Tim is the Secretary of DEFNA, the organization that runs DjangoCon US each year. He is also a founder of Djangonaut.space, maintainer of django-debug-toolbar, Google Summer of Code mentor, and more. We discuss last week’s conference, current changes afoot in the Django community, his day job working at an education analytics company, and more.
Carlton Gibson 0:00
This episode of Django chat is sponsored by talk Python and their new htmx courses. The links in the show notes, and we'll tell you more about them later.
Will Vincent 0:12
Hi. Welcome to another episode of Django chat podcast on the Django web framework. I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson, hello, Carlton.
Carlton Gibson 0:19
Hello Will!
Will Vincent 0:20
And we are joined.
Tim Schilling 0:21
I've always been, well, you too. I was gonna say I've always been curious how that gets recorded. Like, is that, like, actually recorded, or is that all live? Like, then seeing the pause and they're like, this is yeah, we do it live,
Will Vincent 0:36
yeah, yeah. Bill O'Reilly style, yeah. I don't know if we want to keep this in or not. But anyways,
Tim Schilling 0:42
we in or not, but anyways,
Carlton Gibson 0:44
this week we've got with us. Tim, shitting out YouTube,
Tim Schilling 0:47
I'm doing great, like, the last the first time I met you. I just want to point out because, like, that little bit of Surrealism was in San Diego and going to dinner, and I'm just sitting out there in the front and you two come by and you're like, Oh, you want to go to go to dinner and end up in the back of a van with both of you and just looking around, what is going on here? So, yeah, so now seeing the actual recording
Carlton Gibson 1:10
of it, it was cool. That's good. Yeah, okay, we
Will Vincent 1:14
want to talk about DjangoCon us, because you were an organizer Carlton and I spoke. It was a couple days ago, and I've I just wrote up a little recap, maybe I'll put in the show notes. But I've been thinking about, you know, first conference, second conference. I think this is sixth or something for me. And I vividly remember the first one I ever went to was in San Diego. It was there three years total, so, but that first year didn't know anyone, you know, you're sort of milling around in the evening like I don't have any friends, and then people just appear in the lobby. And often it's like, yeah, let's, let's go to dinner somewhere. So it's very organic and very, very friendly, in a way that other tech conferences aren't as much.
Tim Schilling 1:55
Yeah, I have no idea what other tech conferences are like. I just know I was walking down the hallway and Carol gone, uh, recommended, hey, go down to the lobby. You'll find people eat there. And so I did that. And yeah, everything kind of was great after that, so once I learned that superhero trick. So
Carlton Gibson 2:12
it was, yeah, Was that your first before we talk about this year? Was that your first entry into sort of like the wider Django community? Tim,
Tim Schilling 2:19
yes, yeah, it was. I was I was trying to think of a different one. And, no, it was, it's really that, which,
Will Vincent 2:24
which year was that? Was that 20? I was 22 Oh, wow. Okay, yeah,
Carlton Gibson 2:30
so you get
Will Vincent 2:32
so I know, yeah, you just show up. I had a plan,
Tim Schilling 2:36
yeah, no, it, I kind of had a plan coming into it. And then Kojo had his orientation where he's like, Hey, know what you're here for. And so did some quick reflection, and, yeah, tried to make the best of it, and just dove both feet in and haven't really looked back.
Carlton Gibson 2:52
It's amazing that you've only been really in, like, active in the community for those two years then, because it seems like you're everywhere and involved in everything and being massively, so that's just super what a great effort. Yeah.
Tim Schilling 3:03
I mean, it started back in like, 2000 like, so I was answering questions on Stack Overflow for many years, and then the forum, and then the discord, and then I became a moderator of discord, and then, yeah, then it was really the 22 jencon US Conference, and then Django, not space, and defna and an organizer, yeah, so everything kind of just snowballed. But yeah, I've kind of been around on the edges, just not as deep into it as I am right now.
Will Vincent 3:35
And you meant 2020, right? I mean, because you don't look like you've been involved since 2000 you're a bit younger than us? No,
Tim Schilling 3:42
no, yeah. Sorry, 2020, yeah. Okay. Well, so DjangoCon.
Will Vincent 3:48
One of the things is, everyone has a different experience. There's the first time experience, there's this speaker experience, but there's also the organizer experience. Maybe you could touch upon that. You know, how did you get involved? What is, what is that like? Because I know from talking to, you know, Jeff Triplett specifically, who helped run it for years, it's just wildly different when you're behind the scenes, making things happen, as opposed to, you know, just showing up. Yeah,
Tim Schilling 4:13
it I didn't really process this until I just Lacey, he did an interview with Jay Miller, and I just watched it recently, and she was talking about how her perspectives on Jenga cons have changed. Where Originally she was there for, like, the technical talks, and then she became more involved in the organization, like, that's where she ended up skewing to. And I realized, like, that is exactly what happened this year. I the first two years, I had pages and pages of notes from every single technical talk this year, not so much trying to manage, like the organization side of things, and keep up with the communication check and make sure that everybody else is having the conference that they're intending to have. Kind of you have to take that from somewhere, that focus has to come from somewhere. And so a lot of it. Like, that deep thinking during the talks. So now I'll have to go back and re watch them and really consider, like, what they were. So there were a couple that stuck out, but like, those were, like, more of the emotional ones, some of the technical ones were a little bit harder for me to grok fully. But yeah, other than that, like, it was great. It this year went a lot smoother for me than last year. I took some advice and tried to step back and not do so much. So that was really nice. We were able to do a couple of new things that I'm proud of. There's the interviews that I just referenced. Nate Zeger. Nathan. Zeger was helping organize those, and we'll be releasing those over the next couple of weeks, and I'm really excited about those. And then, yeah, we had the hackathon this year. Yeah, there was a bunch of new things that we added that were that were pretty cool. I remember,
Will Vincent 5:49
I just wrote up my recap, and a lot of it is not focusing on the talks. I mean, it is a little bit because I want to link to them later, but it becomes, I remember my first year, I felt like I had to, I go to every single talk, go to every single thing. And so I ended up staying inside for like, three, four days. People were like, what was San Diego like? And I was like, I don't know. Like, took airport to here, and then I basically didn't leave. And then the next year, I think that's when Carlton, you and I did the biking. We did
Carlton Gibson 6:18
bike down to the sea every morning.
Will Vincent 6:21
Yeah, because E, E Durbin had, I'd seen he had done that. Like, wow. Like, that's a good idea. So we went out in the mornings. And then now I feel like I'm, I'm almost like, at the other extreme, where writing up my recap, it seems like nothing, but, you know, walks and coffees and then a little bit of the talks. But I think that's because the talks, I still went to a lot of talks, but I know that I can see them online after and there's, it's about meeting people, and it's also about pacing yourself and not being overwhelmed by everything. I think, as well,
Carlton Gibson 6:53
like you might, you might put in the technical talks, you might pick up some sort of high level strategic things, but the sort of lower level tactical things. You've got to re watch the videos, and you know, you're not going to capture those as the talks are going on. I mean, well, you might, but that's hard work.
Will Vincent 7:07
Well, no, I was like, you Tim, I have like, pages and pages of notes for my first DjangoCon because it was, it was like, you know, being in grad school. But I didn't, I don't know if I knew that the talks were gonna be, I don't think I knew the talks were gonna be online later, or somehow it didn't click for me, that I could just absorb it and then, yeah, go back and dive in later like it wasn't going to completely and so now, actually, that's what I do. I try to make a point of watching basically every talk from DjangoCon Europe and US, and then I have, like, a whole note section, because otherwise I'm not going to remember anything. But then I can be like, Oh, what was that talk? You know? What was that talk? You know? What was that code snippet? And, yeah, it's a lot. Makes everything a lot more enjoyable, and you don't feel like you have to write things down or you'll forget it.
Tim Schilling 7:49
I that one of the technical talks I really enjoyed, though, was Ryan Chili's agriculture one. That one hit pretty close to home, like I was there with a couple of employees. And afterwards, we were talking about, like, yeah, we might have a few of those, and we're just kind of letting smolder for a bit here. But yeah,
Carlton Gibson 8:09
I've not got too much done since I came home, but I have been turning off a few of those and tweaking them and like, Oh, I'll create an issue for that, rather than just having it every day. Oh, yeah, it's still that's still life, that's, well,
Will Vincent 8:22
that's the benefit of a break, right? You come back and certain things, like, I should really do something about these, you know, ongoing things that that bug you. So, yeah, yeah, we had, we Jeff Triplett and I run the Django news newsletters, which we put out during the conference or tried to, and it was having one of its periodic issues on Friday. And so I think was a combination of, like, being tired, being home, new he and I are both ready to just like, rip it all up and switch to some other platform. And we, yeah, you came out with a new perspective. There's some things that might be changing. There some that's fun. Well, cools
Carlton Gibson 9:04
are always bug free, right? Yeah,
Will Vincent 9:05
what? It's sort of like, um, it's like, um, a murder mystery. I don't know. Maybe I'll tell the story another time with how it all plays out. But there's some interesting things with how, yeah, curated and other things. Carlton knows I've, I've complained to him about it, but we'll see how it all shakes out. But we we got someone we're like, is this a zombie project that we're we've been using for five years and paying, like, real money to and we found someone involved. And, yeah, when I sort that all that out, we'll tell that tale. But you know, the point is, you come at it these everyday things, and you're like, you know, maybe we should do it differently. Yeah,
Tim Schilling 9:40
that's a that's a big one to change, though, for a project like, Well,
Will Vincent 9:46
okay, well, not really. I mean, we have the email addresses like, we don't. It would be as simple, you know, I actually already moved it over to to something else, but it would just be about giving the Django. Know, the Django knots access and be a little bit of a hassle, but it's not, it's not that, like, there's no payments that go through it, because we have sponsors, like, that's all separate. So, you know, it's weighing up the annoyance of change versus the annoyance of three times in six months, no, a newsletter not going out. And then this time, at least though, Jeff and I both wrote some pretty frustrated emails for us, and we actually got a response. And then, yeah, found out that, trying to figure out the ownership structure of it right now, which when I have that nailed down, I'll talk about it. But,
Tim Schilling 10:41
yeah, I'm always shocked whenever people send like, hey, Django newsletters, amazing. It's great. And then Jeff responds back with, well, I didn't even realize, like, people read it that much. I'm sitting there like, No, this is fantastic. This is a really core piece of of our community that that's required almost at this point. So, yeah, well, that's, I
Will Vincent 11:01
mean, that's the benefit of Django Conrad, is all these digital friends and colleagues. You get together and you hear just a couple token Hey, thanks for thanks for organizing the conference. Tim like, thanks for all these packages. Thanks for helping out, right? I mean, you don't get that, right? I mean, GitHub, stars, or listens, you know, you don't. I mean, I can speak for the, you know, the podcast, like Carlton and I, every once in a while, we get an email or something, but absent Django cons, it's almost like it doesn't exist beyond the people we're interviewing, right? Because it's like, I see some numbers, but I don't know, unless someone says something, same thing with the newsletter, right? It's just like, Okay, I mean, I see that it goes to 1000s of people, but until someone says something, you might as well not
Tim Schilling 11:43
so I've got a question for both of you then, along the vein like, how important are Django cons to the Django community?
Carlton Gibson 11:53
I just think they're utterly essential. Like I often tell the story of how I kind of really got deeper into Django. I was using it for years and years and years. And years and years, but I never went to any events, because I'd been to tech conferences in my early career. And they were, they were okay, but they weren't particularly great. And lots of things that we pride djangocons being about, well, these events weren't like that. And so I and then, I don't know, I saw the Django Under the Hood events come out, and I was like, oh, I should have gone to, I could have gone to those, but they sold out quickly, and I missed them. And then the year after, I think, DjangoCon was in, like, Florence. I was like, I can go to Florence. And I went. And the talks were, you know, there were technical tools, sure, but the talks were on things like cognitive biases and diversity hiring and, like all these just topics I hadn't even really considered, right? And I literally think of it as changing my life. I was like, Yes, I'm home. This is where I want to be. This is I don't want to engage in. And at the time, I was at an inflection point in my career. I was, I'd been, I'd had a kind of five years or so of building mobile app front ends with Django back ends, and that was a nice niche, but at the time, it was getting harder and harder to maintain that, and I either had to specialize more on the mobile front ends or specialize more in the Django. And I remember going to that conference being like, well, Which am I going to do? And it was very much the conference that made me say, No, I'm okay. I'll double down on Django. And yeah, it was literally life changing. And I met all these people, and I engage more with the community. And every year it refreshes it. And every year you go and you see these fun you're like, oh, how are you? And that is magic, and it's irreplaceable.
Will Vincent 13:32
Yeah, is that where you gave that you will? I just wanted to ask Carlton, did you give a talk at the first one, the growing old gracefully? Or was that the no, that the No, that was the next year. Was it also in Florence? For some
Carlton Gibson 13:43
reason? Yeah, no, that was in Heidelberg the following year. But basically, I came away from, I came away from DjangoCon. You 72,017 being like I got, got to submit a talk for the next one, you know. And then
Will Vincent 13:58
was it 2018 when you gave the talk on in Heidelberg, I guess, because it would have been the spring, right? Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm just trying to say, which is my first talk six years ago, because I I'll answer your question, Tim, but I've always found Carlton because I saw that talk, so I probably because I was going through the videos, and I emailed you, I believe. And so then DjangoCon, 2018 us, my first one, I gave a talk. I sort of knew who Carlton was. And then he came up after the talk and said hi and had feedback. And then that, you know, here we are now. So,
Carlton Gibson 14:37
you know, it's always like a great love was, cool. You
Will Vincent 14:41
never, I mean, Carlton will know this every year. I'm, it's a hat. It's, it's a big ask to go to a conference like, it's a lot of time. It's, it's money and stuff. And I have, I can sort of talk myself out of it, but every time I go, all these good things happen. And it's often after, you know, it's not, you know, I can't evaluate the conference based. And how I feel, you know, the week after, as we are now, it's like the weeks and months and getting to know people, and then, you know, just having, just having a meal or coffee with someone later, when you interact with them online, you you know, they're a human being, right? So it just makes it a lot easier. You can understand, oh, they, you know, maybe this is how they're thinking about things, because you've had conversations about and you have a just, you know, just a sense of them as a as a full person, not just this name out there that's helping or hindering what you want to do with Django or with code. It's absolutely same experience for me. I've been, I've been to a PyCon, I've been to some tech conferences in San Francisco when I was out there, but nothing, nothing like a DjangoCon. See
Tim Schilling 15:42
those comments that I could always make me worried about going to other conferences then, because, like, there's, there's a couple that I know in, like the conference chats group, like I would if they're there and there's the organizers there, I'm willing to go to those conferences. Yes, I, I have that bit of trust in them, and that's willing to spend the money and the time to go do it, but it took a lot for me to go to that first DjangoCon. Like it was really a decision. Like, Nope, I am investing a lot of my career into this. And like, let's see what happens. Yeah, part of the question behind, the reason behind that question was, do you both then feel like you both agreed that like hey, personally and community wise, like Django cons mean a lot. Do you feel like we accurately represent those within the community, like the sorry, do we accurately reflect that importance within the community of like djangocons kind of keep things together moving forward? Oh,
Carlton Gibson 16:42
parcel, now, yeah, I mean, what? Well, I don't quite understand the concern. Like, yes, they're big things, right? And we a lot of effort goes into them. A lot of promotion goes
Tim Schilling 16:52
into them. But it's more of like, could we be doing more of really leaning into jank recon? So if, if we know that they're important, and we know that this is where community members get together, and they build that level of trust, so we can have those difficult conversations, like, I think was the last episode YouTube were talking about the the auth change and how we might be able to get a decision made at DjangoCon, because we're gonna have a bunch of people DjangoCon us because we have a bunch of people. We have a bunch of people in the room, and we can kind of hash out a bunch of these differences and hopefully arrive at a solution that moves us forward. And so, like, this is a common trend in these conferences, but I don't know if we're I think everyone within it, we all know that this is true, but are we actually actively marketing it and telling people like, Hey, if you want to be a part of this, like you need to be here, like you really should be here if you really want to invest into the community, if you want to integrate yourself into the community, and then also making sure, like the people that are in the community that we are trying to help support, Like, are we helping them get to these so that's kind of where I'm Yeah, yeah.
Will Vincent 18:05
I mean, yeah, you said the magic word marketing. And you know, I just gonna say, like, I mean, Jacob Kaplan moss gave a talk this year on what would the Django Software Foundation do with a million dollars. And one of the big takeaways was was having an executive director to do things like that that fall through the cracks. You know, we could also do things like put the conferences on the homepage of Django project, right? Like I we could when we don't track the statistics, but I would venture that the number of people who see the news community section of the website is point something percent. You know that's that's kind of why, that's why the newsletter exists. That's why the podcast exists. I would rather the newsletter be a Django newsletter, so maybe I should, Jeff and I should push harder for that, like we've offered to run that for Django. But I think the reality is it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of, you know, I think the ongoing volunteer commitments are difficult. That's why we have the fellows role, which I thought Natalia gave a really great talk about it this year. But yeah, Mark marketing shining the light on, you know, organizers, like, I didn't, I didn't know that volunteers ran the first DjangoCon when I was there. I just like, Oh, it's a conference, you know, I didn't realize it was like, nope, nobody's getting paid. It's, it's just right. And then as you get into it, you start to see, and, you know, however we can shine a light on the people who are making Django happen, the better, but I think it's easy. You know, it's running a conference, doing code, doing community, doing docs. You know, Sarah Boyce gave an amazing talk on accessibility features in Django, five point x, but we basically don't talk about them, because by the time we've done everything involved, everyone's just exhausted, right? And so that last bit that if we were a commercial and. Prize or something, would get all the focus instead, all the focus is on the meat and not on the sizzle. Yep, that's what I would say, Carlton, what's, what's your take? Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 20:08
no, exactly that. Like there was this line, I think, from Emmerich, well, years ago, that Django is, it's a framework, but it's like an ecosystem around that framework, and it's a community around that. And the biggest part is the community. And then the ecosystem, and then the framework is the least of it, but the framework is the only bit that we have on the website. And if you come along as a Django a new Django Dev and you find the website, you managed to download it, you managed to go through the tutorial. You kind of don't even know that there's this ecosystem around it, like we finally Tim, you managed to get Django debug toolbar into the tutorial as that final step, it's, oh, look, there is, there are these third party packages, and here's one, and look, there's a there's a site that tells you about more and that. But that was a major change for Django to even just even hint that there are all these third party packages. And could we perhaps hint that there was a community that raised, in fact, the best bit about it. But
Will Vincent 21:01
this change, this change is happening. I mean, this was the discussion Carlton, I had a little bit with the fellows, and then we had even further. We had dinner with them at the conference. I mean, the fact that there's people like you, Tim, right, there's people who are new the community, who are stepping into these major, major roles. Because, especially during covid, there was, there was, there was definitely a changing of the guard. I mean, Carlton spoken of, especially when he was fellow some of the founding figures were stepping away a little bit, which makes sense. But there wasn't that next generation. And I feel like now we have, we have it or we have it more so. So change is happening, you know, we're, there's a ticket open to add user profile models, you know, all these, I think, because a lot of people who did so much work back in the day are slightly less involved, but can still inadvertently be a block on change. And so having these in person conferences, seeing newer people come in, nobody wants to be a block, but we kind of need, you know, new ideas, new enthusiasm, you know, reconsider things, you know. So that forum post my talk was on auth. I think most people, when they step back and think about it, like, yeah, we, why don't we have a template for login? So we have built in login. It's, I don't think it's controversial. It's just hasn't been done. And then the whole awe thing was, there were, there was a big, not fight, but discussion about it, you know, 12 years ago. And a lot of the people who were involved with it then have scar tissue from that. But,
Tim Schilling 22:31
yeah, you know, it's, it's hard. Natalia ran a a code review session during the sprints of because that's one of the needs right now. Of the Fellows is they need other experienced devs to come in and leave code reviews on things, and one of the PRS she pulled up was this verb changing the variable names to be more straightforward. And then there was a comment about performance, and immediately I'm just thinking like, oh my goodness, like that this is so difficult to try to reason about. And like, this is just one small change that isn't functional. It's literally, if you're reading, just happen to be reading this one function, this will help, but then you have to have how much time of investment over how many people, and that's just it. It was mind boggling, right then, of how much time it goes into changing any bit of this code. And then, when you make it much larger, of talking about models and like a core part of like the developer experience, yeah, I can see it's
Carlton Gibson 23:32
going to take a while. One of the things that I've come increasingly to thinking, it's not just a new thought, but it's been brewing for ages, but it came up at the end of my talks. Daniele asked me a question about, I know about getting new features into Django, or something around that thing, he'd asked a very similar question when I gave the talk in Vigo, and I'd been reflecting on it, and I'd read a few essays, and there's this idea of having like the kernel, kernel Django, kernel Django, like the core bit that's small and tight and difficult to mint, difficult to edit, and difficult minute and then around that, we have got the great third party ecosystem. And that's all fine, except, again, nobody knows what to you know if you're a newcomer, how do you know what to install from the third party ecosystem. And so Django is philosophy of batteries included, sort of fades away and dies unless we find a way. Well, either we have to pile it all into Django, in which case it's hard to maintain and it can't be done because we can't make changes quickly to Django, or we have to find a solution to this problem, this messaging problem, about Hey, and if you need, I don't know if you need rate limiting, there's option one and option two for rate limiting. If you need debug tooling, there's these options for debug tooling. If you need two factor auth, there are these packages that are all worth looking into. We need to solve that problem so that a newcomer arriving at the Django project has some. Guidance, and doesn't have to go and find, say, awesome Django on the GitHub repo, like low, millions of people don't even, never even know about this awesome, awesome X projects, right? We can't be relying on that as our information distribution channel.
Will Vincent 25:14
I mean, curation is tough, right? Like this is, I mean, when you're on the board, right? I mean, just historically, Django hasn't wanted to put its finger on anything which makes a certain amount of sense, but has these drawbacks. And I think, I think that's one of the lines I just say I'm on the blind sides of blindsides, blind sites, whatever it is of Django or these conferences, is most of the people there are deeply involved with Django, and you can forget these, you know, how international it is, you know these, how off putting some of these things are to newcomers, which people aren't trying to be. But our concerns as developers are different than new people, and we sort of lose that perspective over time. I mean,
Carlton Gibson 26:00
it's also the counter argument. Sorry to just sorry. There's a slight lag on the thing. But the the counter argument was always look, if we put in a list of packages in the to the docs, and then they stop being maintained, and we've got to constantly update that that list. And that's not a trivial task, either. So it's, I don't know exactly what the solution is. But there's the dilemma. It's
Tim Schilling 26:24
also like on the other side too, of you want to start contributing to that ecosystem. So you start writing blog posts, you start creating a package. How do you get the rest of everybody to know about it? Like, if you're not in the in group, it's really hard for people to take you, I wouldn't say take you seriously, but to give you to invest the time to research it and provide you, like, critical feedback and stuff. And so it's, yeah, there's challenges on both sides of it. By not having a standard, like, Hey, this is where you go for community, like third party like, this is where you go and submit your your blog posts for greater reach. And,
Will Vincent 27:01
yeah, we can't rely on just me and Jeff randomly seeing something and making a, well, that's a quick call.
Tim Schilling 27:09
After 2023 that DjangoCon. Like, I was like, I'm gonna create Django Cairn. Like, that's, that's my idea. Like, the central index of all the Django knowledge and, like, have some curation in it. And, yeah, never got anywhere. But, like, it's that need is still there. I just there's other things I'm investing my time in right now.
Will Vincent 27:26
Well, can we talk about Django Commons? Because I think that ties into some of this third party stuff. So give us the pitch.
Tim Schilling 27:33
Yeah, so Django commons, I think the working tagline is, like, the last place you'll need to transfer your project to. Theoretically, it's going to be, ideally, we want it to be a home for Django and Python packages, so that you know that package will have a good chance of always being maintained like we can't guarantee there's always going to be a maintainer for things, because that's not our purview. But we're going to work our hardest to make sure that we're identifying packages that do maintainers and help new people become maintainers and try to ease that logistical burden around maintaining software. So it we we've learned a lot from other solutions in the ecosystem, like jazz band did a lot of things, has done a lot of things really well and continues to so we've copied a lot of our organization from there, but the main difference was we started with a group of people at the administrator level at the top, to create that redundancy and create a success like an immediate succession plan. So everything we have to do, we have to allow multiple people to have access to it, and by confronting that from the beginning, then it's easier to be like, alright, we can onboard somebody. We can remove someone. And then that, that idea then permeates down, and then yeah. So I held, I don't want to say community interview, but like, kind of asked who would be interested, and I had 10 or 12 people respond, yeah, Carlton was one of them. And yeah, we had, like, a list of responsibilities. And the four people that I ended up going with were the they were the ones that had responded like, yes to everything, wanting to be involved with the community, like responding to questions, reaching out to maintainers, reaching out to new people, like, I felt that at least in the initial phase, we need to be really strong on the community aspect of trying to maintain relationships and set up those organizational flows so that, like later on, people have then processes and workbooks or playbooks to be like, Oh, we just need to go implement This now. And so that's kind of the idea behind it. This
Carlton Gibson 29:43
episode of Django chat is sponsored by talk Python. Are you serious about getting better at Python than web development? They have over 250 hours of courses, including their new HTML course, whether it's Django core Python or tooling you want to learn, you can save 10% and get a great course@talkpython.fx Forward slash Django chat listeners with hyphens. Level up your Python and support the shown show. Level up your Python and support the show with the talk Python. Course, links in your podcast, players, show notes. Now I think there's that's probably quite wise, in that we've historically Chad the hero does code by themselves approach, and that's worked very well, and that goes very so far, but it's it reaches its limits, and there's those difficulties about succession. That's the key. How do we hand off to the new generation? That's I've heard this topic come up just a billion times recently, but baking the community in from the start is exact, reversing the framework, ecosystem, community. It's like, well, let's go, let's go community ecosystem framework and see if that works better. I
Tim Schilling 30:46
mean, it's also the only way I can write do community things like Django, Cairn didn't go anywhere because I was the only one working on it. But then, like, the debug toolbar has been really fun to maintain with Matthias, we have a co writing group, and then we meet every six months just talk about the project. We've recently added a couple new maintainers, and then Django not space is so much more fun because we have a group of administrators. We now have some new session organizers. And then Django Commons like it helps create that accountability, but then it also creates that connection. And then when you go to the jam cons and see people's faces, and you get to connect with them, and yeah,
Will Vincent 31:21
it's a lot of fun. I think it also just gives you that outlet where, if it when it's just you, it just be, it can easily become overwhelming, and at some point you think, I'll just stop for a little bit, and then you kind of stop, stop, you know? I mean, I certain this podcast with Carlton, the newsletter with Jeff. I mean, even the awesome Django repo, Jeff came in. I forget, like, two, three years ago, because I was feeling overwhelmed. And, you know, when it's a non paying, you know, community thing, it's very easy to just be like, throw your hands up. But if you just have that little bit of help, it gets you over the edge. Can we talk about Django, not spaces, though, because that, I feel like we've talked about some of the challenges here. This is this unbelievable success story that, yeah, came from, you know, this new generation of people who are like, we should do something and and actually did it. And now the thirds, the thirds cohort, just closed the right,
Tim Schilling 32:18
yep. We just sent out the announcements to people who were selected. Yeah, it's Yeah, another, another DjangoCon product, Rachel and Dawn. I think it was after 2022 I think that was the one, whichever one Rachel was on the panel at the end. I think it was 2022 they realized, like, hey, we we should have something to help people get contributing. Like, start contributing, yeah. And from there, like, it kind of grew. They added Sarah abdomen, and then Sarah Boyce and I joined. A couple months after that, then we had the little pilot program. And now, yeah, we're on session three. We now have, we session two. We had one new session organizer, Tisha Gupta, and this session, we now have three new session organizers helping Priya POA, I'm sorry for pronouncing your name wrong, Priya, and then Lillian Tran and Emmanuel catchy, so it's it's really exciting to see people, like, go through the program, advance up and like, take more and more ownership, and now being to the point like actually helping us out, because that the organizers of Django, not space like, haven't stayed static. Like, Dawn's now president of the PSF board. Sarah abdomen is on the DSF board. Sarah Boyce is a Django fellow. Like it people keep moving. So, like, we there was a vacuum growing. Like, we need to pull people up and help out. And so it's, it's really exciting to see, see that happen real time Well, and that's,
Will Vincent 33:47
I think that's the life cycle built in right where it's expected and celebrated that people can do different things but still be involved, I mean. And even something as simple as the Sarah Boyce started on the Django newsletter. She was like, hey, because she was on the review and triage team at the time, like, why don't we celebrate all the PRs? And we're like, that's a great idea. And she's like, and I'll do it for a while, so, you know, and that's turned into a regular feature in the newsletter, and a bunch of the Django knots, and Rafael has done it a lot recently. And that's a perfect, I think, a perfect example where it's not just an, you know, it's like, yes, we should do it, and someone raises their hand and takes it on, and there's a way to have some continuity. So that's, yeah, I think the beautiful thing, right, if we could mimic that like you can't. And this ties into Carlton's initial talk of growing old gracefully, like you can't. It's unreasonable to expect the hero model into it's off, you know, it's off putting initially, and it's off putting long term, when people when that, you know, the it's almost like the burnout thing, right? It's like it just builds up, builds up, builds up. And if there's no release, you just throw your hands up and walk away, you know, unless. Unless, unless you're actually getting paid for it, which almost none of us are. Yeah,
Tim Schilling 35:04
I was gonna say that getting paid for it opens a whole host of other issues. Well, I don't want to go down that channel. Well, ignore that. Speaking
Will Vincent 35:10
of relatively unpaid things, can you talk about mentoring Google Summer code this past year? Because I feel like this is something that's really, really, hidden within the Django community. I mean, I only knew about it from Carlton mentioning it because he was mentoring, and it's this long running thing that's had major changes, and yet has basically no visibility, as far as I'm concerned. So how did, how did you get involved with that, and what was your experience like?
Tim Schilling 35:39
So I basically, when I came back to helping maintain the debug toolbar, one of the first things Matthias and I talked about, or shortly after, was making the toolbar async compatible. Because at the time, like, everything was moving async, and we were fearing, like, hey, we need to make sure, like, the developer tools are compatible with this new paradigm, and the toolbar is one of the most popular ones, like we need to make sure that we're not a bottleneck. And so we had came up with the project. We had done some work on it, but it kept stalling. And yeah, for the last three years, I've been submitting it as a project for Google Summer of Code, and this year we had, I think it was two submissions, and we ended up selecting aman pandies, and he did a fantastic job. We actually had so it was on the mentor side. It was myself, Matthias custom holes, Daniel Harding, and then alanita. And alanita was a Django, not from Django, not space session one, which was really exciting for me. And then, yeah, Aman had previously done a Google, Google Summer of Code with wagtail. And yeah, recommended them. And yeah, it went really well. It was fun to see his ideas. And like, pushing things forward, and like, the actual direction of the project changed as well. Because originally it was, like, the Serializable version of it, which we still need to do, but Amman identify, like, oh, we can't even run the toolbar in an async fashion. Like, we should start there. And so, yeah, we moved over there. We got as many of the panels to be async compatible. Like, there's a couple that aren't, like profiling. We have to swap out what does that underneath the hood, because that's just not async compatible. Or we have to, it's a little tricky. Yeah, I'm really proud of Amman and the team's work on it, and I agree, like, there's, it's another thing where we're not, we don't have the visibility into it, because, like, there were four really big projects, and I'm gonna plug Jacob on space once more. Shafia, she did the JSON. It was sage Abdullah, his mentee, Shafilea, was a part of jungle, not space. I believe it was actually our pilot program. So that's, yeah, it's really good to see, like things just kind of come full circle, and all the connections between things
Will Vincent 37:52
well, and sage gave a talk on this this year. But that's, that's one, right? Carlton, you and I sit back and, you know, smoke our virtual pipes because he was, you know, he was just a college student who did Google Summer code, who became a core contributor on wagtail, and now he's mentoring and, and that's, you know, if not for those entryways, he wouldn't be part of the Django Community, right? So, yeah, yeah. That's a huge success story. Yeah, yeah.
Carlton Gibson 38:24
And, you know, just from the code point of view as well, that the cross dB, JSON field, one example, the Redis, but the back end, another example, these bits of code that need, you know, a dozen weeks to get done, they literally wouldn't exist if it wasn't for, you know, Google Summer of Code, and that's over the years. It's enabled a number of projects in the Django ecosystem. I
Will Vincent 38:47
mean, imagine if we had Django Summer of Code. I mean, because the thing is, Google provides the visibility, but the funding is not super high.
Tim Schilling 38:56
So I would also push back the phrase of summer of coding, because, well, yes, yeah, the hemisphere I learned about that, yeah, but I can't change Google. I can affect us, no, but to the community and the marketing aspects. Mario his keynote on community, I was talking to him after it, and he was saying, like, why don't we celebrate the people who are involved in, like the releases and stuff. And his example to me was, if you are on the craft services team, you stay through that entire list of credits just to see your name on the screen at the very end. We could do something similar, like on each one of our release notes, or at least on the major releases of having a credits, or at least crediting like the fellows that are part of it, and then eventually start adding the list of everyone who's contributed to that and, like, what their contributions were, yeah, so that people, rather than just saying, like, Hey, I've got these commits and linking to GitHub, like, you can link to djangoproject.com and be like, well,
Will Vincent 39:53
we need someone to do that. Other than that, well, no,
Carlton Gibson 39:55
it already exists, right? So, like this, this just. Just needs, I'm going to say just needs, right? There is no just needs here, but this just needs a teeny bit more life. Was Katie McLaughlin built a tool which goes, not only pulls the GitHub commits and who the committers are, which is relatively easy to do, but it goes through track and it looks at who's commented on all the issues, and it pulls those people out. And I think it even hits the forum API, you know, it goes through and it finds the wider set of contributors, you know, because lots of people just leave an insightful comment and that leads to the solution, but they don't get a credit because they're not a Git contributor for, you know, they're not the Git committer for that. They've done all. Katie's done almost all of this work, and it just needs, just needs, like, that little bit of life force to get it over the line. And we, you know, I was working with them to get it done, and I, I failed, and, you know, I ran out of life force. And it never happened for, I know, 4.2 but the tooling, it's there, it exists, and it's, it's ripe to be picked up. And we could, so work so very well create something like this that's much richer than just the list of the Git committers. Much richer, richer. Yeah,
Tim Schilling 41:06
I don't, I don't doubt that we have things like partially done and like that. I'm not saying, like anyone here has to go do that. It's also throwing things out there because someone might be listening like, Oh, I could do that. And then even if you can't do it, yeah,
Will Vincent 41:19
sorry. Should someone email Katie and say, Can I pick that up? Is that the next step? Well,
Carlton Gibson 41:25
we, we should do something along those lines. Hey, you know, because Katie's got this tool, it's like a meeting. Like, we
Will Vincent 41:31
can't just, we can't just complain. We have to, like, end with action items and be like, and you do this, and you do this, you do this, and
Tim Schilling 41:39
I don't want more action items. That's that's not what I was. I
Will Vincent 41:43
know. I know. We don't action we want a clear path, right? Because you can only have the same discussion so many times without saying, Okay, let's just identify what a solution would
Carlton Gibson 41:52
look okay. I can't commit Katie, but I can commit myself. So if somebody listening wants to help pick up that project up, ping me, and I will communicate with Katie and see if we can pick up something in that domain, because it needs to be. It's so close, and it was, you know, a couple of years ago, and life was different. Let's try now. But
Tim Schilling 42:12
I don't think it has to like, the point I'm trying to make here now, the newer point I'm trying to make is like, it doesn't have to be the whole solution that you implement. Either like, you can do half a solution, or, like, just do, like, what the front end would look like, and be like, I need help populating this. Once you already invested that time, someone's more willing to come in and say, Oh, I can help you with that. Like, we can just do this.
Carlton Gibson 42:31
Yeah? No, I think, I think that was perhaps our mistake. Is we had the list of get contributors, and then we tried to do that that bit more. But it was like, we should have shit, yeah.
Tim Schilling 42:40
You know you got, yeah, you gotta. That's one of the things I learned. Being on Django, not space, is like you gotta. The public marketing of celebrations is such a great way to, like, raise awareness. It's, it's literally a cheat code that you know, that I found, or that we found, I learned from everybody else. I
Will Vincent 42:59
think we need the just working group, right? Let's just have a, have a list of just, just, or maybe just open source repo. No, but I'm not totally joking, because there are all these things that are so close. If only Yes, Carlton,
Carlton Gibson 43:14
well, though, if only Yes, I was gonna, there's a way of rephrasing just is Seth Godin, who's the the marketer. He has a mental exercise, which is, ask yourself, If only, so you know, when you've got if only this then, and you keep just saying, If only, and then that's the job list, right? If you can knock off the if only, then you achieve, well, it's a, you know, it's a power. Maybe
Will Vincent 43:34
it's a forum section. I mean, we can't just dump everything on the forum, but that's I'm excited to see the forum seems to be coming into its own the last year or two. I mean, because it, I think Andrew Godwin started up, or someone, I think started up a number of years ago, just because the developers list on Google. I mean, couldn't be more off putting to a younger person or a newcomer. I mean, not the content, but just the whole format. And it's just like it, it just shrieks of like, yeah, not, not what Django really is. I want. I want, you know, so anyways, that choice, anyway,
Carlton Gibson 44:10
no, today I was looking I was a thing that I posted 18 months ago came up, and I was able to find my post really quickly. I would then there was a related issue that Tim was was working on, I was able to find that in a single shot with the search, whereas I, as a fellow, used to have to spend time on the Django developers mailing list, searching the history to find the relevant threads. And every single time, it's 20 minutes of scrolling, you know, it's, it's just, oh, it's a light source. It really is, you know, forum versus email? Yeah, I understand the oldies like email, but seriously, the search and the filtering and the threading and these things, these are, you know, worth any disruption you get from not having an email interface anyway.
Will Vincent 44:53
Can we talk about your day job? Tim, yeah, Carlton, you
Carlton Gibson 44:58
give off all these vibes. To being like some sort of really senior engineer, and I just what, what is it you do? What's your what's your gig? Learn
Tim Schilling 45:07
from a bunch of mistakes that I've made myself? Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. I work for, yeah, no, I work for a company called Aspire edu. We do education analytics. We don't do data science like that. I feel like that's relevant here. Yeah, we're a really small company. I think we have nine people, and then three of us are on the software side of things. And yeah, I've been, I contracted with this company for a while, like half time, for a number of years, and then about two and a half years ago now, I was brought on full time. We've got, it's, it's an interesting project. So we run Django, celery, Postgres, and then we have RabbitMQ and Redis. But like we do everything on platform as a service or software as a service. So we don't run any of our own hardware. We don't use AWS. It's, we run on Heroku. We have Redis Labs, we have cloud AMQP crunchy data. We do, I guess we do have some s3 AWS stuff for like s3 and backups and stuff. But, yeah, so we do all that because none of us are all that great at DevOps work, and we there's enough work elsewhere that we're just trying to ease the developer experience and just kind of work on what we're focused on. It's, it's an interesting project we have. I think the last time I counted over 200 models. Now we got some tables in the 2 billion row mark, so we can hit some so we don't have a lot of usage on the web app. It's more of the nightly process to capture data. We have these massive celery signatures that run and have to hit all these endpoints to capture data determine, like, what these differences are. And yeah, we're working on one of the things I'd really like to do is, instead of capturing all the data every night. The some of these LMSs, they offer the ability to listen to like an Event Queue, but then, like that, then introduce new problems. Like, sorry, we're gonna go real deep on this one particular problem. So like, if you have an assignment and you have the due date set at midnight, and we're scheduled to capture data at midnight, or even if you set like due date at 1am you then run into this problem where all the submissions are most likely going to occur in that last hour, because it's
Will Vincent 47:27
like, ticket sales or something, that you get this spike, yeah. So
Tim Schilling 47:31
then the concern is, like, All right, so as we're capturing like, nature of our product, we have a snapshot thing so you can go back in time and show data at this certain date. If you we need to cut off that date at some point. So now we're trying to deal with all right, if we have this backlog of submissions that can accumulate and we don't know when we're going to get them, like, there's no indication, like, Oh, you've gotten all the submissions. Like, you're good now. So now we're trying to figure out, like, how do we do a cutoff point, but then continue to allow more submissions and put those before the cutoff points that you can properly dictate things. Like, it's, yeah, as you just keep growing, it's like, All right, next problem up, and then try to, like, patch things together and make it all work. And yeah. So that's one of the things I really like working with, like, the same project for eight, nine years, is, you know, all the gnarly bite, all the gnarly Bits and like, you can be really effective really quickly. Yeah, you can get deep into some weird problems.
Will Vincent 48:29
Can I ask about? So you mentioned Redis? So one of the platinum sponsors at the conference was, was valky? What? So for those who don't know, Redis has whatever. It's sort of a longer story, but basically there's a license for it now, and a group is, as I understand it, trying to control Redis itself. So there's a fork, one of which is valky, which is supported by AWS and some other places that want to keep it open source. I'm curious, working on a like, real world project, how does that filter to the decision making. Like, are there these red lines when you say we switch? Or, like, you know, what does that look like in the real world?
Tim Schilling 49:09
Yeah. So for me, it's more of, do they have a managed offering that we can just swap it one for one and have everything that we have elsewhere? Like, if I have to go and set something up in AWS and manage the user accounts, and because of another nature of how we scaled, we have, like, different app, what we call back ends. It's not super simple. So, like, there's a major cost to us switching over to things. It's like, once that exists, doing the price analysis, like, the cost analysis on it, if it's going to make sense for us to spend time on it, because it's going to require my time, and I could be spending that elsewhere. So, like, it's a lot of forward momentum elsewhere that would prevent us from going back. And like, All right, let's change just one other thing real quick, right? I
Will Vincent 49:56
mean, that's the arbitrage, like I said, the business opportunity. Is squeezing that, that pain point, but it is. It's interesting to see, right? I mean, a little bit of the history, right? Whereas open source for forever, and then the maintainer sold it and has stepped away, and, you know, selling open source, and this has happened a couple of times, but, I mean, Carlton's made this point. I mean, Redis is, it's really a pillar of of the web, right? So you sort of can, can't. It's hard to think of that being in private control. So I guess it's, yeah, interesting to
Tim Schilling 50:33
see. Eventually, we're still doing Heroku. So like, yeah, we're clearly a very slow organization to change things. So
Will Vincent 50:40
I'm all about Heroku. I don't think there's anything wrong with throwing money at DevOps. Like, it's, if you're not DevOps people, and you can throw money on it, like, do it, like, you know, it's a whole separate beast, right? It's separate from what you need, and until it becomes prohibitive. Like, why not? I'm very pro, and you're doing, you know, you're doing billions, you know you're doing real scale, right? Like you manage services using crunchy you know, we don't need to be heroes, doing everything ourselves, because no one does a good job of that. Yeah? So, yeah, don't apologize. I I'm all about services personally. Carlton, you agree with me?
Carlton Gibson 51:21
Yeah, no. I mean, like, you know this, this line about Heroku. Like, what did Heroku do? Like, they, well, they stopped evolving because they got bought by sales or so. That was a bit of a shame. But they got rid of the free tier from the beginning. No, but I can never be, I can never be like, Oh, you got rid of your free tier, or boo to you, like, free tiers are not, not good business, right? Like, they don't make any sense. So I, I'm not so worried that Heroku got rid of their free tier. I mean, that they stopped evolving is more of a shame, I think, overall. But it doesn't their product was good and it hasn't gone anywhere, right? Salesforce kept it running. Yeah,
Tim Schilling 51:58
it actually has been pretty stable for like there was, there was a good year where they had a bunch of outages, where it became a real like that. That's the reason we moved to crunchy data. Is like, if we want to move off Heroku, we need to get the database off first so that we can just swap out the application layer. And so that was a major hurdle. But, yeah, crunchy data, crunchy bridge, they helped us out tremendously with that. And then, yeah, we haven't had the need to switch out Heroku yet. It's been running, well, yeah, but that, I mean, usually,
Will Vincent 52:31
yeah, when, when Craig was on the on the podcast, he was making that point that this federated model of managed services, it makes sense, right? It's sort of amazing that Heroku was able to combine everything at a, you know, at scale, but like, they're all separate problems, right? Managing the database, managing this, managing that. So and all of us kind of just want to build web apps and not worry about those things, unless you're at a huge company, and then you can just only worry about those things, but they're, yeah, it's not what interests me personally.
Tim Schilling 53:05
Yeah, it is a challenge to, like, document all these things and, like, keep it straightforward of when somebody new comes on, because we don't, we don't have a ton of turnover, but then, like, trying to onboard somebody onto, like, all these services. And, yeah, I can see how it'd be a lot easier to just have, like, a massive server somewhere, running everything there, and you can just give someone a little bit of access and stuff, but
Will Vincent 53:28
then someone comes in and buys that company, and then you're, oh, I
Tim Schilling 53:32
mean, I mean rolling your own, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, Carlton, I
Will Vincent 53:36
have to say so, you wrote something the other day about them. In reference, the money stack can, yeah, oh,
Carlton Gibson 53:44
so, yeah. So I managed to draft, this was my newsletter for the month. Was stack report newsletter for months about avoiding R and D in production. I managed to draft it on the plane home from DjangoCon. Actually, I was like, right, been taken away. So I managed to block out the major points. But yeah, I mean, the core idea there is, you know, stick to the boring tech, the money stack, as Craig called it. You know, the Django is the Postgres, the Python, the mature sensible technologies, because their failure modes are known for one of a better word, the difficulties you're going to have are known. Your ability to plan around the risk that that involves is known, and so you can actually plan it, whereas if you pick up new and shiny tech, it promises it's going to be faster. But you know, who knows what goes wrong in the worst case, it could be multiples of time lost and it Yeah. So anyway, the piece was about that, but yeah, I'm a massive believer. I think, I think you know more for doing research and development, just not on your production stack,
Will Vincent 54:44
unless it's UV right? Is that that seems to be the next thing. Oh, don't
Carlton Gibson 54:48
get me started. Coming on in a few weeks. We'll save it for then, yeah,
Will Vincent 54:53
yeah. He just, he just did a video we should link to that. He just did an all in one video, I think, making the case. Uh, but yeah, I, you know, I think I'm the same way. Like, and sort of like what you were saying earlier, Tim about, like, you know, with Redis, like, if it's you don't need to change for the sake of change. And it's fun to try things out, especially inside things. But like, on a real world project, like, you don't want change unless you have to have it, or unless it's clearly cheaper or better, and often things aren't quite so simple. What haven't we asked you, Tim, we've, we've covered some stuff. I know we haven't delved into your origin story. We don't, we can do that. Are there any other projects you want to call out? What would you like?
Tim Schilling 55:38
I think we've covered most of them. I mean, yeah, I don't really know.
Will Vincent 55:44
Well, let me ask, let me ask you that. I said two questions. So one is, what is, what is your magic wand? You know, we just come out of DjangoCon. I know you're working on a bunch of things, but what is something you're not directly involved with that you'd like to just change about Django? Not directly involved. So you're directly involved in a lot, it's okay. It could be something you're directly involved with. Go ahead, take the wand.
Tim Schilling 56:06
Um, yeah, I think I'm gonna go back to the earlier point of, we're talking about, you have the community, then the ecosystem, and then Django. And like, I'd really like for us to have solved the community aspect of, like, new person comes in and, like, here's everything you need to know. And like, where to go to find ABC and then XYZ. And if you want to contribute, RST, like, cool, like, this is where you go, and this is how you do that. Like, I think having that solved would unlock a lot of new people getting involved, and then just kind of make everything else easier. And also I'm just, I'm, I'm really big on community. And so that would be, it'd be really fun to see.
Will Vincent 56:45
And it might even be, we do have a slash community page on the Django project site, and you know, it's been updated a little bit. Maybe it's a matter of some love and care there, because it certainly could be, could be improved.
Tim Schilling 57:01
Like, in my mind, it's more than just having static site like this. This is gonna require people effort of maintaining it and, like, communicating out and welcoming people in and making them feel like, Hey, you're seen. And because it's more than just saying, like, Hey, here's the open door. Like, you actually have to, like, step out and be like, hey, come in. Like, this is where you belong, right? So I think taking more of an active I think in my, my version of it, it would be a more of an active role, rather than us saying, like, yeah, we're really welcome. Like, come on in.
Carlton Gibson 57:36
Yeah, the problem which we don't have
Tim Schilling 57:39
the people to do all that. So the problem with the contributing
Carlton Gibson 57:41
guide was always that it's like, 5000 word essay that you've got to start and read. And it's like, well, that's, that's quite a steep cliff face to climb up. I just wanted to sort of help out,
Tim Schilling 57:53
yeah, yeah. Or, I mean, like, we could also have, you know, arc like, character architects, archetypes of, like, oh, so, like, what, how do you want to how do you envision yourself being in the Django community? Like, do you want to be a contributor? Like, okay, like, this is a tough path. Like, this is our contributing guide. And like, here, like, the you can go apply it to Django, not space. And like, if there's any meetups, like, these are the ones you want to go talk to, or go participate in, like, submit a talk. And then if, oh, you want to be a community organizer. Like, all right, where are you located? Like, here's Jan con us. Jan con Europe. Jan con Africa. Look up your all the various Django user groups, Python news groups. Like, go help them organize and like, kind of provide those different ways for people to learn, like, to see themselves in our community, and then provide a pathway for them to go implement it. It's like it, yeah, again, these are all ideas, and we just need somebody to go implement them. And that was a joke. Just,
Will Vincent 58:51
yeah, if only, if only someone would implement them. I mean, just, just looking at the homepage for Django project, you know, down at the bottom, stay in the loop. We don't mention the forum there, even though, I would venture that most of the mindshare has moved to the forum. Instead, it links to these Google Developer lists, which it, you know, it's like a fire hose of stuff. It's not, you know, it's not that casual. You know, it's not what the newsletter is. For example, the Django news newsletter. It's not this monthly thing like that could be. And again, Carlton, I were discussing at the conference, because Paolo was there, and we're remembering that his consultancy had spent a lot of time mocking up potential changes to the look and feel of the site, and it didn't quite get over the line. But I think if I would one of my, you know, wands to wave would definitely be to have the website look as modern as Django itself is, anyway. So, so, so what's next for you? Tim, so you're involved with all these things? Oh, Carlton has a question, but Well, no, no, no,
Carlton Gibson 59:55
go on. You do that. You do that.
Will Vincent 59:56
Yeah. Like, what's
Tim Schilling 59:57
next? Yeah.
Will Vincent 59:58
Like, how do you. To maintain what you're doing. Are there other things? Are you looking to hand off certain things, like, what? Yeah, what comes Yeah, all
Tim Schilling 1:00:06
of the above. So I'm gonna run through a couple of things. Like, if people want to help Django comments, like, if you want to move a package there, please do or open to it. If you want to help maintain another package, we're working on getting those, but definitely join, participate in the discussion groups regarding Gen Con us, like we just had, as we mentioned, we've just finished up the conference for this year, but we are looking for organizers for next year. We're also always open to new venue proposals, and it doesn't have to be for 2025 like, if you want to submit something for 2027 and take us to a different place, please submit another thing at my fellow board members mentioned to me, people can donate to us. We had a tough year this year with sponsors. I don't know if you all saw like we didn't have a sing, I think was platinum or diamond. I diamond on the sponsor. Diamonds. A diamond. Yeah. So yeah, that there's Yeah. So we people can donate that. That's always great. And then Django not space, yeah, we'll probably have the next session coming up sometime in 2025, early, early in the year. And then hopefully, maybe I'd like to do like, these streams of doing code reviews for Django to kind of like, help other people see, like, what goes into it. I don't know. After watching Natalia go through the one, I'm like, oh, boy, this is this gonna be challenging, but so that's, that's the next idea to try to, because Django not space. We need we're really good at having, like, the small group of people and getting them in, but there's so many more people that apply that don't get accepted, and some of those people just need to be told, like, be held a little bit accountable, of just, I want to talk to somebody once a month, and I think we can do that. We just need to create some time for folks. And with the new session organizers that kind of freeze, I'm taking some time away for this session to maybe try that. So we'll see how that turns out. I think I covered everything. Yeah, I
Carlton Gibson 1:02:06
had the Django, Django, DjangoCon, Django, Commons and Django notes, Yes,
Tim Schilling 1:02:11
yep, yep.
Will Vincent 1:02:12
And then you also find time to blog on your your personal site too. We haven't even mentioned that. Yeah, I
Tim Schilling 1:02:19
try, yeah,
Will Vincent 1:02:22
what's the name of it? Again?
Tim Schilling 1:02:24
Better? Simple.com, yeah, it's the last one I had. I've been trying to keep up with one per month. And the last one, I think it was after I said good night to both of you and a couple other people, and I had a different blog post in mind. And then this one hit me, and I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and write this about how this about how Django and Django, kind of, like, I can see there's a group of people that really want to participate, and, like, they're starting to organize at like, the grassroots level, and yeah, we just need to connect that two pathways to really just enable them to have more to effect change a little bit better. Well,
Carlton Gibson 1:03:04
just speaking of that, we should mention this. This autumn, there's going to be both the board elections, which Nominations are open for now and then the steering Council is likely to have an election, you know, very soon, it seems, which is, you know, the more for the technical direction of Django, I guess, whereas the board is more for running the DSF and looking after Django from a kind of organizational perspective. So do you think we can encourage the these, this heads, head swell of grassroots organization to apply for those positions and to to take up those leadership roles,
Tim Schilling 1:03:40
I think so. I It's a challenge. Like, we the thing I've learned about organizing, especially at like, the top part, is a lot of it's not well defined. Like, I know, will you have a post to like, what it was like to be a DSF board member, but how much of it still is? Oh, this new thing cropped up. Like, we need to spend this month on this, and you work on that, you don't ever get back to the thing that you wanted to do originally. And, like, it's hard to define that, and so much of it is problem comes up. Take the initiative and, like, go solve it. And then to the point of, where could this all go in the future, and making sure that we don't have those roadblocks in the way? And so, like, communicating that to people is difficult. And then there's when you sometimes phrase it that way, then it's you're putting people off because, like, that's a little scary. Yeah, so I think going and messaging people and be like, Hey, I think you'd be good at this for this reason, but be aware, like, these are the challenges you're going to face and but this is why I think you're good for it, Executive
Will Vincent 1:04:46
Director kind of thing. I mean, Nicholson cannot. Well, no, I mean, because I think, I mean, you know, this is a fundamental issue, is that a board is meant to be a board, not to be a board. And. Do all the work. And for sure, we need, you know, we have, we have working groups that do great things, but to, you know, to bring in this, you know, dozen, two dozen more people who, if for a little accountability and guidance, would be super involved. There isn't really a mechanism for that just yet. Like, so, yeah, but it would be, you know, be great to have some sort of tears, some sort of public recognition, which is important to people, but then,
Tim Schilling 1:05:32
yeah, all these others really meaning more of like, if you're in the community and you want to make sure that we have qualified people, like, good people on these two boards, or groups like, you can send these messages to people of who you think would be really good once they get on there. Like, yeah, you're 100% right. Like, we do need an exact director and
Will Vincent 1:05:52
but, I mean, I think we need, we can have, we can have more, more public facing than just the steering Council and the board, because there are all these other groups that, I mean, internationalization team, that just work in the shadows and suffer a little bit from that, yeah,
Tim Schilling 1:06:08
but we've got the feature Friday post. Like, now that we have that going, like, it's it's not a far stretch, then to say, like, All right, let's highlight this group, and then stretch from there, like, All right, let's highlight this new person, and before you know it, like we have a really good marketing team, like exposing our community and helping people see where they can get involved. Yeah, I think things are looking up like, I know there's some flux always, but yeah, I'm, I'm pretty positive about this, yeah, why? I
Will Vincent 1:06:38
mean, I think all of us involved are and when you reach a boiling point, step away, just raise your hand, and if someone can come in, you can recirculate and reemerge elsewhere in the community. Anyways, I think we could keep talking to him. I wish we could, but we're at about an hour, so I think that's the cutoff point. But thank you for coming on. We should have had you on a while ago, and thank you for all the work that you've done, and as Carlton said, You really just came in like a tornado and are making all these great things happen that. Yeah, it's very exciting to see.
Tim Schilling 1:07:12
Everything I do is a team effort. Now, every single aspect,
Carlton Gibson 1:07:15
of course, it's not just you, but it is also you.
Tim Schilling 1:07:18
Okay, I don't know, but sure.
Will Vincent 1:07:21
So we'll have links to everything in the show notes, and thanks again, Tim for making the time. Yes, thanks for coming.
Carlton Gibson 1:07:27
Thank you both join us next time. All
Will Vincent 1:07:29
right, see everyone next time, bye, bye.
Carlton Gibson 1:07:31
This episode was brought to you by talk Python in the new htmx Plus Django courses.