Andrew is a prolific software developer based out of Cambridge, UK. He runs the solo agency Software Crafts, writes regularly, is a former Djangonaut, and co-founder of the AI banking startup Hamilton Rock.
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Carlton (00:00)
Hi, and welcome to another episode of Django chat podcast on the Django web framework. Carlton Gibson joined us ever by Will Vincent. Hello Will.
Will (00:06)
Hey Carlton.
Carlton (00:07)
Hello Will, nice jumper by the way and today we've got with us Andy Miller who's big but very active in the Django community. How are doing?
Andy Miller (00:16)
I'm good thanks. am well, yes.
Carlton (00:19)
That's good. People are going to know you as Nano Republica online.
Andy Miller (00:23)
Yes that is the moniker I came up with as a teenager and it's stuck because it doesn't have any numbers after anything like that so it's just yeah that's teenage me. ⁓
Carlton (00:32)
Okay,
Will (00:35)
That's still
Carlton (00:35)
any back story there that's worth digging in?
Will (00:36)
an achievement though. like you got your GitHub handle, you got everything else. That's good.
Andy Miller (00:40)
Yeah,
it's that one thing very easily. I'm not that and it's an anonymous, well it's not anonymous because if you search Nana Republica you will find me but it's just something that I came up with as a teenager and it stuck.
Carlton (00:54)
So you go tell us, go tell us a little bit about yourself Andy, behind the scenes and.
Will (00:54)
What's that?
Andy Miller (00:59)
Okay,
⁓ where to start? I did CS at university, well, half CS, half electronic engineering. So not your, your class, I don't know, is it your classic or non classical programming route?
Carlton (01:06)
you wanna...
But that's like
electronic engineering is like CS with an upgrade, right? It's that one notch heart.
Will (01:18)
Yeah.
Andy Miller (01:19)
Yeah,
was the course title was information systems engineering. There was 20 guys in my year. And so that shows you how popular it was. You basically did everything from the transistor all the way up to software. And I leaned towards more software in my third and fourth year. I currently live in Cambridge. do like the broad thing. I currently live in Cambridge, wife and two kids. And I've been running a
Carlton (01:28)
Yeah.
Andy Miller (01:47)
being here as a freelancer for the last six years and starting a startup ⁓ called Hamilton Rock CTO. That's like the basic intro I think.
Carlton (01:56)
Okay, that's brilliant. And so where do we want to go? Tell us about freelancing. Six years is long enough to have sort of had the good times and the bad. ⁓ you know.
Andy Miller (02:05)
Yeah, I started in 2019 because I quit my job and will say no more about that job except that I wanted out but I also wanted to stay four days a week and not commute to London. So those that don't know UK, Cambridge is about an hour on the train from London or maybe like hour, two hours. like, I don't want to commute that anymore. I'd had enough. So trying to find a job for four days a week before COVID and maybe remote or maybe local.
⁓ it's not that Cambridge isn't a huge city. There's a lot of tech here, but it's not all web tech. so I was like, ⁓ I'll get freelancing ago. And here we are six years later, I stumbled through COVID, ⁓ you'd some savings to kind of get me through some hard months, but then there were some good, good times as well. ⁓ and then I found regular clients, ⁓ who have paid the way. It's like what, one interesting thing.
actually I kind of reflect on for us as software engineers when it comes to freelancing, I have like a few on the go at any one time, but they are much different to say a graphic designer or a copywriter or something where they might have loads of projects in a year. And when I say loads, it's like you're talking tens or maybe even get up to like a hundred in a year because they're short sharp things. Contrast that with us. It's actually more multi-year I found.
contracts, you have three or four, if you get beyond four, your brain explodes because you can't, the context switching between different businesses is just like, no, can't handle that, as well as running your own business. So yeah, that's
Carlton (03:45)
So, so I, when I was free, I freelance for a long, long, long, long time. And for me, the big interesting question was always the pipeline was like, where's the next project, the next client, the next ⁓ thing coming from, if you can do 100 projects in a year, then it's kind of easy because you've always got a new thing coming on the pipeline. And if anyone falls down, then no problem.
But if you've only got, can have like two or three or four projects going on and they probably don't overlap that much, then one falls down. So it can be really quite serious, right?
Andy Miller (04:16)
Yeah.
Yes. I, well, yeah, that's kind of where, so I had a bit of a, I lent a lot on like non-technical communities. So there's like a few freelance communities and I got one client through one of them, but also it's just been active on LinkedIn as we love or hate the place, just kind of being there and maybe not trying to doom scroll, but just people do business there as. ⁓
I've got a couple of good contacts from LinkedIn, generally it's ⁓ kind of where my writing habit, one of the reasons for starting my writing habit, I read a book, I'd have to go and get it, it's in this room somewhere. ⁓ But it was a kind of like...
Carlton (05:01)
My daughter says
things like that. it's in my room somewhere like
Andy Miller (05:04)
It's in the office somewhere. It's like, I don't want to get up. ⁓ But it was called the manifesto of no pitching. We could put it in the show notes at some point. ⁓ But in it, said writing is a way to demonstrate expertise. And so was like, this is a way you show how good you are, or like that you have the expertise to not have to pitch for things. ⁓ I should say I also use like, freelancing websites and stuff to find the initial gigs and kind of just be everywhere.
Carlton (05:18)
Yeah, absolutely.
you
Andy Miller (05:34)
But that's kind of what started the blogging habit. that combined with there was two other people, guy called Jonathan Stark, ⁓ who is a software engineer by trade. And then he's gone into coaching and that kind of thing. And he does a daily newsletter every day, sends a newsletter. Some days. Yeah, but he it's very it's all plain text. Like it's not fancy kind of like images and all that kind of stuff.
Carlton (06:02)
Yeah.
Andy Miller (06:03)
Sometimes it will just be like him asking a question of his newsletter and be like, I've had this idea, respond back or like a question. It goes over the same points. He's just demonstrating his like, he has a book called hourly billing is nuts. And then sometimes it's just an advertising for his Slack community and what's been going on. it's like, it's not, yeah, it's newsletter every day, but it covers the same ground again and again, from different perspectives or it's advertising a podcast that he's been on or that kind of thing. it works quite well. ⁓
And then the other one, I followed a creative called David Kadavy. He's an American who's moved to Columbia. ⁓ Discovered him ages ago. And he put out, he's about to put out his third book, actually, he had put out three books, he's like, I'm gonna get them wrong. The middle one is time management, not no mind management, not time management, get that the wrong way around. He's about to do one about finishing and the first one was about starting whole creative process. But he brought out a book called
the hundred word habit, is where the hundred words came from. It's like, just try and write a hundred words a day and see how you get. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to do this for a year and try it. I'm not doing every day because writing it the weekend when you've got small kids is just like, no, it's like, it's just like, no, no, I'm just doing weekdays. have control over my weekdays. So yeah, I started, where are we? We're 26. I finished, it was two years ago.
Carlton (07:16)
Yeah. Have a little support group moment there.
Andy Miller (07:31)
Yeah, 24 I think.
Will (07:32)
It's 2024,
because I went through them again just in prep for this. Yeah.
Andy Miller (07:36)
Yeah.
So yeah, I started and the main, yeah, it was like, this was the reason to start. And then I had quite a lot of content loaded up because I'd been like active on the discord and some people ask the same questions again, and not the same people, but new person comes along. How do I do user types? Or you see the same mistakes, like people using underscore all don't do that. Well, it's fine to start with as a prototype, but really you want to specify your fields because you're just going to like.
Carlton (07:53)
Yeah, the same questions come up here.
Andy Miller (08:06)
bad habits that you see again and again and again. So I was just like, right, here's the content and you just write and write and write and it's led places. And then it's just forced me to also put ideas out into the world, ones that were ready or ones that were not ready, ⁓ but where I've had ideas for packages or for, I don't know, community ideas, things have just, yeah, you've both followed along and people can go to my website and just scroll through and search. yeah, that's
Carlton (08:34)
No, it's
good. It's a good effort because you do keep it up, which I'm always impressed with.
Andy Miller (08:38)
Yeah,
it's down to about once a week now.
Will (08:41)
Well, I mean, it reminds me of us in a way in that you started off with these foundational things of like, you know, models, templates, URLs, you know, our early episodes were, we're kind of like that almost like university courses or like sections from a book where we talk about Jenga rest framework. And then once you exhaust that, then I saw, you know, for you, then you, know, you do like a 10 part series on building something from scratch or you'd have different ideas. It's, it really is that, that muscle of like being forced to think of something and
⁓ because otherwise it's so easy to have a thought and then you know something happens and then you know off it goes and You know, I I find it's it's you have to think about it as doing it for yourself And then everything else is a benefit, but there are these huge benefits that you don't But you can't it's not a one-to-one thing, you know
Andy Miller (09:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. It was just, I'm doing this goal and I'm just going to see where it leads and just try and just like keep pushing it. It was difficult towards the end. There were some, and over holidays, it was like, what do I write about? And there were some days I was at like 11 o'clock at night being like, I have to put word pen to paper or metaphorical paper and just get something out. But yeah, it was just doing it for myself and just push and the benefits were just...
Will (09:55)
And it's
not a lot of words either. I guess you started doing parts, I mean, I remember, you know, because a number of them we put in a newsletter, I would regularly on some of your technical stuff be like, it was like a cliffhanger, you know, was like, was like, wait, keep going, keep going. Like, how could you? I would almost find that the hardest is like, because for me, if I finally get something going, I'm like, all right, let's just get it all out. ⁓ It's like poetry almost to like be concise.
Andy Miller (10:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, it was the mental. Yeah, the cliffhangers
were kind of like when I had a series, it was like, Oh, great, that does a week or something, because I'm thinking about it all the time, like you write it. And then it's like, what's the next topic? So doing a series was actually easier to some extent, because you go, right, okay, I can just break it at different points. And for me, it was, yeah, I was like, I could have written it all in one go. But it was nice just to kind of go, right, that's me done for the day. Move on and
probably some of the later posts like even the ones that I'm writing now are probably going to be slightly longer because I'm like okay this is my post for the week I'm not going to intentionally split it up for a daily thing it's and I should probably take some of those long those series and concatenate them into longer posts at some point but you know maybe AI will do it.
Will (11:06)
I like this.
like people doing this. Eric Mathis also has this Mostly Python, you know, I think there's room for a technical series of things. But, Carlton, you were going to make a point there.
Carlton (11:17)
No, just, I don't want to swing away from writing, but I did want to cut back slightly to the freelancing just before we move on and leave it. So you're working, you're doing, doing startup now. that, is that, are you still freelancing as well or are you doing the startup full time? Half of them.
Andy Miller (11:25)
Yeah.
I'm
a half and half. am full time on the startup and have been for like the last few months. Yeah, I'm, I have a couple of maintenance contracts and some people paying off bills and then I've got like an advisory role. I do need to go back and do, I think I'm tomorrow. I'm looking at my financial planning for the year. And I'm like, I need to probably go and do a bit more freelancing this year, just to yeah, cashflow being.
Carlton (11:40)
I am full time freelancing as well.
Okay,
so what I wanted to ask you about was then how you're feeling at the moment because you've been, know, six years, it's plenty of time to see the ups and downs of the business and see how it works. And, know, you go through a, you know, quite a bad recession previously, and then there's this current situation. And I wonder what are you, are you optimistic, are you pessimistic? What words of advice do you have that kind of, you know, how do you, how do you see the situation currently? Because a lot of people are worried and struggling.
Andy Miller (12:32)
Oh, that's a that's a big question. That's a deep question. Yeah. Like, on the face of it, I wouldn't recommend freelance, like if you're freelancing, seriously, I wouldn't, for me, I wouldn't recommend juniors do freelancing. Because as much as it's easy way, it's an easy way to then kind of give freelancing a bad name or contracting a bad name. Because I think I benefited from doing freelancing. 10 years, no.
Carlton (12:36)
Well, that's a deep shot, right?
Andy Miller (13:01)
yeah, almost 10 years into my career kind of thing. Like I had some experience to kind of go, yeah, I can build things rather than people going, and I've seen it in the discord where people come in like, I need to build this for a client and I have no idea. you're like, surely you need to have some idea. How did you like, but it's blindly, you don't want blindly in the blind. That's just my, but that's for me, how I feel about the current situation. Personally, I, I put it down to faith. Like I, I believe I'm a Christian. I believe in that, but that's, and that's kind of part of the reason I've
did, I trust something else. I trust God and that's part of my, like, of why I went freelancing as well. Like, I was like, I'm just stepping out and trusting that money's going to come through at the right time and the right decisions are going to come, that people are going to show up at my door effectively. And that's kind of happened, where, even the kind of the co-founder, how my co-founder reached out or was looking for someone. I was just like, I wasn't expecting to get that at all.
can talk about it in a minute, like, it's just that I think you've just got to step out and just try it. It's not sitting still. It's doing the cold outreach, kind of applying to all the things, but it's then going, what's the right thing? And just that's not really an answer I know, but it is an answer in terms of like, you got to do all the right things. And there are plenty, I'm not going to like go consume knowledge. Like for those, those that want to start businesses, there's like,
hundreds of podcasts and during COVID I was listening, binged listened to like hours and hours and hours on general and not even, and don't limit yourself to like software freelancing, like listen to design freelancers, listen to copyrighters, listen, like get wide perspectives and be, don't be the only, be the only software person in that room. Like I'm definitely part of some communities where I'm the only software engineer and it's like great. That's like, if people are going to come to me, if they have softwa-
problems.
Carlton (15:03)
think that's a big.
Will (15:03)
And you have a podcast
too. Like we shouldn't sleep on that right in progress. You've been doing for a while. I think I was one of your very first People who signed up. Yeah
Andy Miller (15:07)
Yeah. Probably. Yeah,
I started that just experiment with a platform that kind of someone else had put out as like a private podcast. And was like, I want to experiment with this. So I was like, I'm just going to talk about and like experiment with it was like, for me, it's also with the content game. It's like, start with writing. Okay, I'm comfortable writing.
start with then go to audio and then maybe I'm not promising anything but maybe this year I experiment with video like I've kind of got the setup I did get this all the setup to do video but I hadn't got the kind of screencasting I need to sort that out and the editing process and kind of that's the next stage that if I have some time this year maybe I'd look at videos like one video I'd love to do or series I'd love to do is a video series of the official tutorials and
just step that through and keep it to the LTS versions. I'm not saying every change I'm gonna re-record a video, but the idea of, again, when people come to the Discord or to the forum, they're like, I wanna watch a video. And you're like, okay, YouTube's not great. They teach a lot of bad practices. often come, people come and we come fixing, they're not using forms and that kind of, like, there's not a good set of community videos. There are some, but they're, a lot of them are, should I say, want people who wanna kind of show how to be.
sell courses or want to be entrepreneurs or go from zero to hero, which is not, I'm not saying there's anything bad, but there's no one from the community that I see doing. Yeah.
Will (16:36)
Or they don't get any views.
I'm not going to throw out names on this, but there's a couple people I see their content and I'm like, this is amazing. Why would I ever do a course? And yet they have a fraction of the views of someone who does a lot of things on a lot of topics. then they get, they're helpful, I guess, on Django, but they're not Django people. They're not even web people. So they miss so many best practices. And yeah, I feel the same way.
Andy Miller (16:51)
Yeah.
Will (17:06)
There's some people who do good stuff, it's interesting that like, like no one at a Django con is doing has like a million views on YouTube and same thing in Python. Python's the same way. No one who's at a PyCon or involved in Python is one of these people making a million of subscribers.
Andy Miller (17:15)
Yeah, I'm not.
Yeah,
there's this disconnect, I think, between video and Python. I don't know what it is. It's just the community aspect. I'd want to be someone in the community doing videos, if that makes sense. Will, you're probably one of the top people in that. I have visibility of anyway.
Will (17:39)
Yeah, yeah, but
yeah, it's yeah, anyways, I don't yeah, I The thing is video takes a lot of a lot of work. It's a totally different skill set also the people looking at videos I think are Younger than us many of them, you know, so like there's a whole bunch of factors. ⁓ And as I say, I think the thing is writing Writing is so like you can write from anywhere You can go right from a cafe a video like you need so much setup and there's just so much more
Production involved for it not to look terrible that it feels like if it misses it's like a much bigger, you know It's like I don't know. It just feels like a bigger miss
Andy Miller (18:17)
Oh, completely. And that's why I haven't done it today. Cause I've stalled on the kind of like, I maybe recorded one video and then I was like, what do I do now in the terms of editing? And I'm just like, I was like, no, okay. And just stopped. So I was like writing audio like, cause with the in progress one, I've automated all of that as well. I hit stop record. It churns away does the trunk like AI does the transcript opens a PR for me on my website or a view it. then I
Will (18:45)
I like your transcripts,
the way, because sometimes, you know, actually often I just I like reading more than podcasts or vodcasts. So I just like blast through it. So I appreciate that you have that.
Andy Miller (18:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a Christmas project of, was like, whisper CPP does the audio to text and then I pass it over another, does another pass, I think with the local model to kind of categorize it and do the section headers and stuff. yeah.
Will (19:16)
Well, I'll say one more and the Carlton has the heavy questions, but I think we're sort of circling around, like you seem to like freelancing, right? I mean, this is the thing is that when you freelance, your mind is so activated with different projects and problems that to go from that to working for one company on one code base is, you know, it's a tough transition.
Andy Miller (19:37)
Yeah, I what's been really interesting is that the last month has been intense and I come out of it and I'm like, wow, that was intense just to work on one thing week in week out, day in day out kind of thing. Because normally, like the last couple of months have been focused on it. But in the evenings, I've been playing with other bits and pieces of Django or other little projects and side projects kind of thing. It's just been all focused. And I've enjoyed it, though. I've kind of enjoyed the progress I've made.
And yes, yeah, it's tough. And I would have stuck with freelancing and I will probably, when this starts up runs, course, I will be back, I think freelancing. I've enjoyed it and I'll stick at it. But ⁓ yeah, it's, ⁓ I've really enjoyed the freedom of kind of like freelancing and kind of family life and that mix. ⁓ But it's, yeah, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.
kind of like as things went along. And we could, guess, talk about the startup now if you want.
Carlton (20:40)
Yeah,
tell us about it. So come on, this week, we're named.
Andy Miller (20:43)
Okay, it's
how it's called Hamilton rock. ⁓ I didn't come up with the name that was my co founder has been working on it for years before I did. I came along. ⁓ And it's a gonna call it a FinTech. I'm not going to call it a bank. While we do provide banking services, I'm going to get like with the legalese here. It's we don't have we won't have a banking license in the US is going to operate in the US it's targeting small e commerce firms.
And so we're building banking and then we're to features and bits on top that target e-commerce firms and are specific for them. ⁓ To date, I have just built the banking piece. That's enough. There's just a lot to build when it comes to kind of moving money and storing money and onboarding and all the extras. ⁓ And yeah.
Will (21:31)
Well, floating fields, decimal
points, integer types, like that's a, like we've heard some horror stories. I'm sure you have some, right? You want to get your model fields correct.
Andy Miller (21:37)
Yeah.
Yes, like so yeah, big it, well, I learned from last year with octopus energy and it was a bit like big ints and all the private. Yeah, on z out there's a Timber ⁓ big ints on all my primary keys and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, everything's stored as cents. ⁓ I'm not storing dollars and it's like, yeah, I'm storing all of cents and we're backed by Stripe. So Stripe do everything in cents as well. So it's just that one to one mapping.
Will (21:47)
Tim. Was it Tim? Yeah.
Yeah.
Andy Miller (22:10)
so far, yeah, I think the biggest, yeah, the biggest interesting thing is I've been building our own internal ledger as well. And that's interesting. We'll see how that goes. ⁓ yeah. Yes. Double book. ⁓ I'm using PG triggers and stuff to make it append only and that kind of thing. So yeah, we'll, we'll see how it goes. I've like, I've gone, yes, this is how I think it wants, but we've not hit production yet. So yeah.
Will (22:24)
Double book, double book I hope.
Carlton (22:24)
case.
Andy Miller (22:39)
A lot of it is still theoretical in my head.
Carlton (22:42)
So I want to ask
about the complexity of that, because obviously that's quite a complex domain in and of itself, and it's got quite strict business logic rules. And it's the kind of case where people would argue about moving away from Django to a certain extent and adding a kind of service layer on top of that with a business logic in pure domain objects. I wondering if you might speak to that from.
Andy Miller (22:53)
Yes.
I've kept everything pure Django so far. ⁓ So everything is either I'm using your library, prod views, and I've extended that with extra like Ajax hate is. It's HTML, yeah, pure HTML, template partials, a lot of partials, a lot of HTMLX views. All the logic is currently in forms. ⁓
Carlton (23:09)
Is that what you found?
Okay, good.
Andy Miller (23:37)
most of the internal logic and forms and then managers query sets. It's all there. Whether and the time I haven't, I've still called it a manager is there's an onboarding manager, which is like the only non Django, it's just a class which holds onboarding. But onboarding is just pulling together different bits from the code base and it's just into one place. ⁓ The place I pull out of it is in forms. I make a call out to Stripe when I need to do API calls and that's.
wrapped with catas. So catas is just its own serialization layer going from Django to Stripe data structures and back. Yeah, and that's it so far. And so, yes, I will say I need to go one of my tasks for either this month or next month is to sit down and I've been using Claude code a lot to get it.
Carlton (24:07)
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, which is nice.
Okay.
Andy Miller (24:31)
all out and some of it I do need to go back and just read and make sure that it's doing it the way I'd like it to do. So when it does come to compliance regulation, I understand what's going on. do like it's working as it should do minus a few bugs, which I'm fixing, but that eats that comp. I heard the term the other day, comprehension debt. So making sure that my understanding and AI's understanding is in line. And I've been going so fast that I know it's not aligned right now. And so I need to go.
Carlton (24:50)
Yes.
Yeah. I just, you cut in Will, I just want to talk about that thing about putting your logic in forms because in what, from a sort of pure architecture point of view, that's like horror because the forms are sanitizing data as they come in. And then you've got the sort of the business logic in the save method or whatever to check that your business rules are implied. But what I like about that method, that approach is that it scales to quite, quite nicely. And then if you do need to separate those two steps, the data sanitation from the business rule, it's very easy to pull it.
Andy Miller (25:01)
make it a life.
Carlton (25:30)
pull them apart later on.
Andy Miller (25:31)
Yeah,
I found it's like, for me, it's serializers or forms are the place you put logic in Django. I put it in air quotes, because like without inventing a new class, that's the place I put it. And if I was, I'd probably shift it into query sets or managers as like if it needs to across multiple models or multiple like, but ⁓ yeah, I've so far I want to try and keep to that.
that kind of architecture as long as possible until it kind of breaks down and we'll see what happens then. But yeah.
Carlton (26:05)
But at that point you've got better, you've got, you not a bad problem. Yeah.
Andy Miller (26:08)
I got other people then to fix it.
I'm not writing code at that point, hopefully.
Carlton (26:15)
Well, you were gonna.
Will (26:17)
Well, I mean, so many things to think about. I want to give you a chance to talk about, I think you published this yesterday, model renders, so component stuff around Django, which is related to forms. Can we mention more about that? I thought that was kind of interesting. We'll put a link in the show notes to this post.
Andy Miller (26:35)
So one thing that I played around with when I was styling up the start of Hamilton Rock, I was like, I'll play around with form renderers because why not? I wanna try and reduce the amount of templates that I'm creating. So when it comes to rendering a form, I want the form to look the same everywhere. ⁓ Ideally, you just do the brackets form and you're away. And so I found myself, I created a project form renderer.
⁓ which has some in it. And then I ended up in that same file, well it's actually one template file using partials. So I've got one template file with a load of partials defined, which define widgets and the forms. And you're just referencing partials from the renderer and I'm monkey patching the widget templates. So that's just two files. That's all your form style's done, which is quite nice. ⁓ And I was wondering...
wouldn't it be nice or I say nice, would it be an interesting experiment to see if like you could define a model renderer. So like from Neapolitan, Carlton, you've got two template tags of object detail on object list, I think.
Carlton (27:44)
Yeah,
just to render a table or a single instance.
Andy Miller (27:47)
Yeah,
but essentially taking that and making it configurable from a class like a form renderer ⁓ and then have maybe a link to the form renderer for that model as well. I don't know what this is just, this was an initial idea that I had at the end of last year. And it's like the idea of you define that and then go, right, okay, if you want to customize how your model was rendered on a page and you just go object or object list and you're kind of one idea I'm generally playing around with, with
The introduction of with form renderers with simple block tag with ⁓ template partials, I think we're very quite close to having components in core Django, but they're just not, they haven't been drawn together yet into this is how you do it. I actually have one tab from Django, it's Django Cotton's, I think it's their readme. ⁓ They have a table which compares
Carlton (28:32)
Please come follow.
Andy Miller (28:47)
going pull it up now. Give me a moment. There we go. It's got cotton Django components, slippers and template partials. And of course it's saying cotton ticks most of the boxes. There's one which Django components does but cotton doesn't do. But I'd like to just at some point spend some time going through that and being like, actually, while Django like well,
Carlton (29:00)
almost is yeah
Andy Miller (29:16)
Partials doesn't do everything, but if you do partials and then simple block tag, you get more like extra like it's like what parts do you need to bring together from core Django to actually have something comparable? And yes, the DX like cotton provides a user developer experience, but I'm like, I think we're closer than we think we are in core Django. So I'm just kind of pushing at those boundaries. And especially where like I take the
another blog post I wrote recently about like icon packs using template partials. And I didn't come up with that idea. will say Claude kind of came up with that idea and I pushed it a bit and I'm like, that's interesting. I never thought to use partials like that, but it's just, did it. And so I'm like, okay, what else can we explore with partials and the newer things that haven't been experimented much with in the later releases?
Carlton (29:49)
Yeah, I that.
Yeah, no, mean,
I'm totally with you on all of that. find, you know, I'm still finding template partials to be like revelation, revelatory in like the patterns they enable. And this idea that you've got one template file with the past, the related partials in it. And it's like, it's that one. It's that one. And they're all next to each other. And it's like, that's, that's lovely. And then for the full, for the kind of the component problem, which I think is think of as the kind of problem of slots.
where you've got a layout and you need to inject bits into it. And still, the DTL by itself, even with Temelink partial, doesn't do that perfectly. So that's when the cottons and the whatnot. And I use HTPy for this, which is where you define these fragments ⁓ in Python. And I like it. There's cotton, there's Django components, there's several options out here. And it's just all of us together struggling towards...
Andy Miller (30:59)
impact.
Carlton (31:10)
what are the patterns that we'll be using in five years time? And I think it's really super. It's just a lovely time to be working in Django around this area.
Andy Miller (31:20)
Yeah, I'm just, resisting essentially installing one of those third party packages. I'm just going to, every time I come up, I'm like, what can I do in Django and what can I patch in Django to make it work? And I will probably need to install one at some point, but for the time being, I'm like, how far can I abuse what's there ⁓ to see.
Carlton (31:40)
That's
a really good technique. So I used to maintain crispy forms. I used crispy forms for a decade. And when I started the new project, I was like, I'm not going to install it. I'm going to see how far I can get with the renderers and template partials. And I still haven't installed it. There are bits where I'm like, oh, I could just do that dynamic layout. But I'm like, OK, what do we do? What do we do? And how far can we push it without the dependency?
Andy Miller (32:00)
Exactly.
Yeah. And then it's like.
Will (32:03)
I think that's
experience talking though. Sorry to jump in. Like you were saying, you know, 10 years and then freelance. Like, cause a freelancer would just pull off the shelf, oops, solved, solved, solved, right? Whereas with a little more experience, you're like, even if I later go to it, I want to play around and muck in there and have that deep understanding and know where that line is. But you don't know where any lines when you're starting out.
Andy Miller (32:26)
That's very true. Part of it as well is that for me as well, want to push, I want to see what Django like, want to like, if I hit the edge of like, say, and it's like, actually, we need this small thing in Django to them, like template partials, but like, what's the next, is it like, variables in, in a template or something like that, which means you don't have to necessarily define, say a template tag is not a big thing, but like, what
Will (32:40)
like template partials.
Andy Miller (32:55)
identifying the small gaps that then if we do patch that if we do decide to patch it I'm not saying it's a definite but it's like understanding where the edges are to then round them out and then you go here's the component solution that we're looking for rather than lumping more than we need into Django Core so it's an experiment in that way as well.
Carlton (33:17)
This is the way, I think. It's not only how we find the right answers forward, but it's how you develop your own mastery as well. It's win-win.
Andy Miller (33:28)
Exactly.
Will (33:29)
Well, and part of that is also just taking like both of you have been talking about like, this is what one does. It's finding yourself the time to do that. Right. think if you're, if you're at a company, if you're just endlessly reactive and dealing with pull requests, it's very difficult to find the time to not to learn, but you know what I mean? Like to, to round it all out and to come up with these things. Cause cause the business imperative is not for you to do that.
Andy Miller (33:53)
That's it.
Yeah, that's a challenge. that's actually, I say one thing I'm going to enjoy when I'm being positive, when the company grows, is I want to carve out that time and make sure that Hamilton Rock gives back to Django and to open source. And we make time for that thing because I know intrinsically that I wouldn't be here without Django. So I'm going to make sure Django gets the support it needs within reason. Like, the business needs to function.
Will (34:26)
It's good marketing too, right? You'll get a good Django person out of it. Sorry, Carlton.
Andy Miller (34:27)
That's kind of what.
Carlton (34:27)
See you.
Andy Miller (34:31)
Yeah, exactly.
Carlton (34:32)
And you're investing in the foundation that you've built your business on, right?
Andy Miller (34:36)
Yeah, exactly
that.
Carlton (34:39)
It's not a stupid thing to do.
Andy Miller (34:40)
No, it's not at all. It's like it makes complete sense, but you just you need to walk people through it and yeah
Carlton (34:48)
All of that's really exciting. Okay, so you talk about Django and you're big in the community. Tell us all the things you've been doing because like...
Andy Miller (34:56)
This
is right, I read off the list, right? So, I'll do it in chronology. I joined the Discord and I realized, that was when I realized, oh, I actually do know quite a lot. Because at that point in the freelancer, I was like, I know what I know, I've learned. And then you go and you're like, oh, actually, I do know quite a lot because there's beginners asking lots of questions. then I was asked to be made a moderator and I was like, sure. And Tim was a moderator, him shilling at that point.
Carlton (34:58)
Yeah, yeah, go on, spell it.
Andy Miller (35:24)
both, we're both active and both moderators. ⁓ I then went along to DjangoCon and that was in Edinburgh. I really enjoyed that. ⁓ Yeah, I was there for just the conference days that time because I had family holiday during the sprints. ⁓ Then I was just continuing to be active in the community in Discord mainly. ⁓ Kind of did the for
more active on the forum now, there's an open tab in my browser. ⁓ Started Django social in Cambridge after hearing John's interview with you two. I was like, yeah, I could do that. Again, another freelance marketing to like local freelance marketing tactic. I was like, let's just be the Django person that everyone knows in Cambridge. ⁓ And that's
Will (36:16)
I mean,
you're in Cambridge, like, mean, as an American, Cambridge is like, you know, it's not like the middle of nowhere.
Andy Miller (36:19)
But
no, ⁓ but it's there's actually there's not there's a there's probably more Django here than you've you realize but it's all big life science companies so they don't realize
Will (36:35)
And ARM has a big office there too, right? I mean, just in terms of...
Andy Miller (36:38)
has
a big office and the university itself uses Django a lot as well, but it's getting into those big places and I've not been successful at all with that. But that's kind of like, yeah, but I've met a few people in the community and other people in Cambridge that use Django and it's like, ⁓ we have, there's some connection. ⁓
Will (36:56)
It's the same thing for
me here, like MIT, Harvard, like there's a lot of Django, both being taught and then also just the infrastructure. And yet when I've interacted with some of those people, it's like a different planet of, cause I'm like, oh, Django, let's talk about it. But yeah, I haven't bridged that divide. I've given up trying, but it's weird that it can be the same thing. And yet their world and my world is like so radically different. I'm like,
Andy Miller (37:09)
Others.
Yeah, that's very much the case. I'm looking at it now. Last year, I've got made an admin of the Discord for because I also started the online community working group. Last year, did the lightning talk, DjangoCon Europe, about my 100 words. ⁓
Will (37:44)
Yep, we have
a link to that time stamp.
Andy Miller (37:47)
And then ⁓ also did Django Nought sessions, was like, that was the starting point of me getting into contributing more back to the community as well, like code wise and being less scared of those things. ⁓ If that makes it like, it's like not, and I may, it forced me to make time for it as well. I think that's why I got in as well. Like Tim was like, you can do this, but I was like, yeah, but if you give me eight weeks to make sure I do it and I'm accountable to someone, then it will happen. And that's what happened. So.
Carlton (38:14)
need a deadline. There's a free answer talking I need a deadline.
Andy Miller (38:16)
Yeah,
give me a deadline, give me space and I'll do it.
Carlton (38:22)
I would consider you to be one of the more active and people are given more time so I really salute you in everything that you do and the effort you put in.
Andy Miller (38:31)
Thank you. Yeah,
it's I realized it's one of I've described it. I just got goes back to university like I in my when I was a teenager, I was like didn't quite have a had friends but it was like didn't feel quite felt went to university. I was like, I found my people feel like I found my people again in the Django community where it's just like get to walk in the room at a conference or even on discord and you just like you feel like we're friends and it's just like all talking the same language same ethos same community, right?
Carlton (39:01)
Yeah.
Andy Miller (39:05)
What's next?
Will (39:06)
I
would say from an outside perspective you came in like this like Meteor of like knowledge with this like hundred words where you know cuz Jeff Triplett and I do in the newsletter We're always hunting around for stuff and suddenly it was like oh I was like oh again again again again like I think I even told you I was like I would have put like almost all of them in there But we can't just make it you know same thing same thing with Adam Adam Johnson I'm like I can't it can't just repost everything you do but but I think of
Andy Miller (39:27)
I can't make it in my ear.
I
Carlton (39:33)
just our assessment.
Will (39:35)
You know, there's, I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's other people out there who have some, you know, similar or more knowledge than we have, but they don't commit to doing something right there, or they write amazing blog posts and then five months passes. Right. And there needs to be some consistency and commitment to, guess, get on the radar of people as, and then from there, all the, you know, I think that's the thing is like, it's easy as a practitioner to think I need to get better at coding. need to get better at Python or Django. And it's like, you cut, you got to like,
Put your umbrella wide and see what falls in. You can't just be narrow and in a cave somewhere hacking away.
Andy Miller (40:14)
Yeah, it's definitely that consistency when coming back to the blogging. It was just like, I'm just going to be consistent. And some of the posts aren't about Django at all. Some of them are like, I did this on holiday because but it was I'm going to write every day and I'm going to. And yeah, I could have dropped off after that. But it's just you after a few weeks or months, you just the consistency is there. It's a habit. And yeah.
Will (40:39)
It's a community thing too. mean, cause I think about this again, I feel like Carlton, I, started off with, think pretty high quality takes on Django, but at a certain point, you know, now what, right? And it's like, okay, well now we'll talk to people in the community or, I I've come to be more accepting of the fact that there's nuggets of information. Sometimes we go technical, but sometimes we're just chatting as one would in a hallway or at a meetup. And you know, many of us are working, working remotely. So
Andy Miller (41:06)
Yeah.
Will (41:08)
there's value in that even if, know, it doesn't have to be reinventing the core of Django every podcast to have value. But you know, part of me thinks like, I should be like, you know, more hardcore with everything all the time.
Andy Miller (41:25)
No, I think the classic phrase, come for the code, stay for the community. This is a really good insight into what we're thinking about as a community. Getting the breadth of voices is like, ⁓ is where we're thinking as a community. The conferences are great. You go there, but, and Danielle made this in the Lightning Talk in Dublin, it's very exclusive. costs.
what, easily a grand even to get there, right, for a conference. That's, and probably more in the US. I don't know. I've not tried to cost out the US one, like, yeah, but getting to these places is very, very expensive for most people. And so having online community, and this is kind of where the online community for me started. It's like, how can we make the online community replicate?
Will (42:04)
Well, not within the,
Andy Miller (42:20)
the in-person conference for everyone that doesn't get, that wants to be there, but can't be there for whatever reason. And how do we experiment with ideas that are just, yeah, is it like monthly onboarding, an onboarding call or a community call where people just get, and the DSF office hours is part of that to some extent. Like that's one example of it, that kind of people just jump on a call once a week. I don't get to join because it's dinner time, but that's.
Carlton (42:47)
Hahaha.
Will (42:48)
That American
bias, I know.
Andy Miller (42:49)
Yeah, but,
but, but it's like, like, for example, I know I've got community inside on the discord, we've built up like a staff team of helpers and moderators. And the private staff off topic channel is active, like pretty much every single day, there's just talking and checking in with people. And it's private because it's the staff channel, but like, I could see that being replicated. It's like you get a small group of people and you just
You slowly build it up and you can have community online, but it just takes time and effort. And on ramps, we've talked about, you've both talked about this before, it's like smoothing those on ramps into the community. And it not being, you have to do X, Y, Z, it's like, just help out. And, but it is that consistency as well. Like so many people drive by, ask for the help or their homework assignment or whatever and disappear. The ones that stay around are the ones that become part of the community. It's like they're...
and they choose to be a part of it.
Carlton (43:51)
How do you handle the setting limits to your commitment? Because you've got young kids, you've got a business, you've got another bit of your freelancing business on the side that you're still doing, you've got all the time you spend on Discord, you've got the forum open, you're doing these working groups, you comment on almost every significant debate I can do, you've got your blog that you're writing. How do you avoid doing too much?
Andy Miller (44:18)
with great difficulty. My calendar is an absolute mess. Well, it looks like an absolute mess, but it's like very strict scheduling of when I do things. ⁓
Will (44:32)
So time boxing everything though.
Andy Miller (44:34)
Titan Boxing, for example, yeah, every night of the week is probably if there's something there, but it's like doing either date night or I'm doing Django stuff or it's, I do Cub Scouts, so doing Cub Scouts or it's like, but then I've architected my life that between 8.30 in the morning and 3.30 ish, I can do what I like. So like,
One thing that happened during my freelance career was one client was having a production issue, but I had at that point had a day rate to or my day booked in with someone else. And I was like, I can't have this. So I've over the six years structured it so that people pay me monthly for a service. But then then gives me the opportunity to choose how I run my day, run my week. have complete freedom. And that's not, so it does mean I can jump on a call at any time. Like it's not.
I have some standing calls, but it also means I get to go climbing every Monday or I can go out for lunch with my wife on Fridays because she has Fridays. I've worked to create that flexibility and therefore it means I can stay engaged in different places and also worked with the freelancing to get my prices to a point where I don't need to be working every single hour of the day generally to enable me to do the other things like write blogs and it's
It's creating that margin and then I fill the margin.
Carlton (46:06)
What you want to.
Andy Miller (46:07)
yeah, with what I want to do and what I would like to do.
Will (46:11)
That seems healthy. I mean, there's a season to things, I mean, I feel like at some point I was writing very regularly and all these things, and now I just talk to Carlton and Jeff. And then everything else flows from there.
Andy Miller (46:26)
But yeah, that's why I went from daily down to weekly of the post I was like I've done the year but and I run out and I was like I can't keep doing this because it was just all consuming for that year and I was like Now it's got to be a weekly thing where I when I have an idea and if I skip a week So be it but it's like when I have ideas I'm not gonna force them, but I'll write about one when they come
Carlton (46:40)
Yeah.
Will (46:46)
Yeah, well, Carlton's always been a good influence for me because his kids are a little bit older than mine. Sometimes I would be like, I want to work on this thing, but I'm at the playground or I'm doing this thing. And obviously I want to spend time with my kids. But he would always like, ⁓ that's when the deep thinking happens. When you're pushing a three year old on the swing for 40 minutes, it sort of frees up the space. It's the equivalent of like a Kantian walk or something, but with kids, right?
Andy Miller (47:05)
you
⁓
Yeah, exactly that. It's like I have.
Will (47:13)
But it is
true, it is true, right? Our brains are always going, even when you're rock climbing, part of you is thinking about like, big end, that's interesting.
Andy Miller (47:21)
Yeah, the
guy David Kadavy I mentioned, has this thing about front burner and he has a, in one of his books he talks about front burner and back burner when you're cooking and you have like the things you're focusing on the front and you might move something to the back when you just, you need to let it simmer or something like that when cooking. And it's the same kind of thing with creative projects or code. It's like you've maybe focusing on something, but there's always background work going on and you need to push them back. You can't always be on something. So yeah.
Will (47:51)
Alright, should we go to projects and books phase of things? I'll say yes. I'll start. Books.
how to build your own
LLM from scratch. I'll throw that one out there. have been working through it. So basically you in Python build like a GPT-2 equivalent. So going through, you know, pre-training pipeline, I'll be honest, I haven't finished it. I'm like halfway through it. It is technical, ⁓ but it's super interesting. I wish I'd, you know, instead I've been like, I find myself drawn to, you know, like these books of like, you know, people making
Carlton (48:28)
Yeah.
Will (48:30)
Snappy comments on AI, but anyways build your own LLM from scratch really good knows what he's talking about ⁓ You don't really know a thing unless you you know code it yourself from hand not with Claude. So ⁓
Carlton (48:43)
So you can't, I was going to ask, can you get Claude to implement the chat GBT too?
Will (48:46)
Yeah, well, no, I love I love
your phrase comprehension debt because I was I've been thinking about like what is that? Yeah, there needs to be a name for this right like because even if the code is correct and let's just assume that it is if I didn't struggle and type it like Because I come from doing it beforehand. I'm like I go into these code bases and I'm like what is going on here? Like, you know, it's like am I losing my mind? It's like no I vibe coded that that's why I don't I can't like just spin it up as much as yeah
Andy Miller (49:14)
I'm not going to claim I coined that term. heard it from a YouTube show on AI. I'm not claiming it. Yeah, but yeah, it was an interview with... One thing on AI that I will say is that I follow a guy called Brian Castle who's from Connecticut and he has a site called Builder Methods. He's doing very sensible takes on AI. It's not all the vibe coding. It's like he's targeting professionals like ourselves and fairly sensible.
Will (49:19)
Yeah, well, it needs some term for that.
feel like I know this
guy. I don't know him, but I've followed a bunch of his stuff. He's done like a million different like YouTube channels and
Andy Miller (49:49)
Yeah, he's done a lot, but it's he's focusing on doubling down on AI and he's produced some good tools that I'm interested in and been using. So anyway, should I do book? Should I do my books or Carlton? you have a book? Yeah. I too many to choose. I'm going to plug disclaimer. The author is a good friend of mine for so for fiction. It's world of Ashtrom. It's a friend of mine. He has written a trilogy.
Will (49:51)
Yeah.
Carlton (50:01)
Yeah, do your book, Andy, you do.
Andy Miller (50:18)
It's like Tolkien esque fantasy. ⁓ So he's got a trilogy out which is now in one big book, and then I'm subscribed to his Patreon. And he's got a quadrilogy, or maybe more. That's like set 40 years after the published book. So I'm reading like a chapter, the first draft every month as it comes as he's publishing it. And it's a very, good read.
Will (50:39)
This sounds like
catnip for you, Carlton. You like these types of things.
Carlton (50:42)
Yeah, no,
was just thinking I could get that for the children. ⁓
Will (50:46)
Hahaha
Andy Miller (50:46)
It's yeah. And then nonfiction I one author I recommend I think I might have mentioned earlier Rob Walling. ⁓ His books I've just read. My microcom I've just finished reading his latest which is exit strategy about exiting business. I know I'm nowhere near that but I'm reading it for context later down the line preparing myself. But yeah, his advice and his is just very sensible when it comes to if you're interested in building a software business.
Will (50:54)
yeah. Micro, right? Micro stuff.
Andy Miller (51:14)
I recommend it.
Carlton (51:18)
I've been reading a slit one by Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc. which is about the dictators who want to run the world. It's about what's going on in Hungary and what's going on in the United States and what's going on around the world. And the methods that these people use to undermine our democracies. It's about halfway through it and it's pretty good. So yeah, I mean, it's out in 2024 and at the end...
Will (51:23)
yeah?
It rings true to the...
Carlton (51:47)
about 2026. It's all the worst. You know, it's it's anyway, it's Autocracy ink. It's worth reading one the Pulitzer Prize. So it's, you know, but it lays down quite clearly the kind of ⁓ behaviors you see would like the crazy things that happen in the media. And you're like, why on earth is this happening in the media? And it's all part of like a sort of standard playbook that, you know, it talks about and it's okay, that that's interesting. So ⁓ yeah, I've been reading that and enjoying it.
Will (52:14)
Well, quickly projects. I'm going to shout out Andy, your Django prod server. think we ran out of time to fully dive into it, but we'll link to it. I've been following it. I think you're still kind of working on it. Like it's got a number of stars.
Andy Miller (52:25)
Yeah, it's
yeah, I need to there's a few bugs I need to fix and stuff. I am working on I put an open PR with Django cookie cutter to get it merged in. ⁓ There's a Yeah, I need to fix a bug. But that's kind of my next phase. I kind of talked about it on the forum and places is how do you market? You've got a thing. How do you market what to do? And this is like for me? Yeah, well, yeah, I was like, I could create my own startup project, but actually, it would be better to get into one that's already used. So
Will (52:46)
Well, create your own starter project.
Andy Miller (52:55)
⁓ Lucky I know I worked with Bruno who maintains it. So I was like, hey Bruno, could we maybe shift this into? And he's like, yeah. He played around with it. He's like, so that I'm also thinking of getting it. ⁓ I need to work on Django simple deploying and get it into that as well. I think it'd be a good place for it to live as well as a nice pairing. ⁓ But yeah, it's there. I just need to slowly chip away on it ⁓ this year. And so keep improving it, keep promoting it.
Will (53:14)
Yeah.
Andy Miller (53:24)
There might be a lightning talk or maybe something more. Yeah, before you joined, Will Carlton was rubbing me to submit a CFP for it. Yeah, I will be there, but whether I'm doing a talk or not, we'll see. I'll be doing a lightning talk, but we'll see if there's an actual talk.
Carlton (53:28)
I heard there might be a CFP
Will (53:38)
Yeah, yeah, he's an insta-
Carlton (53:38)
It's for DjangoCon
Europe where the CFP closes this weekend.
Well, we'll see.
Andy Miller (53:51)
⁓ My project is the, at the end of last year, the us and the online community working group, we opened a repo very similar to new features, but for community ideas. And it kind of probably got lost. The announcement probably got lost between board elections and 6.0 release and that kind of thing. ⁓ But it's sitting there. You can submit issues of like, I want this to happen on GitHub or Discord, and so we can start tracking them and start implementing features and, or people can.
start seeing what we've got planned as well. I have dumped a lot of ideas on there, but yeah, go have a look. But it's yeah, community ideas rather than stuff to go into Django, it's for around the community itself. ⁓ Yeah, go have a look.
Carlton (54:38)
think that's good. I think that the new features board has turned, has been quite successful. It's given people a place to put their ideas and several ideas have been promoted forward and it gives a chance for discussions to happen and it's away from the sort of the main workflow. And I can only see ⁓ ideas for the community having their own space as being a positive thing too, so super. My project, I just wanted to mention Django Health Check, which popped up again this week. Again, it's a...
It's coding Joe, what's his name? Yeah, Joe Moran, Johannes Moran. ⁓ It's, what is it? It enables you to set up health checks for, don't know, your caches, your databases, your disk space, your memory, and then you can ping those health checks and then you can decide what actions you wanna take ⁓ in case, know, suddenly your disk space has gone to 80%.
I bet I want at least a notification that or I want some automatic action to happen. Oh, my cash went down. It's no longer reachable. Oh, I better take action. So it's a really good project and it's very easy to write your own checks. again, Joe puts an awful lot of work into keeping these projects updated. So I wanted to mention that.
Will (55:50)
Well, I feel like we could easily go for another hour, but we'll try to keep it to under an hour slightly. ⁓ I guess last quick thing, our magic wand question. So if you had one power to change one thing in Django, code community, what would you put your foot down for?
Andy Miller (56:08)
I was thinking about this a lot last week. don't think I honestly it's the for me it's the funding and the budget of ⁓ because in the community as I see it there's a lot of movement of a lot of ideas but they're all limited because we're all volunteers. I say ⁓ okay the fellows are paid but even them it's like everyone is limited. If we could hire an executive director if we could hire more fellows or ⁓ even hire freelancers like take the marketing and the website.
It's like, if you could throw cash at that, great. Then things would exist.
Will (56:42)
You've written
some posts around this idea too,
Andy Miller (56:44)
Yeah, it's just like the idea of, think that's the one thing I would change is just go give Django a million dollars or whatever it needs to just grow. then, and I think that would allow us to just, I like the leisurely pace that Django takes, but I think we could be a bit faster if we had more, and we would be probably naturally faster. And I think that it's, there's, I'm not saying everything has to go JavaScript speed, shall we say, ⁓ but it's. ⁓
It's a bit.
Will (57:16)
Yeah, well, I know that, you
know, Jeff Triplett is the new president and the new board are working on this. People have been working on this. I know it can be frustrating because there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that until something happens, you know, it's easy to say, why hasn't something happened? But I know that I know that stuff is happening. It's just it's also a lot. It's a lot of work to get a bunch of money from a big company. I think that's kind of almost the big problem is like if we had the muscle to get it.
Andy Miller (57:24)
Yeah.
Cough
Yeah.
Will (57:44)
but we don't and so they even if they want to give it there's that disconnect.
Andy Miller (57:48)
Yeah, it's that's why I say the funding because I think everything else is just sitting there like there's energy in different parts of the community and I'm like, if there was it's that I think the funding is the thing holding the community back right now. So if I had to waive a magic wand, it would be money dumped into an account that people could then use. I is like, yeah, I just see the energy and people wanting to push it forward. So I don't think we need any magic wand anywhere else. It's just that kick up. Yeah, but
Will (58:17)
Well,
there's this meme of just one missing piece. It's like this brain with puzzle pieces and someone has a thing that's $1 billion. My wife and I often share that. We're like, oh, there's just one little thing we fix, whatever realm it is.
Andy Miller (58:21)
Yeah.
Hahaha!
Carlton (58:25)
Ha ⁓
Andy Miller (58:30)
.
But yeah, I, other than that, I'm quite happy with Django as the code. Like, generally, I was thinking about it, I like, I'm quite happy with like, yeah, it's got its warts, but any 20 piece of software does have its warts. like, the job. It's fun to work with. The community's great. It doesn't, yeah, I'm happy with it. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't. I'd have found something else.
Will (58:35)
Hahaha
Carlton (58:35)
Yeah, good one.
It's a good one. It's good.
Will (58:57)
Yeah, same. Well, all right, we're gonna have links to all the things. ⁓ Thank you for taking the time. It's fun to finally have you on. Again, been reading your stuff for, I guess, over three years now. So, glad we made it. Yeah, so jangochat.com on YouTube, and we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.
Carlton (58:57)
So.
Andy Miller (59:09)
It's a pleasure to be here.