlton Gibson 1:09:13
for coming on to have really inspired
Will Vincent 1:09:14
Django chat.com and we'll see everyone next time bye bye, bye bye.