Kojo gave the Keynote at DjangoCon Europe 2022 and is a prolific public speaker. He is a software engineer at RevSys and Lightning Talks Chair at DjangoCon US 2022 as well. We discuss the various contributions to Django and why it's not all about code.
Carlton Gibson 0:06
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I'm Carlton Gibson. Joined by Will Vincent. Hello Will Vincent.
Will Vincent 0:12
Hi Carlton Gibson.
Carlton Gibson 0:15
Hello Will Vincent. Django Chat, what's that you're saying? It's a podcast on the Django web framework. Totally out of practice. Welcome back from the summer break folks joined today by Gojo. Who's I've just bumped into a Django con it gave a great keynote there and we're going to talk about some of the topics he brought up there. Hey, Kojo, how are you? I'm good. How are you are? Very excited to have you on you've just flown back from Puerto. Yeah.
Kojo Idrissa 0:36
Yeah. Yesterday. What is it in Tuesday in central time into recording this I arrived home, get back to my apartment about 11pm. Monday.
Will Vincent 0:44
So Wow. Well, you're a trooper, we appreciate it.
Carlton Gibson 0:49
Thanks for coming on. So let's talk. First of all talk about Django con, because it's been what, two, three years since we're all able to get together?
Kojo Idrissa 0:56
Yeah, definitely. I think 2018 probably the last time so. Well, I don't think we've thought of YouTube. We're at January 2019. I will the
Will Vincent 1:07
US one. Yes. Okay, not Europe.
Carlton Gibson 1:10
So yeah, that was that was the last time because that was in like September October time. 2019. And then obviously, by the time the spring came round, Django con Europe was canceled because of
Will Vincent 1:20
Yeah, but I remember I had my plane ticket which I had to get get a refund and all I was so excited. Carlton was going to caravan and bring his whole family on the train over so
Kojo Idrissa 1:30
keep forgetting Carlton lives in Spain, it's closer to COVID to various European things.
Carlton Gibson 1:36
I was going to I ended up flying to Puerto this time, just you know, short short, this flight I really want to get the train but like it's like three hours safe and Barcelona to Madrid, which is hot, kind of halfway across the Iberian Peninsula. It's
Will Vincent 1:48
such a cool scene, right? That's like, I've done that the high speed one, it's so beautiful. And it's the fastest in the world, I think,
Carlton Gibson 1:54
well, I don't know, I saw I read I read a thing recently it said that Spain's got the second largest high speed network in the world after China because they've invested a lot of the EU development funds in that and then you can get from Madrid to close to the Portuguese border in sort of similar kind of time. But there's just no connections across and so it was gonna take me a couple of days each way and in the you know, with with my wife taking care of the kids at home and I'm like I can go away for you know, the conference and then the spreads and then but like to stretch it two days either side is is asking a bit much so I had to fly but maybe next time I mean it and having Paris and definitely getting next and get
Will Vincent 2:33
basically just analysis Edinburgh in May, I believe next year.
Carlton Gibson 2:38
Yeah. But it's a Janko Europe 2023. And during May, end of May. I don't know about you cardio. But when I first arrived, it was my first in person event since the pandemic. And so we you know, we arrived and we walked into the park where the venue was, it was amazing venue, the port, it was a lovely city. And there's this big conference center dome arena thing, and it's like, wow, yeah, we definitely needed to make sure that we definitely need to cut after they put all the work into organize it. We definitely needed to come here. This is amazing. But then you get there. And it's like, oh, like lots of people, I think five, nearly 600 people in a venue. It's like this is that was a little strange. For me it certainly the first day, I suddenly got a bit more useful.
Kojo Idrissa 3:25
For me, for better or worse. This is my third event in person event this year. So i i keynoted pi, pi, Texas in the end of March of this year. And so that's like a two and a half drive in Austin in two and a half hour drive. And he's been so pretty straightforward. And I used to live in Austin City. But that was I'm pretty sure under 200 People might have been like 1.5. So it was you know, so that was my first in person gatherings of anyone who wasn't like a family member, really? Since 2019. And so yeah, so that's eased me into things a little bit. And then I was also at PyCon. Us,
Carlton Gibson 4:06
like 1000 or something?
Kojo Idrissa 4:08
Yeah. It was not as big as usual. PyCon maybe like half the number of in person people as usual Python. But still, you know, more than 1000 people that you don't know yet most of whom you don't know. And so it's a very large pocket and usually in like the cities may give it to that. And so, you know, that sort of helped, I guess, with the you know, with getting over any potential anxieties as far as like suddenly being being in a crowd again. But important was different because it's my first time on in Europe proper or mainland Europe or I stood, despite having been there. I still don't know what it's called. It's a Europe. It's the European mainland from having lived in China. I think, you know, the Chinese, European mainland, I guess, but I doubt that's what people in Europe say.
Carlton Gibson 4:57
Well, I don't think people in Europe I think people in Britain they call it The continent, we're going to the continent.
Unknown Speaker 5:02
You also say?
Carlton Gibson 5:06
Well, we say these days we say the king. We're not talking about that. It's gone. Gone. Gone. If you've got a question about good.
Kojo Idrissa 5:16
People really say the king now like, I mean, when the huge changes, people started writing last year's, they don't think it's like, it's been like, what two weeks? You know, people still saying, you know, I'm sure people still reflexively saying God Save the Queen. And then oh, wait, no, she's Beyonce.
Carlton Gibson 5:32
They may well be I did two minutes, I don't know.
Will Vincent 5:35
But for a reason. So.
Carlton Gibson 5:43
Civil War, the simply English Civil War back in 16, wherever, had to live in Poland until, you know, John Locke, for instance, you're not famous British philosopher, he had to live in exile from anywhere.
Kojo Idrissa 5:57
Chimpanzee gatherings, Porter was nice. So I guess it's so the, the getting really accustomed to being around large numbers of people was that part was less of an issue. I think it was just really more of a sort of, you know, just made the adjustment to a new country, new continent. Although it also helped that I was the opening keynote. And so there wasn't really time to be worried about anything other than Okay, do I have? Do I have words to say, I feel like I have worked. But can I say those words? Who can know it? And then I went into the words, and then I was tired. But
Carlton Gibson 6:34
yeah, I think you know, the opening keynote is the best spot to have, because you can relax, you can just enjoy the conference. Whereas if you're talking at some any other spot, it's like builds and builds until your talk and then you can relax.
Kojo Idrissa 6:47
In I know myself, I will tend to make adjustments. And I guess I sort of saw other people sort of, in I'm not sure if this was scheduling genius on the part of the Django penury people or just sort of Lucky serendipity. But it seemed like there were, you know, a number of talks that had at least a somewhat related topic to do my opening keynote, no, or the more than one of us was on the same page. And I heard sort of references to my talk over the course of the event, itself interesting, because I know that I'm that person, too. Like if I were speaking later in the event, there's always this temptation to like, Oh, let me let me include something that I heard in somebody else's talk and my daughter.
Carlton Gibson 7:27
Yeah, I think that's one of the lovely things about the live conference versus the pre recorded talks that we've had the last couple of years. I mean, and the virtual conference is massively better than no conference at all. But this kind of way that the the narrative of the con conference builds over the course of the three days. And that's super. So we wanted to get you on because I think your keynote was super important. And something that is really interesting. And so perhaps you could you talk about what was your What was your talk and,
Kojo Idrissa 8:00
you know, so the top, the time that was an interesting contributor experience, improving attribute experience and broadening contributor scope, it really probably should have been called in proving maintainer experience. But a bit of both were true. There were two very broad ideas there. One being that the source community who we have people who are maintaining the core projects, and we need to, we as a community, need to try to find ways to better support those people, better sports people, it better support them, as they do work that supports us. That's important. And then at the same time, sort of the need to to broaden the scope of our contributors of the different people who contribute to the projects. We have as a community, I think, focus too much on the idea of contributors being only maybe contributed being limited to people who write code for, you know, several people who write code for Django, or people who who write code for Python or what have you. And the truth is, there are a lot of other types of contributions and types of contributors. In so I'm sort of I never worked on a talk because I'm always working on talks. And so I think the next version of this talk or the next iteration of these ideas, might have to be called like, let's talk about how we talk because as I was working on this talk, you know, instead of discussing that, people issues came up around language and I had some amount of uncertainty but as far as like using certain terms, and trying to not alienate people in private and things of that nature. So the idea is like, even the small differences between a term like a A non code contributor and a non coding contribute non coding contributions. They sound almost identical, but they can they can have very different meanings depending on once a year. But I think it just sort of for the sake of clarity, so that is Daniels. I have used the term non code contributor in like in my talk and in some of the things I've referenced as someone who is a contributor to Python or Django or what have you, but they're contributing by not using code and in my talk, I used examples of some of my co workers from from rep says, three of whom are developers, one of them is not so for people who are familiar, the Django community and our Django chat, Jeff triplet, who doesn't observe as well, and is a former founding member of Django foundation with make it former Django con us chair and Dan Pena is co chair, current Python Software Foundation Board member. Him Frank Triplett, former Django Software Foundation, President lacy William Central, who is a former Django tenuous chair and co chair, and organizer, and then Katherine, who, who works at rep says, and does a lot of a lot of administrative stuff behind the scenes to make sure that Django con us works and has done similar type of work for the DSF. And so the the reason we use them as examples is appeal to all those contributions that they're doing. They're definitely making significant contributions to Django, the Django community. But you know, none of them involve code or three of those people. Jeff, Lacey, and Frank are developers, and are capable of you know, doing code contributions. But they're not they're making contributions without code. And so, so then Catherine, is up at all, but those are all very significant contributions. So I contrast that non code contribution with a term I've heard other people use and say the idea with non coding contributors, which seems which is almost sort of this, like, oh, well, people who can't code and so they have to, you know, do other things that you know, people who can't go do, because that's all they can do, it ends up being the sort of this sort of like, oh, like the, the kids table, sort of this sort of very weird thing. I think that's why we have to, I think, the next generation this might be, you know, let's talk about how we talk because there are definitely sort of ideas and cultural norms in our community that I think we need to address need to be fixed. Kate prime example. And I was I was literally shocked to hear this.
You do to sort of hearing witnesses so I was the opening keynote for, for the this can be sound a little pedantic, but the repetition, for point, I was the opening keynote speaker at Django con Europe, a Django coffee for the Django, people. The closing keynote, for Django con Euro Django conference for the people in front of Django, people was a time Kirby, who is the Django Software Foundation's Vice President. And I watched him stand on a stage at Django con representative, a bunch of Django people as the Django Software Foundation vice president and say, he has never contributed Django. But he, and I'm like, Okay, that's it. And so, and this is not to try to, you know, be pedantic about his words or what have you. But it's sort of a larger cultural thing of, he got on a stage in front of a bunch of Django people, and said that, and and knew that they would, and knew that they would, he knew how they would interpret it. And we're sort of aware that this is, this is sort of the commonly accepted viewpoint in our community. If you have not made a code contribution to Django, then you have made no contributions, you have not contributed to Django, and you're looking at different people's like bios, there's like, oh, Django contributor, and I'm like, Okay, well, that's, that's someone who's like on the technical board or, or what have you. And so we somehow as a community have defined contributor as only people who have written code, or maybe that's,
Carlton Gibson 14:13
yeah, and that's exactly right. But what I love is, anybody who's involved in Django involved in the Django community, as soon as you phrase it as clearly and bluntly is that that you've got somebody like Jeff or Frank Lacey or gag, Katherine, Katherine, or Haim, and you say, they haven't. I mean, you know, Frank and Jeff and Lacey have all made commits at some point, but like, you say, Oh, they're not contributors. That's ridiculous. And everybody involved in the in so okay, it's like reductio ad absurdum. It's like we've got a, you know, this the way of using contributors like this leads to thing that leads to conclusions, which we all know are false. So it can't be a good way of, of using it.
Kojo Idrissa 14:55
And in addition to that, I think it also So the submarine used to kind of carry my pocket. And so it has two thirds, there's the so there was an issue shouldn't be trying to lay out the problem of why our current mechanics need more help into sort of the first half to 30, to two thirds of the talk was focused on code contributions. Because there's a problem that I felt needed to be laid out. And then I proposed a solution in this idea of a new role of contributor mentors, specifically code contributor mentors. But then the second part of the talk, maybe the I guess, the last third, approximately, was focusing on non code contributors. Or, you know, in again, I've been struggling with that language. Maybe sometimes using like, you know, code coding contribute contributions without code. Because again, I like the people that I work with, you know, like, I myself, like, again, to two weeks, I leave for Django con us where I'm an organizer, I am the Orientation Chair, the lightning talk Sham, and the development sprint share, if there's no code involved in that, you know, there may be there could be, but you know, but yeah, but just like the ordinary, because if we were just eating, I think I said this to people in Porto just, you know, while we were at Django con, Europe, as we were sitting at lunch, like, there was no code involved in putting those beers on the table, or, you know, or having the food arrive or, or securing the venue or, you know, or, you know, getting up making sure I'll be at work, and, you know, so that the, the large undertaking some blog, putting out January, or any sort of pop into, or any sort of all sorts of other things. Those are contributions without code, but those are still vital and necessary. I mean, like, if I was talking about the future, the DSF, and where it can go and what it might do. He wasn't talking about, like, regretting bugs, you know, he wasn't talking about how like, like, you know, like, we need to improve, improve test coverage, or, you know, update roads in the Docker. It's, it's about the legal and the financial, and the organizational aspects of the Django Software Foundation, keeping those things going. And so I think those sorts of contributions are often overlooked. And I think because there's the community culture has is too heavily swayed to have excited towards software engineering. Yeah. And also, I remember that wasn't that I need to, I'm going to talk a separate talk on this called the Python spectrum. And this idea of there's a range of people who use Python, but I'm realizing I have this graphic, that sort of a parent, a bi directional arrows, that's meant to show a continuum or a spectrum, that really doesn't, I may need to change that graphic, to sort of make it more visually clear that software engineering is a specific use of programming. So it's like, if you've written any code, then you're a programmer. I mean, if you didn't have a world, that program, you're a programmer, congratulations. Now, you might not think of yourself as a programmer, you might not be someone who programs on a continual basis. But so that's sort of anyone who's written any sort of code is a programmer, as you move towards the other end of the spectrum, you have this very specialized use of programming, which is what's known as soft, which is what I call software engineering. And that's what people who are, you know, and I've got a bunch of different things that delineate that. But when most people think of professional developers, they're usually thinking of software engineering, but especially with Python, that is an increasingly small subset of the community. And so, I mean, it came up a few times, but just the idea that software engineering is a subset of programming. You know, software engineers, very small group of programmers, other people who use programming, specifically Python for various uses. From it's a small subset of people who use Python to generate some value for themselves. But the community culture is so heavily slanted towards software engineering is the one true way it leads to all these weird things.
Carlton Gibson 19:12
So I think that's right as well, it's because if you just take Django that I think the vast majority of Django projects out there are on the programming to middle end of the spectrum rather than in you know, as you get into a bigger team and a bigger project you take on more and more software engineering practices, but most of the literature that you read is all about Bing, Google and Facebook and you know, these massive companies, and it's just not appropriate to take on that kind of tooling for the vast majority of Django applications that have ever been written and ever will be written.
Kojo Idrissa 19:45
Exactly.
Will Vincent 19:46
I was gonna say I think part of why there's so much just advanced writing is that people in those organizations have the, the luxury and the knowledge to to write it. So they have an employer and they've They can spend months on a specific thing, and then they would document it. Whereas the beginner generally doesn't have the confidence or the doesn't document what they're learning as much. Or if you're in the middle, I think like going, who goes to conferences, right? It's a lot of consultants, freelance people, and then people at Big corpse, because it's, it's an investment, right to do. So I think there's the same thing for tutorials to write any sort of, or not even a tutorial write any sort of blog post is a big investment in time. And for whatever reason I think you have, the more advanced you are, the more prone you are to write that. And, you know, I find this like, I lose my sense of what a beginner is thinking, except that I get lots of emails every day, that's the only way I have any sort of touch point to remembering all the pain that I went through.
Kojo Idrissa 20:46
Yeah, and I think, I'm not sure how clearly communicated this is like, the moment you finish, you're talking like, okay, here are the four ways this could have been better. But, for me, one of the sort of the danger points there is that by focusing the definition of contributor, so heavily on people who make contributions, by way of code, we end up largely excluding, you know, or you know, sort of sort of explicitly, but also sometimes sort of, you know, sort of tacitly or, you know, unconsciously, sort of excluding people who could become contributors, you could become contributors without any, and that's like most of what time was talking about in his in his keynote, like those, we need more of those people. And my contention is in you, I think, you know, this, like, sort of, well, I have similar backgrounds as far as me being like, you know, accounting slash MBA people before, you know, becoming developers. As I said, in my talk, I was perfecting the trendy capitalism. And so year after receiving my professional capitalism training, as I then became a software engineer, but there are a lot of people in those spaces, who could benefit from Python. And that's my first sort of serious Python project was in my work as an accountant and automating a process. But I think there are lots of people who is the most obvious example of this, you see, the growth of data science, and people in general, and also the value of Python and other tools in the realm of data science, but there are a lot of other people who could benefit from both Django and Python, without having it become their primary focus, it is this it is this spectacularly useful tool, the language itself lends itself to, to people being able to focus on solving the problem, instead of having to wrestle with the language. And so your answer, so that's a much larger percentage of the of the population using Python and Django. And those people who aren't focusing on being web developers, or software engineers, as their primary career have all these other skills, and expertise that we could use in our community, as far as you know, with renting, sort of, from obvious things like the DSM, what appears at work, but also on, you know, on smaller boards, like you know, for for the you know, if there's an organization around the country, or definite, or you're in Texas, or pi Texas Foundation, in different organizations like that, organizing your local meetups or, you know, or helping to solve code related problems, without actually be involved, because this contributor mentor thing that I've been thinking about and trying to sort out and talking about, and about. Some of the some of that is, is motivated by my desire to help friends who are, you know, maintainers projects, but that is also work that needs to be done. That's sort of a issue that needs to be sort of figured out to some extent. But the core maintainers shouldn't necessarily be the ones trying to figure that out, because they're already using a lot of their free time. And again, lots of people are using their free time, time that's spent their family's time not spent taking a nap or eating the pie or going on a walk. They're building software for us. And so instead of also asking them to say, Oh, you have problems, we'll use some more your free time to figure those out. You know, some there are other people who could be trying to figure out, you know, decent solutions to the problems, but those are also contributions that don't involve
Will Vincent 24:29
Carlson, you, you and I have mentioned at one point, or you mentioned the idea of like a hall of fame or some sort of, you know, recognition for all these people, because I think part of and I don't think you mentioned this yet Kojo, but part of the issue is that a commit is so black and white and they're forever, but organizing a conference or all these other things. You know, people aren't doing it necessarily for the recognition, but it's harder to see it whereas a commit you see, well,
Carlton Gibson 24:52
I think this I mean, this is like a long standing sort of discussion that we be having goes back to the discussions three, four years ago around the dev, the dissolution of the old Django core, which became Django, DEC 10. and changed the governance of Django. And it's kind of natural when you begin a software project. And it's, you know, only a few people in Lawrence, Texas to count the Commission's because, sorry, Lawrence, can. I apologize to my southern southern middle bits of the North American listeners that I got the states, they're very
Will Vincent 25:29
proud in Kansas, so I just
Carlton Gibson 25:30
Yeah, so high as well, they rightly should be. I'd like to go to Kansas. But it's natural to count the commits. But then as the community grows, and especially it grows to something like Django site that all these other aspects come in, and it's how do you count those, it's an, you know, one hope that there was around the end of the resolution of the old Django core, and with this kind of honorary title of a Django core contributor, was that we would be able to apply it more widely. And I think the ball was nicely picking up momentum there and ideas and lists of, you know, some cohorts that that could be applied to were being drawn up. And then obviously, the pandemic arrived. And that grand to a whole, but I think that that's picking up Katie McLaughlin was helping me pull together, hopefully, we're going to get a list of you will be able to draw together, contributors for Django, perhaps 4.2, we'll get it up and running, I tried to do it for Django 4.0. And then the world came along and sort of knocked me sideways, just the wrong moment. So that didn't happen, I got a couple of blog posts that identified some committers. But again, this was just committed. Well, Katie's able to do, I mean, and she's given many talks on this subject and works
Kojo Idrissa 26:43
is doing a lot of again, this is a contribution that doesn't require code. Integrity isn't good and bad background, but it's not a direct, it is not a contraction of code to Django, or to Python, but it is a contribution to those ecosystems. And I know she has done a lot of work around this idea of render better highlighting with better surfacing and better tracking people who make problems without,
Carlton Gibson 27:10
yeah, and what she's able to do is she got tooling around this to do this is not only get the person who made the commit, like the official person with the GitHub commit, but any co authors, and then she's able to go to the issues and find people who commented and interacted and gave a meaningful interaction, because, you know, you might, you might advise everybody, and, and yet not commit anything, and you know, not and somehow you were a major part of the of the release, and yet you you weren't recognized at all, and this isn't, you know, that hope. So, you know, she's making massive progress there. So hopefully, that will come together, or, you know, or it will come together, it's just, you know, when it comes together for which particular release, but then that should give us the Center for saying, Well, okay, but also in this time period, you know, this conference was organized, who, you know, who were the team there and who, and then start to call those people out and recognize them say, Hey, that was important. And then, you know, who was on the Django Software Foundation Board? Well, and what did they do, and then we can start to say, well, you know, in your city, who pulled out who organized the meetups, and we can just start to build a wider recognition, culture. And the thing with recognition is that you identify, you can identify the jobs that are done, you can then give recognition for them. But you can then start to codify what the job actually is, because you're doing it Do you realize the track Django translation team, who were never recognized by anybody in the whole 17 years of the history of translations in Django, that, do you know, that they, they do all this and that one day, they might not turn up for work for whatever reason, right? Because I say work, it's not paid. It's all volunteer for all of this time. What work is it? They do? And so if we, if we do need to give them more support, and we do need to make sure that there are other people around who know what that work is that we can draw up a sort of a checklist of what the work is, and then a call for volunteers to help do it. It's a kind of self who can then go on to be recognized. It's a it's a it's a self perpetuating cycle for a healthy community, a healthy ecosystem?
Kojo Idrissa 29:18
Yeah, I think so. And it was. So one of the one of the bits of information that I referenced to the My Django Kandra, you know, there was sort of synthesizes medicine from places but one of them that I thought was very important to the Naomi cedars PyCon us 2022 keynote, where she talks about sort of the idea of our community being a gift economy. ecosystem, and I think that is important from the standpoint of, but one of the problems that has come up and in much the same way that like, you don't want to build your community around responses to you know, a limited number bad actors like this one guy tried to put about an issue on a plane. And now we all have to take our shoes off forever at the airports. You know, so you don't want to sort of get in on that too much. But I think Nam was points as far as wanting our community to remain the sort of gift economy is not just a transactional thing is important. And you will sometimes have bad actors as far as code for their contributions, who will try to make a quick, good contribution just so they can sort of say, Look what I did, or how to zone out on the resume. So is that is that is a concern. And so and I agree with me that we want to keep things focused on on, you're as close to a gift economy as we can, however, in agreement, because sometimes when you start talking about recognition, there's a concern that people will if there's more recognition, and people will start doing stuff for recognition. That is, while technically true, you know, and theoretically possible, I don't think that that's a large concern. I think the larger issue is that by recognizing, by increasing the recognition of these people who are making contributions that don't require code, it also allows you to, to highlight the areas of need within your community, you open your project, it's like, Okay, we have, you know, let's say you can over the course of a six month period, you can see your 100 commits to Python and C Python 100 commits to Django, okay, you just clear it. And Nabis, you can see those there, they're easy to look, it's data that's easy to capture. But then if you can look over and see oh, well, wait a minute, we have, like 200 people who are making these contributions that don't require code. Okay, well, like, clearly that stuff that was done and needed to be done. Like, what is that stuff? And who's doing it? And how can we make sure that it continues to happen? Because I can't nobody, you know, we definitely try to make sure that the new code contributions happen. And we have tooling around that. But okay, well, what's this other stuff that has happened is going on? And that makes things work? In that Pete know, what's his work, the people that are we need to make sure we're aware of that and so that we can continue to have that work being done and and try to improve the way it's done, and make the lives of those people easier and make the larger future? Contributors easier.
Will Vincent 32:13
What made us come up before Carlton, but I mean, even just having a slash contributors page on Django project. I mean, for some of this, I mean, we don't list past board members, right. Like I've, based on this podcast, some former board members have reached out and been like, oh, yeah, we wrestled with that issue before. And I didn't know they're on the board, because there's no listing anywhere. Same with translation team, right. Like, actually, quite, quite often, there's emails into the the DSF board, saying how do I, you know, help, and so redirect them to us to be the Google group now the forum, but it's, it's completely hidden? So, just in terms of like, doing something, right, like, you know, the first step is okay, even if we had passport members, jet, you know, Django con organizers, translation team, there's many, many more people to add, but you sort of need to start somewhere, I think, rather than not doing.
Carlton Gibson 33:08
You can't, you can't not, you can't not do any of this, because you can't recognize everybody you have to
Will Vincent 33:15
have. Somewhere with like, 200 people with with like, former core, I honestly, I forgot. I sort of dried out a little bit. There was, I mean, we'll it would be a lot of people, but I think if you had, like current, we could delineate as you both been saying, you know, conferences, organizing, helping mentoring, you know, however we define it, and then also have, you know, scroll down to the bottom past ones, and then it can be a little bit on people to add themselves. But
Carlton Gibson 33:43
I mean, we Katie said something. I felt important at the conference, while we were discussing this, she said to me that, look, if we can just focus on recognizing some people from say, a fixed release saying the next release comes? Yeah, exactly, rather. And then and then if we can then run it for backdating? Well, that's great. But, you know, if we can do it for one release, and then do it going forward, that's better than worrying. Well, you know, did we really capture everyone in the whole history of Django isn't like being proud. It's not as relevant fact, we haven't been able to do that. Well, it'd be nice to do but don't be blocked by it
Will Vincent 34:15
know, exactly. From from even
Carlton Gibson 34:17
starting,
Kojo Idrissa 34:18
you don't want the lack of a perfect solution for everyone to to stop you from trying to attempt to to integrate on a first solution that you can then improve on going forward.
Carlton Gibson 34:29
Yeah, I've got a question about a term that you brought up a couple of times, but it'd be nice to just sort of clarify it a bit for the listeners who weren't at the keyword which says contributor mentors, and the reason why I mean, the, the let me bring it in. The way that it's appeals to me is because for quite a few years, I've been worried about the on ramp to contributing to Jango and I've never really thought more about code contributors, but I think it would apply across the board. But it can be difficult to get going started get going to You know, contributing, it's, you know, Django is not now a project where there are really low hanging fruit which use come along, snip off, and you've contributed a major new feature. And, as you said, as like, you know, as a, as a Django fellow, part of my role is to help could get people on board and help new contributors, but there's only so much time that I can allocate to that. So. So in that space, could you just say a little bit more about the contributor mentors? And, you know,
Kojo Idrissa 35:31
if I guess, let me be clear here. So this idea of contributor mentors, is it okay, I am not, I'm sure I didn't think of this. But I'm using sort of my own my own terminology here, in my own very limited, you know, partially big thinking on this. But the idea being what we currently have is, you know, with Django, and with Python, in most other open source projects, we have like the core maintainers, who have the primary responsibility of making sure that the next version of Django, the next version of Python gets released is in good working order, and gets built and gets released. So that the music, and that's their primary responsibility, that is really the primary that rests on them. When you have an open source project, we have new people who want to make contribution for various reasons. And the issue then is the only people to really sort of help those new potential contributors are the core maintainers, who already are, who are already doing, in most cases, a lot of volunteer work on their own to make sure that we get new Django, new Python, that pi keeps working and blah, blah, blah. And so how is that a puts an increased burden on our current maintainers, which increases the risk of them burning out, which is not good for any of us. But then B, it also makes the experience of trying to sort out how to contribute to the project, ie, how to help all the rest of us for free, that makes that process more difficult, you know, and so like, if you want people to help you for free, you want to try to figure out the easiest way to have that little people show up and help them for free. And so my idea of a code contributor is to sort of have it try to look at visually you have, you know, at one level, we have the coordinate tenders, and they have a primary responsibility of making sure that you know, the software is in good working order to be released. And then you have lots of new people should come in and try and interact with them to make contributions. Because the idea with attributor mentor is someone is a set of people who are sort of in between those two groups, and who is a can have a focus on helping new people get started. So that the primary maintainers of 5g I think, and again, focus in this is on actual on a software side, make sure that the primary maintenance of the equipment candidate or your they call it different than the other project, make sure the core maintainer is aren't having to, you know, to focus as much of their energy on that because they have this primary responsibility in software out. So they can help new people get on boarded, and figure out how to make contributions and what to do. And maybe also to help some triaging of tickets and things of that nature. That is the specifics will vary from project to project. But essentially, sort of acting is a buffer between the primary project maintainers and new activity or new potential contributors. And I think the new potential contributors part is important because there are people who will be excited about open source and want to show up and make a contribution. And then making sort of once they've done it once that they you know, they've been wanting that another file and they'll go off and might not ever come back might come back three years later, you know what happened you but to have the core mechanics have to divert a lot of their attention to all these people who who in many cases are transient. Attention is a limited resource. And the core maintainer has many projects as human beings have limited attention. When is on a slightly unrelated besides the tangential close up grant. One of the reasons so many people are distracted today is because we have these little attention stealing devices in our pockets all the time. You know that?
Will Vincent 39:29
Children, right? That's what they are children, because
Kojo Idrissa 39:33
if it was just children, that would be differently, but you know, even the smallest child won't fit in your pocket. And so, you know, and then the trick is like the children also have these little devices in their pockets as well. And so you have three kids, each kid has a detention distract me stealing direction, you have one of your own. So It's turtles all the way down. But in so at this point of large corporations have have focused on monetizing attention. That's how important and valuable that resource attention is. And we have our project managers who, who, again, as human beings have a limited amount of attention. And so trying to give them back some of their attention, while also providing additional attention to people who want to contribute, again, to people who want to come and help us for free. And so, you know, let us provide attention to those people who want to come and help make sure that they're new versions of Django, and then you've worked in the pipeline, and to try to help make that process as easy as possible. And so the reason it's sort of a bit half baked it is, I am obsessed with trying to sweat out the details of it. And so my experiment will be to try to make myself a contributor, mentor for for Django. And then finally, again, back to what we were talking about, as far as trying to recognize people who contributed without code. Instead of trying to come up with a perfect solution, maybe try it for one Django release. And then And then, you know, you can iterate on that going forward. That's the approach I'm going to take with this contributed metric and try to figure out what can I do and, you know, can I make myself this? Can I put myself in this role that I have in my mind, and then elaborate on that,
Carlton Gibson 41:18
just thinking about one concrete way we can try this out and your sprint chair for Gen Con you so may not be that you can play the role yourself. But maybe as sprint share, you can help drum up some people who who worked at this the Sprint's to 2019, or 2019, Django con Europe, I tried to do help help new contributors who come along to strings get started, you know, get downloading Django running the test suite, finding your ticket, this sort of thing. And I didn't have a collective way of doing that. So I did it sort of table by table, group by group and I was just destroyed, I was blown and blown out. And there was still people who were like, twiddling their thumbs didn't have anywhere to go in to do. And so at GenCon, us, we ran a workshop 2019. And it went really well that we had four tables, and we had some, but what I realized that if we had there, which I didn't really notice at times, like, sort of veteran hands, sort of placed in the audience, so to speak, on the tables helping and like smiley, Chris is one of them and some other people. And they were, they were working with the people, the genuine new contributors going through and you know, it's funny, Chris obviously knows how to run the Django test. It's been around forever in a day. But because he was there, he was able to go through it, and it worked really well. And then I was able to get around the groups. Having run it, just importantly, this this weekend, it was good, it went really well as well. But I was finding, actually, I was too many calls on my attention all at the same time. And that gets this I have this line that if you look at a ticket, you become the world expert. So a new contributor always asked me, how is it that I can as a new contributor? How can they have a voice in what the solution should be? And the answer is, because if they investigate it, they at that point, when they've spent, you know, a couple of evenings, and they've worked through it, and they've really come up, they know more about that ticket at that moment than anyone else in the whole world. And so then you know, they may not be the most experienced contributor, but the other contributors will listen to them because they know more. And that's how it becomes a conversation between the person working on it. And, you know, everybody else who's in the jam community, rather than just hey, you have to implement it this way, like but you know, the senior dev told you what to do. It's, it's not like that. And in, in the, in the sprint circumstance, because I'm busy trying to go around so many places, I can't load the individual ticket into my brain in order to have a meaningful conversation with with them at the level they're at. They're much they're far in front of me, and I haven't got the capacity at that moment to catch up. Whereas if there were, you know, a few senior, you know, more experienced developers, Django developers around in working through with them, those people would be able to go on the journey with them through the ticket and and input meaningfully and help them get closer to a to a resolution in that day.
Kojo Idrissa 44:11
Exactly. And so in that kind of thing, works very well, the development Sprint's and that's what I think so part of the idea behind distributed mentor is to try to have that role happen offline, you know, in asynchronously, because I don't I'm not sure that that is a thing, or the best thing we have. So we definitely have people who could fill that role. But perhaps some of them don't want to or perhaps some of them aren't aware that hey, like this is a thing that needs to be done. I again, back to the idea of people who contributed without code. You know, one of the values of recognizing those people is this like, oh, you recognize, hey, he was work that is being done that needs to be done. We didn't know it needs to be done because someone was just making it happen. I didn't see it. I didn't know it. And so in it Like in Florida, I spoke to people who were you starting to think about it from that standpoint as like, oh, you know, that's the thing I could do. But I didn't, I didn't really know that that was a thing that was needed per se. Or maybe they're doing it like on a, on a small scale, like with people who've been there with people that they work with. But sort of not realizing, Oh, hey, here's the thing I could be doing. And that was one of the points of the talk was to try to, to try to get that idea out there. And to point out to people, Hey, like, if you're making contributions, you should make them code contributions, or Jaga. That's fantastic, or, you know, or Python or whatever, whatever project, that is fantastic. And we're thrilled that you're doing that. Consider perhaps being someone who helps other people make code contributions to your product of choice. So that the maintainers of your product of choice, don't have to bear that burden themselves, you can, you can help some of that. And the truth is, I can so people who are just important with us at this at the development sprints on day one, who made maybe like their first contribution, or second, first or second code contribution, those people will be excellent contributing mentors, for people who are trying to make their first step and make a difference, because they're familiar with the process, as well as people who have been making code contributions over a longer amount of time, but but who also might have the mindset of I would like to help people make contributions. So I think that's important. But also, it and I think this was sort of heavily impressed upon me just about being appointed a, we, we really, really need to change the way we talk about what it means to be a contributor, because there are all sorts of other problems that came up. In like me talking to people about my talk, and but some of the language involved as far as like, there's this idea of like, you know, non coding contributors being viewed a certain way, or there's a concept introduced from not equal, but I represented both, but working in public that talks about how open source software is maintained. And there's a lot there. One of the issues that she talks about, as far as the production side is this, it was what she calls a casual contributor, which is someone who, in reality she uses like people who might like record, like a tornado, or some sort of news event on their phone in the center of a news station. And the news station uses that those people aren't planning to become recorded the cinematographer is they're just there, they've made that one contribution, and then they're gonna move on with their lives. You have casual contributors, in the same way with code with with, you know, software projects. But each of those terms can sometimes make people feel sort of sort of excluded is especially in us about this at the Piper Porter. And so this idea kind of me partially from those conversations. The idea if you have a sort of a, you call somebody category, contributor or non coding contributor, it's some it has the potential in some situations to sort of to diminish what they do, because they haven't taken on the full software engineering thing. Well, I believe in I could be misremembering this, but I feel like you and I, I think we met in January, January 2018. And this is one of the things under the wills, one of the things I remember we're talking about was the idea of making web development easier for people, you know, in general. And so, in the question tooling around that, and I feel like you and I were both at lunch, and you're talking about how you have actually be simpler, and someone at the table was like, Well, do we want this, we want those people in our community if they're not going to learn all these segments, such tools, and I feel like you and I both in stereo answer that, yes. Because like, you know, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have to, you know, you shouldn't have to know Docker and Kubernetes. And, and, you know, puppet and you know, in, you know, all this, others instructors, coaches, to know web development. And so so so to bring that back to this idea of changing the way we talk about things,
we need to I feel like that's kind of the problem is the same situation, the same underlying problem that causes people to be worried about being able to is that code contributors, or casual contributors, or noncoding contributors is the same underlying problem that makes the DSF vice president one state to say he's never contributed to Django. So I feel like that's a thing that needs to be written, that sort of cultural thing needs to be addressed within our community, because there's so many different ways that people contribute and they all need to be in it. I don't say this in a like, whoo, let's, you know, everybody gets to participate participation trophy sort of way. I say this in a from the standpoint again, as someone professionally trained in capitalism, that yes, like the salesperson or whoever, the people who contribute code, they are necessary, but without the entire rest of the team. The whole thing doesn't work. You know, it's great as Michael Jordan was, he didn't win a championship by himself, you know,
Will Vincent 50:00
Well, that's why I mean, I was so pleased to see the the most recent releases having more contributors and the steps Carlson's been taking to normalize this and recognize, I mean, I feel like it's only I don't know how many years that I've been inside of Django, I mean, five, six, like, Only now do I know all these people who do these things, but there isn't like a place where someone else could know about the event organizers about all these things. So
Carlton Gibson 50:26
okay, so if contributed mentors are going to be contributors, writ large, not just contributors, let's not have let's not, let's not let's worry about the language we use. But let's let's have contributors in the the large centering groups is all contributors. One thing that the Koch the contributor, mentor needs to have in mind is a kind of mental list of all the different jobs that get done. So the beginning of the contributing guide, we've got writing code, translating, or writing documentation. But we haven't got all
Kojo Idrissa 51:01
in so it's, I think they're in it my talk, I tried to make a separation, I try to make the separation because I think it's valid, it's important. So code contributions. And non code contributions are two different things and require different sets of skills and different mindsets. And so so so for instance, when you point out to contributor that, that's the contributor guide to the Django goes to the Django Software project that the specific actual codebase of Django. But like the things, you know, the time and DSF members, that DSF board members are doing that sort of thing, go to contribute to contribution to the larger Django project that don't involve code. And so there are different, there are different, there are different things there. And so I'm thinking of this idea of code, contributor, mentor, and a non coding mentor or some other language as far as helping people make having a class of people, these could contribute to mentors writ large, but some of the contributor Metro will focus on helping people make code contributions. And suddenly, people will focus on helping folks make non code contributions. And the we talked about, of course, the code contributions are for lack of a better term easier, because it's easy to see sort of what what needs to be done in what is done in half, the non code contributions cover a much wider range of topics, and you know, in a much more amorphous, but but the help is needed on both sides. Because again, in the same way, we see the and you hear about open source maintainers, having grown out of that sort of thing, what what the three of us know, because we had been involved in these different boards and things of that nature is that people on the non code contribution side burnout as well, you know, DSNPs, at board members, conference organizers, things of that nature, those people are running out as well. And so you're trying to make sure that help is there for them. So there's like a new generation of people being brought in to make those sorts of contributions, or, and to solve these new problems. Because, again, Django was 1718 years old now. There are issues that Django has to face. Now, I found that the face now that didn't exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and so new ideas are needed there. And that's where those those people who are contributing without code and come from backgrounds other than software engineer, it could be so can be super valuable, because we need that. We don't need just software engineers, trying to trying to solve little problems to solve these problems, their organizational problems, their financial problems, and marketing Trump then software engineering, so much software engineers, probably not the best people to solve them. Well, I
Will Vincent 53:52
think also the, I mean, the pandemic obviously, has really hurt the, the new rejuvenation of members. I mean, you know, thinking of myself, I mean, how did I get roped in, I learned Django I wrote about it, I gave a talk. And then it was at the conference in at local meetups where I got a sense of the community and then saw the needs and you know, that just hasn't been there with COVID. So there definitely is on the non code side number of people hanging on who I think are ready to, to move on and mentor people. But hopefully, there'll be parts from these conferences and other things, more people who want to come in and join and help out. So I think I guess it's I think it's a little worse than it would normally be it's it's still a challenge, but it's that's why it feels more acute. I mean, the board right, we've had the same board the last Django Software Foundation board last two years. There are multiple people who aren't going up for reelection. So there's a real chance there to have, you know, new blood and new ideas that will come up in the fall. And all these other areas as well. Translation and all the rest
Carlton Gibson 54:58
to have the conference Important this last week was just amazing. I came away thinking, oh, yeah, we need and that's it was so good just to you know rebound with people and reconnect and meet new people. You know,
Will Vincent 55:10
this this podcast, Carlton, right this podcast came out of Django con because I met you. And, you know, we had the idea like, hey, how do we replicate the hallway track? And here we are stuck with the podcast.
Carlton Gibson 55:26
Okay, so you've mentioned Heinz keynote loads of times. Cody, I have one more question for you. And we'll really so Jaime talks about at the end, he's like, also put your hands up if you're an individual member of the Django Software Foundation, so many people put your hands up, put your hand up, if you subscribe to the Django news, loot newsletter, so many people put your hands up, put your hands up, if you listen to the Django chat podcast, some more people put their hands up, but by heart by perhaps half, that was only half the people in the room. And it seems pointless. Well, the rest of you, I haven't got any channel, which I can reach you via, because we can talk about something on the podcast, and we'll inject and put it in the newsletter and the mailing list for the individual members. But that's not the entirety of the Django community. So how, what might we do that would be a low, you know, a low maintenance easy thing to do that? How might we have a channel which we can reach? More?
Unknown Speaker 56:24
Oh, I've got kind of a hard day that I've had for a while. But
Will Vincent 56:30
yeah, go for it. The mic.
Kojo Idrissa 56:35
So I think for me, it comes back to sort of this new idea of how you're talking about how to talk, but also just sort of how we behave as a community. And I'm sure, at some point, multiflow sort of become just one big draw this idea of a lot of the Django or Python communities interaction with the rest of the world. A lot of that happens at the local level. It's a local meetup level is well pointed out here the past couple of years, you know, a lot of those things have sort of gone away, there are a number of local meetups, you know, that don't really need anymore, or might have been reconstituted, or what have you. But most people aren't, and probably shouldn't, they might be with us and Python and Django, I can probably shouldn't be interacting with the PSF. The PSF is like, there's not necessarily a reason, you know, like, if you've downloaded Django, and you're you're building a site for, you know, your, your town's volleyball League, like, you know, you don't necessarily need to talk to, you know, you don't talk about every DSF board. You don't need that. But as far as what Hans mentions about short, okay, how do I reach these other people? That that's about reaching connection, I think comes from the local meetup. So like, I know that I have attended various things because I went to my local Python meetup. here in Houston. You going upstairs? I'm going to mount the Python meetup and met various people. And you know, they had certain attitudes as far as how people can use Python and use Django and contribute that sort of thing. And I know, in other cities and other places, is that same thing. So my Vinicius thing is, like, we need to change kind of how we talk about this and stuff. I have no culture because software engineering centric, it's like even within people who write code professionally, I have seen like in my own local Python meetup as the shift happened towards like web development, and even Nexus, so we had a Python meetup in Houston, it split into a Python and Django meetup because as Django became more popular, there are lots of people who use Python for non web stuff, and didn't want to sit through a bunch of Django talks. And so we had two different meetups within even within just the street pack on me that there is a sort of a split between people who were, who were sort of following newer developing software engineering trends like Docker and containerization, and things of that nature. And then there were other people who were like, Well, I've been writing Python since, like, 1998. And I've never needed to use Docker once. So like, you know, who are these people who are going to tell me that this is the way and so it's business. So there's definitely a lot of sort of leaning in one particular direction. So I think that needs to change. Because I think that's, that's how word gets back. No word from Django con Europe, and from Django con us people who the people who attend that then go home to their local meetups, and they go back to the to the Munich Python meetup into the Monty Python meetup into you know, the Lawrence Kansas didn't have me I gotta grab sisters there. Let's get this Python meetup. You know, to the Houston cat, Python meetup, and they share those ideas with people So that's kind of how, you know, that sort of a sort of the diffusion approach. But the, just the really hard part of it takes me to stop being jerks. And we need to normalize not being jerks. Like just, just because somebody's not a professional software engineer, doesn't mean they can't be part of our community. And we have to get past that there's, there's a certain amount of hero worship that comes up. Oh, it's, you know, people who are sort of enamored of the sort of the very heavy software engineering approach, and not recognize that you can use Python and Django to solve a wide range of real world problems without having these other software engineering to them. And so, I think that's just part of me sort of changing the way we talk about this stuff. And that makes its way back out to the broader community. But I think also also just sort of recognizing that like, a lot, there are a whole bunch of people who use Django and benefit from it and don't need it, you know, who doesn't you just talk with them? And they don't need to hear from him? Because like, if you didn't, you know, as long as I can download Django, and it works, and it does what I needed to do, like, you know, that you know, thank you mysterious Django people, you know, for making you this
Will Vincent 1:01:12
offer. Exactly, or will Django is free? Why aren't your books free? Well, I love that. But there is there is this guild, this guild mentality that some people have around, you know, I have a CS degree, and it should be hard. And you know, it's a big world. I mean, honestly, when I hear people getting on a high horse about something as it's just insecurity, personally, I mean, if you meet gatekeeping, yeah, gatekeeping. I mean, it's, you know, so you take it for what it is, but it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. Doesn't need to be that way. At the same time, there is that, you know, just like in organizations, there's an individual contributor to manager leap. Not everyone who tackles tickets wants to be a mentor. That's fine. Right? It is, it's a different personalities, a different thing.
Kojo Idrissa 1:02:00
But when we talk about when I'm talking with them, and I think that's something that gets missed is that there are people who have a personality such that they want to be mentors, and they would like to be mentors and like to be encouraging people. But the example there is, you know, on the blackouts, I was going to go there. So we have seen over the past month or so people in an uproar about the Little Mermaid, be the new Little Mermaid being black, and they're being black elves and Lord of the Rings. And people, you know that non black people seem to be mad about that sign outside. But so you talk about sometimes issues of representation. And when we look at within just our software communities, what is seeing is, again, the culture being heavily biased towards software engineering, but then also being heavily biased towards this individual genius, contributor sort of thing. And that's kind of that's, that's what people coming up with, for me to kind of think they need to be aspiring to. And the reality is, there's plenty of need for you to be to show up and be someone who is kind of friendly and nurturing and supportive, as a software engineer, like so you could be a software engineer who was kind and friendly, and supportive, and mentors, other software engineers to do software engineering stuff. Or you can be someone who makes code contributions, perhaps you're not intending to be, you know, have a career as a software engineer, but you can, if you have the mindset and the personality of someone who wants to help other people, and be kind of supportive and help other people grow and help yourself grow in the process, then you can become you can try to work towards becoming a code contribution, mentor and help other people do that sort of thing. But I don't know that we were seeing these examples of, you know, kind, helpful, supportive people in our coding communities. When I've seen those, we're seeing like, the, the individual lone genius, you know, I made a social, I'd like to talk to people because I'm too smart for that, because I'm doing with the Koch things that you know, normal mortals wouldn't understand this sort of like the and the, the angry Unix wizard, you know, archetype that we had that existed, like in the 70s and the 80s. Or what happened as soon as that sort of got pushed forward into this sort of lone genius, developer mindset. But but the reality is like, there's there's no motive in this apartment agenda. Okay. There was just like this one really smart person who just, you know, made all the Python or Django by themselves and continue to do that.
Will Vincent 1:04:29
If they were a jerk. They wouldn't have had people help them out. I mean,
Carlton Gibson 1:04:34
Django was built on collaboration. It was it was
Will Vincent 1:04:39
all Django. Django, especially, but I mean, even. Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 1:04:44
I'm just thinking about what you're saying. Come on. I'm thinking,
Kojo Idrissa 1:04:47
even see, by far he has built it's just been on the power of friendship. I mean, that's kind of what it is. It's people helping each other. Do a very complicated thing. Build build this this very large, complicated software that is used by billions of people all over the world. It's not just this one lone genius thing, but but we don't we don't see that part, we, you know, what we see is what sort of gets pushed the sort of the community culture and community narrative that gets pushed in some of it is also is definitely a side effect of US culture, I can say. But even like, sort of, within our specifically, there's so much emphasis on like, you know, being a brilliant developer or a 10x developer, I think, fortunately, people don't say that anymore, I don't think but you know, like being an authentic developer, or code ninja or, you know, whatever, whatever. But the reality is, if you want to be friendly, and kind and supportive to people in the software engineering community, you can do that, or in a programming community, just using Python, Django is optional, you can use that as a valid approach to take.
Will Vincent 1:05:50
Yeah, well, attitude over aptitude every day of the week, assuming there's a base aptitude, and even I, because most of my friends aren't programmers, programming, I think is unusual. And it's sort of a hive mind that you have, it's very intimate when you're seeing someone else's code, most white collar professions, you're just you hire someone's like, you got the credential, go sit in an office deal with patients, or you're a little bit of a jerk, I don't have to deal with that. But coding, if you if you have a jerk, you know, if you have a bad apple in the mix, it's gonna pollute everything. It's so much more about communication, I would say then, many other fields where you can just kind of be solo, get a credential and, and do it, you know, you have to collaborate so much more. So anyone who's a bad apple, I mean, I think of some of the people when I was at a startup and had to fire. It was probably the most brilliant programmer, but he wasn't good to work with. And we were going around and saying, Hey, this new thing who wants to work with him on it, and the entire group, no one raised their hand and we're like, Okay, well, you know, he was going to work, that's not going to work, you know, so I, I know, I hear what you're saying. I don't I don't get that same sense. But I'm not on Twitter as much. I hope it's not still that case, or I hope new, I can see how new people might feel that, you know, it's Linus or all these people but even someone like like John Carmack, like, he's not necessarily a jerk. Like he's pretty, you know? Yeah. So I hope that goes away.
Kojo Idrissa 1:07:12
John Carmack
Will Vincent 1:07:14
you maybe he's younger, he was now now he's now he's mellowed out, maybe perhaps
Kojo Idrissa 1:07:19
it's what I've seen. I haven't seen him yet. But also, I feel like in a lot of ways, he has been less visible than, say others Torvalds or, or other people like that, from the standpoint of like, people know who he is and what he's done. But he wasn't necessarily like the face of, of a major project for an extended period of time. So it seems like he was like, he was fine, just sort of doing what he did, and living his life. But does that mean, things have definitely changed as far as you know, how we interact with community again, again, the pandemic has changed so many different things. And I think we are, we are continuing to figure out what those things are, and how to do that for them. But I feel like a lot of it comes down to us as members of a community working to ensure that our community culture is just kept them on Capitol Washington, maybe that's why I have this sort of idea that any community culture that's not sort of tended or maintained, tends towards toxicity. And I feel like we might have done a little bit wrong with that, you know, without a little more tending or maybe overlooking an area of community culture that needed to be tended to maintain this idea that, okay, you know, we can't have everything and so heavily slanted towards software engineering is the one true way to use Python or Django. And also, hey, you know what, people can be kind and collaborative in all sorts of ways. You don't have to just like if you want to be calm and collaborative, with Python or Django, you don't have to just limit it to like pi laters, or Django Girls, or to some sort of like community service thing. Like you can be kind and collaborative, while helping people work on tickets in Django, or while helping people work on tickets and see Python, or while helping people figure out how to secure new funding for the PSF or for the DSF so that we can continue to have a development residential, we can continue to have Django fellows. You can be kind and collaborative in all those different ways within our community, because that's how we roll and that's what we do.
Will Vincent 1:09:28
Well, Carlton at my first talk, where he met beyond being the Django fellow was kind enough to after the talk mentioned that I misspoke on something rather than raised his hand and asked me publicly about it. So I remember that was one of my first thoughts on Carlton. I was like, That was very kind of him. I mean, I would have been fine if you call it out. But no, no, I'm
Carlton Gibson 1:09:49
just giving a talk. Excuse me. I've got a comment.
Will Vincent 1:09:52
Question. Did you know that Did you know that you're wrong? Are you just an idiot? Yeah, yeah,
Carlton Gibson 1:09:57
no, no, that's horrible when that happens Kojo, we've probably got over but super, super, thank you for joining us straight after your long flight and you know, you can go and relax but it you know, such a such a good important topic that we were desperate to have you want to kick off the new season with, you know chatting about.
Kojo Idrissa 1:10:18
Thank you, thank you, man. It's good to talk to you all just sort of in general but also good to sort of talk college and after, you know, having just seen him recently in person and like, I'll see him in a couple of you know,
Will Vincent 1:10:28
if you Risa means I'm giving a talk as well. Okay,
Kojo Idrissa 1:10:32
okay. It's gonna be it'd be good to. So I just thought about it. Yeah, I just woke up in you know, a few days ago, but it's been last Thursday. We'll also be good to see you all here in person.
Carlton Gibson 1:10:42
And we should say that Django con us in San Diego, what are the dates because I think there's just a few tickets available. If people still rush or still
Will Vincent 1:10:49
they're still online. It is. It is the 16th to the 21st of October. With the talks are so tutorials on the 16th talks 17th through 19th and sprints, 20th and 21st. And you can get hybrid, you can get online hybrid tickets, if you can't attend.
Kojo Idrissa 1:11:09
It's a hybrid event this year. So if you if you click public, you know it'd be nice for them to come. But I also realized it's a little late, you know, a month before the end to try to plan a trip from Europe to North Korea. But they're also it's hybrid winter, they're online tickets available. So that is always the thing. Yeah, I have different dates in my head because I'm arriving. I'm moving back for the different times. It's a capital gain as a company organizer, and then you know is rush to play.
Will Vincent 1:11:38
Yeah, different dates. So thank you, Kojo. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We are Django chat.com, chat Django on Twitter. And we'll see you all next time. Bye bye bye.