Chaim is the current President of the Django Software Foundation. We discuss what's new in Django, Carlton's pending departure as a Fellow, and how things really work behind-the-scenes.
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Will Vincent 0:05
Hi, welcome to an episode of Django Chat, a podcast on the Django web framework. I'm Will Vincent joined by Carlton Gibson. Hello, Carlton.
Carlton Gibson 0:12
Hello.
Will Vincent 0:13
And we're very pleased to have Haim Kirby, president of the Django Software Foundation. Join us for this episode.
Chaim Kirby 0:18
Hi, Will. Hi, Carlton. Thanks for having me.
Carlton Gibson 0:20
Hello. Thank you.
Will Vincent 0:21
Happy to finally have you on. So this episode is being more or less real time. So it'll come out tomorrow from what you record. So that's that's a nice sign. But let's, let's start with the Django Software Foundation. So you're the president. Yeah, as of this year, what's the quick pitch like? I thought Django is just code. But what's, what's this other organization, so
Chaim Kirby 0:42
the Django Software Foundation, we own the copyright to the code we hold, hold the copyright, we hold the trademarks, we police both of those things. And somewhat more importantly, I think we manage the community are helped to manage the community around Django. The steering committee is part of the DSF. The steering committee sort of leads technical innovation, the fellows with Carlton, I think I can say that for another four days, being one, Carlton,
Will Vincent 1:10
two days, two days, whatever, they whatever, they
Chaim Kirby 1:13
don't even know what today is the 28th. There you go. Carlton, numerious are wonderful fellows. And we do have a new fellow joining us. The announcement will be coming out very soon. But I think this podcast will probably come up before the announcement. But we've had a wonderful time with Carlton, and we hope that process will continue. In amazing way. And yeah, but yeah, so the DSF everything that isn't Django code, specifically in the Django ecosystem and world.
Will Vincent 1:38
And then let's just so how does one get on the DSF? So you, you and I were on it together for several years. How did you how did how did you find out about it, right, because you're a programmer, but I think it takes a while before a Django person even knows about it, maybe the Django con or how you learn about.
Chaim Kirby 1:55
So I'm a little bit unusual. And I think we'll probably get into this a bit. I have an engineering background, but also a legal background. And so stuff like that sort of jumps out to me or make a purpose of looking at it. But more to the point I found in my life, that things that I'm interested in, I tend to fall into positions of leadership or something like that. And I think more it's, if I'm interested in it, I'm going to go all in. And so I discovered the DSM fairly soon. In my life, I'm joining the board. Well, I guess there's two different things in joining the DSF, right, because we have members, and then we have the board. And then we have committees and stuff which we can talk about. And membership is a place where I'm really interested in growing the DSF what it means to be a member, our membership right now what the bylaws say membership is and what our membership is right now isn't even fully aligned. But right now, membership is kind of a Lifetime Achievement, you've done good things in the community award, for lack of a better term, there's probably about 250 300, individual members of the DSF. And then the board, separate from the steering committee is charged with all the sort of legal and bureaucratic aspects of running the DSF. Like we said, and anybody can run for the board, we have elections once a year, don't have to be a member, anybody in the world can run for the board, only members can vote. And generally speaking, I think people who are elected to the board are people who are known to the community. But if you can write a good personal statement, you'll get elected, we made a change last year and will participate in this change. It used to be we elected to a one year terms and over COVID that seem to us who were on the board to be a bad idea. Because you know, there was a huge potential for burnout of everybody doing everything. And the idea of the entire board deciding one day to be like I'm done. That doesn't bode well for right the lifecycle of an organization. So we switched to a staggered two year terms. So this year was our first election it kicked into that. So this year, half the board that was elected, well, there's seven of us. So for people who were elected were elected to two year terms, and three people were elected to the final one year term for us to set up the staggering.
Will Vincent 4:06
A positive take on that is that we noticed that I think, I guess the second year of COVID, or during COVID, we had basically the same board. And it was so much I felt it was so much more productive because there is a ramp up period. And so most people when they're new, which makes sense, don't aren't proactive, because they're just learning the ropes the first, certainly six months. And so that second year where we had the same board, I felt like you know, changing the bylaws and all these other things, it was much more productive. So having to your term made a lot of sense. And again, you know, Django relied on your legal background, because you're certainly the only Django developer. I know the legal background.
Chaim Kirby 4:44
Yeah, I think there's probably a few I mean, right. It's when you say Django developer, this is something that always interests me. So, right, there's seven board members, three members of the steering committee, a few committees here and they're like, we have our fellowship committee that there are three people we have For a few others that Code of Conduct Committee and there's overlap among them right, then 300 some odd DSF individual members. Then we saw JetBrains Django survey and I think correct me if there was what I think about 50,000 respondents, 20,000 I forget the number, but a couple of 10s of 1000s. I
Will Vincent 5:18
think it was like 7am I
Chaim Kirby 5:20
getting this term I think gave the Python. I think you're thinking that Python, but there was there was,
Will Vincent 5:27
I think, like 7000, last, okay, something like that. So, so 7000
Chaim Kirby 5:29
people responded. So what is the Django developer and this is a big deal. And I know, I sort of spoke about this in my talk in Porto, that you're going to Lincoln, and thank you for that. There's probably one or 2 million Django developers at any time in the world. Right. And so who are we doing this for? And who is participating? And it's an it's an interesting question. Anyway, yeah. Sorry. I'm a bit of a tangent. But no, it's no,
Carlton Gibson 5:53
it's I think it's really important, because the thing you talked about there was that the the individual membership award, let's call it is for lifetime achievement, you've contributed to Django, there's an awful lot of those people that aren't currently involved in Django. Correct, which is fine, because there's no obligation to keep being involved in Django forever, right, you move on, you're gonna do other things. And even if they are just away for a bit, or they come back, but what we don't have I think, and what I think somehow we, I don't know whether it needs to be an official thing, but I think it's really missing is something that's more is for who's active now. So okay, there's a discord in the forum, and you can hang out in those places, you can come to the conferences, but there's an awful lot of people beyond that, who are active in Django now, but I think, for me, I'm like, how do I reach those people, because, say, for example, now, we want to move the translations, machinery from trans effects to website, and they've offered us hosting and all the rest, but there's a there's a work load to be done to in moving that now I can email the members of the Django Software Foundation and say, Hey, anyone going to help me, but most of the people on that list aren't perhaps active. Whereas if there's another forum, I'm like, Hey, you're all active, and we've got this issue, I'm gonna get a better response. It's difficult to know, just from a pure a maintenance perspective. If I want volunteers, the Hall of Fame isn't necessarily the place to ask for those volunteers. What's your thought on that?
Chaim Kirby 7:22
Yeah, definitely, I think, and to call it a Hall of Fame. That's difficult. And I've had that feeling too. But yeah, there's always this this danger of when we have an initiative, when we decide we want to do things something either on the worksite on a committee side, whatever. We reach out to the membership, why? Well, we have a mailing list. But it's, it's hard to say, Okay, we're going to continually ask the people who have given have been recognized for having given in the past, and asked them to do more, right, that's a really excellent recipe for burnout. And we aren't giving not we aren't giving other people the opportunity to to join that that membership by not giving them anything, but we don't have the channels to tell people, hey, there is things that are can be done that aren't code, but that you can can give back. It's kind of like political donations, right? You give one donation of $5. And suddenly, like everybody who wants money, emails you it's like, oh, because this is someone who give like, but suddenly that's half a million dollars if I gave to everybody what's going on? I have another I think, good example, maybe to illustrate it. So I'm an admin on a slack called pie slackers. And 50,000 people on that slack. Which we can talk about the slack pricing itself at another point, but we don't Haley. But 50,000 people on that slack. If I go look at the metrics, about 200 are commenting, right? There's like 200 core people who like put whatever. But every week, you get this message about new new users in people who moved inactive. However, Slack means inactive. Probably haven't touched it in a week, right. And usually, we have about 50 or 100 new users, or 50, or 100 inactive, which means that community, people who are seeing these messages, yeah, it's 200 people driving it. But there's 49,000 people who are like seeing it. We in the DSF don't have that 49,000 in a channel.
Carlton Gibson 9:14
I mean, there is the discord that's been set up there is the discord and it's
Chaim Kirby 9:19
a full disclosure. I'm not actually on the discord. Which we should be okay.
Carlton Gibson 9:24
So right. Okay, so I'm not I'm on it, but I don't never go on it. Because every time I go into discord, my mind sort of explodes slightly, I find it really difficult to be.
Chaim Kirby 9:31
And I think that's right, so much of the Django community, rightly is about the software. And of course, it's about the software. But there's so much that can be done without writing code for core Django, right translations that something writing your own libraries or just you use Django, right, if you use it, it matters to you in some way, shape, or form. Maybe you just wanted to be able
Carlton Gibson 9:57
to get updates. Yeah, just I mean, quite often as well as in my time feathering, I've had people come and they approach and say, Well, what can I do? And it's like, it's really hard to guide them in the right direction to was the contributing Guide, which is great. But it's like, like reading the Bible. It's massive. It's big. It's intimidating. And we don't have that easy on ramp. Yeah. For people who want to volunteer?
Chaim Kirby 10:23
Well, it's funny, you know, when somebody comes into this, not even the Django community, but the software community, right, and they want to learn, you know, about a career they want to learn they went to school or not, what do we tell them, we tell them, you know, scratch your own itch. That's the only way you're going to do something that's interesting. And then that's lost, maybe to some degree, right? Like, oh, write a package, you don't have to contribute to Django. Like that was my entry into Django. I mean, I was using it for work, but I wrote a few packages, and you know, maybe one other person has used them, but they're on pi pi. And that's cool. And that's maybe lacking. And I, you know, I know, we were in San Diego, Carlton, and I think I forget if we met there, but we sort of became close in San Diego 2019. Right. And we were talking about contributions and stuff. And Carlton was like, oh, there's this effort to move the postgres specific RM bits, to be database agnostic, as much as possible, you know, maybe you could take some effort there. And I looked at it. But my time is finite. And certainly we could talk about that. And like, there wasn't an itch I had there. Right. And that was there. Actually, I think around the time where I was like, I'll run for the board instead, to some degree, because that sort of interested me more in scratching an itch. And in the communal aspect of things.
Will Vincent 11:38
Well, in the conference is something else that COVID highlight is the conferences have really been the Django cons, the place to bring people into community. I mean, that's how I got pulled in. And so not having the conferences, we really felt the the lack of other ways to bring people in
Chaim Kirby 11:54
even there, right? Our conferences are small, which is good, right? There's a group of people and you want it to be right, you can meet anybody in the room. And that's wonderful. It's not like this, you know, 10,000 person conference, even PyCon is not 10,000 people, but it's too many. And there's too many feels like channels. Right, exactly. But even there. How many people are new to those? Probably not too many. Right? Maybe they've been doing a little, I don't know, maybe?
Carlton Gibson 12:22
I'm going to argue. I was in Porto. And I was like it was the first conference back after the two, two years of online and it was like, Is this going to work? Is it and yet, first of all, it's like, oh, there's all these all the old faces, like brilliant, it's so good to see. And there was some people who didn't come in, sometimes not. But there were the old faces. And that was wonderful. But also there were masses of new people and masses of youngsters as well, which is really important.
Chaim Kirby 12:48
I didn't mean to say new people to the conference is yes, there are a lot of new people to the conference. I don't think there's people come to the conferences. Usually, I think maybe I'm misreading, right, because I've not run the conferences, I've been to them. People come when they've had an entree into the Django community that conferences are not their entry point to the Django community, especially, you know, and I say, throwing ideas out and putting more work on other people's plates, I don't know. But I remember in San Diego, there was a student, I think a local student, I said, oh, like was their advertising at your school was something like that? And they said, you know, no, I just happen to see Lincoln's like, why don't we do local community advertising? Yeah, sure. There's numbers and whatever, but you know, have a local cut or a student rate cut for the local university or whatever, get their computer science students do show up at a conference. We do that.
Will Vincent 13:40
Why don't why don't why don't we have local chapters. And that's that, that's how I did there. There. We used to be a Django Boston pre COVID. And that's unfortunately gone away. So there's i, which I think my main point I was gonna say is that Django is all volunteers, it is this big thing. But if when I ask people who aren't in the Django world, even Django developers, like we're seeing Django comes from, they just assume, you know, it's tech, there's money flowing, you know, out of fountains, right, they just assume that Google or somebody is has a, you know, financial incentive to make it all happen. But you know, we're not, we're not even Python, right, Python pythons or step up, you know, a big step up. And then there's other things. So Django is huge, but tiny. And that's, that's a hard thing. Even for software developers like, well, it's just there. So it always be there.
Chaim Kirby 14:32
Yeah, I'm glad you said that will. Because it goes into something I was thinking it's, you know, you mentioned Oh, local chapters. So when we were on the board, when Bill and I were on the board, we got a request, we get grant requests, and we can talk about funding and stuff separately, but but I think it's an important discussion. We got a request from somebody who wanted to start basically cengel Club gym club at the university. And I don't even know that they're asking for money, per se. I mean, yeah, we might have thrown them a Couple of 100 bucks if you know it made sense, but they're asking for, you know, resources or mentorship or something like that. And being the volunteer and I know Carlton, we can talk a lot about mentorship. I know that's something top of mind for you. And I think will you as well. I mean cards on the table, we run on about a quarter million dollars a year. That's what we raise. And there's a bit of a budget shortfall. We could talk about that because of inflation and various other things. It's interesting to think that I know these are conversations that we've had, what could we do with more? What would we do with more? What work would it take to raise more? Because I think there's a whole lot that could be done, but who knows? Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 15:41
Okay. So here's my when you say that my immediate thought is, is and this comes back to the point I made about you, we need to be able to reach who's active now? Because Okay, let's say we raised half a million extra, like three times the budget. Okay, what would we do with that motor point? Who's going to do it? Excellent. Who's going to who's going to do that work with the money that we raise? It's, yeah, like we're kind of. So I guess the question is, what do you think the scope of the DSF should be? Because clearly, it needs to defend Django and the trademark. And clearly the fellowship program, or I absolutely believe that fellowship program is the reason why Django has been able to succeed over the longer term. And then there's the Django cons, which I think are absolutely vital. But beyond those things, what do you think the scope of the DSF is reasonable to take on?
Chaim Kirby 16:28
Absolutely. Excellent question. So first, you're scooping I think, something that I'm going to bring you with the next board meeting. So I apologize to the rest of the board members. I will say these are my own thoughts. This is not, you know, the DSM for the Board's thoughts. But yes, first and foremost, what do we need to do? So the fellows are the driving force behind our roadmap, hitting its target dates? Yes. The steering committee sort of is the final arbiters, but the fellows are doing the day to day work, 100% and all everything to them. Carlton, Morris, I could not do what you guys do. It's amazing. So thank you for all the work you've done. Separately, yeah, doing grants are sort of big funds. Grant wise, Django con Europe, Django, con us Django, con Africa, there's going to be a Django con Africa this year. Very exciting. And then primarily, Django Girls events. There are a few others here and there. But those are sort of the the big grant monies. And then small things we pay for hosting, and things of that nature a few places. So what can we do with more? Well, the DSF, by its founding articles, has four mandates to protect Jango. So trademark, copyright, things like that. And I'm gonna get some of these wrong to develop Django so the fellows people contributing the steering committee, or what have you to further the cutting edge of modern web development, which I think gets kind of close into just developing Django, but things like async falls into that broadly, right. And then, and then finally, and I think this is where we dropped the ball continuously. And I would suggest for whatever the 17 years, the DSF has been a thing is promote Django. Right, we do a little promotion, by way of giving money to Django, girls, by giving money to the conferences by letting people under our rules of trademark use the trademark appropriately. But that's it. Right? And again, it's because it's volunteer. And that's fine. If we had more money, some ideas, and there are various places that we could place the money, it depends on what scope and what we prioritize. One would be. I think there's a recognition that there may be some scope for more fellow effort. So certainly, you know, sort of more people paid to work on and with and around Jayco would be very appropriate. An idea has been floated a number of times about an executive director to handle more of the day to day, so it's not wholly volunteer the sort of running of the Django world. And then, what could we do with money right around promotion? Could we run more events? Do we bring cones back under the umbrella of the DSF? There's been you know, conversations going both directions of that like like the Python world, the PSF runs PyCon, right? We don't run Django con Daphna runs Gen Con us and we sort of manage Gen Con Europe by finding a committee to do it every year. Maybe we could do outreach, maybe we could have community liaisons developer relations. Right. Maybe we little things. Put out a PR blurb every time there's a major release incentive like tech news channels, right? We don't do that. tiny things that would cost nothing but time but we don't have the time. So let's spend a few bucks To do it, perhaps
Will Vincent 20:00
you reminded me of we should ask Ron as guests come, Deb Nicholson, who's the PSF, the new executive director, Anna, the past DSF president and I had a really great call with her, I guess last year, where we you know, and asking, you know, what, you know, coming new into this new, like, what can Executive Director do, and she really, you know, she got the PSF job, so, and she's worked in this space for years. So she really could lay out what such a person can do, right? And it's really just someone full time organizing the trains, doing all these little things, delegating, you know, making, making hard calls that need to be made, you know, operationally not around the code. So it's certainly, when you're on the inside of the DSF. It's, it's definitely like, oh, it'd be nice if there was, you know, it's hard to know if it's just like a white unicorn. Or, like, how much do we need? Well, these things like
Chaim Kirby 20:53
this. So it's definitely Oh, cotton gopher
Carlton Gibson 20:57
bursting with I bursting at this point, is it because technically speaking, the framework is in a stronger position as it's been for years, like the last few releases, just so many things to fix have been, you know, boxes have been ticked and improvements have been made. And it's actually it's really exciting. And it's like, yeah, we should be promoting Django. It's like, actually, it's not old and crusty and weathering. It's like, you know, new blue. Let's, let's promote it. Let's get people excited about using it.
Chaim Kirby 21:26
Yeah. And I think that's, there's maybe a differentiator, they're talking about DSF, Django, PSF, Python, right. People look at the DSF. And they see Django and maybe they see Yeah, it's exciting. But it's it's difficult to get into it's opaque. Because it's robust. It is large, right? It is, and it's working. And so how do I get into it? Python? Certainly, there's a lot going on in the Python world, but it's all about the community around Python and PyCon in the PSF. Right. And I made this comment for anybody who listens to my 2020 to your talk, that let's go really dour, the death of Django, right? It's not going to be because the code base dies and where there's like, honestly, we could do no more work, and it would be long lived. It does what it needs to do. We want to continually improve it and make it modern, and, you know, do everything that anybody would want to do, but it's good. It's excellent. If Dingo dies, it's gonna be the community that dies, because people are like, oh, yeah, the code is done. What else is there to do? And there's so much to do. If you care about the community, if you care about using Django, right, if you don't, it's a bit of a tautology. There's nothing to do if there's nothing to do well, there is if you want to do stuff.
Will Vincent 22:39
Oh, and that's why we're having this chat. So people can. Part of it, you know, you wrote a political analogy. I mean, it's, it's a democracy and all its strengths and weaknesses. And one of the weaknesses is, sometimes it's hard to get something done. I mean, even, you know, in a sense, well, not me anymore. I don't matter. But if they were ever people to get something done, I mean, Carl, you know, Carlton's a fellow for another two days, you're the president. So wait two days? Let's, this is real world for people. Hey, let's have a let's have a newsletter on the Django project site, because we don't have it. That's, that's a big reason why I have the Django news newsletter because we don't have it. But like, you know, how are we going to reach someone if we don't do that? Like, how does that actually play out? Kind of behind the scenes? Absolutely. I mean, maybe you can, yeah, both of you can elicit you know, illuminate that for people.
Chaim Kirby 23:24
So I can't speak deeply historically, but I can say for the last three years in the last three years, the bulk of that were very unusual time. But the board and the couple other people who work on committees steering committee are like, again, our fellowship committee. It's how much time they're willing to put in right there. There are minimal expectations. Yes, our bylaws say we can remove somebody who's not performing their job, but I don't think that's ever happened, right. And so the expectations are really how much we expect of ourselves right as it were on the board and Okay, great. You go to an hour long meeting or you know, I guess will was the treasurer, the treasurer has a little bit more in the President has a little bit more. But are you actually going to put that time in because right now hopefully we can get to a place where it's not just about people who come up with a couple hours here and there can do something if they so desire, hopefully it can be a little bit more robust, for lack of a better term. But let's speak in specifics. We the board, last board meeting, approved some changes to the bylaws. The bylaws had some interesting language around committees that were restrictive and we can change the bylaws. So now we just we eliminated that section and they'll get published soon on the website. And we look back to the higher Article of the bylaws that says the board can do anything basically for the good of the DSF. So we are going to start expanding our committees and expanding the support for Django both for opportunities For people to give back, hopefully, also to allow the board hopefully to become more of a proactive and directional force in the DSF. And less less of bureaucratic reactive, oh, we have to like figure out if we're going to give this grant kind of thing. So one immediate place where people can maybe come back, we're going to ask for volunteers will be on some of these committees, the ones that are obvious that we're going to put off, we're going to build up a funding committee who will review grant requests, the board will finally approve them, but we're gonna have a funding committee, the one that goes immediately with that a fundraising committee, because fundraising, I just said it's important. We actually did have a budget shortfall. We have savings, we're okay. But right. So fundraising is important and fundraising is it needs to be a concerted effort. So if we bring on the executive director, right, we would do that. Then we can start thinking about things. A lot of it is going to be a question of the membership and greater Django community, how much they want to give back in various areas. Right? Do we have a swag committee? Do we have a promotion committee, right? Like, we have a Twitter channel, Twitter with all its dumpster fire of everything. But we also have a presence on I think, Mastodon, we have various presents, maybe it's just one or two people that once or twice a month, put together a press release a tweet, whatever, start in that promotional direction. If people were interested, you know, I'm related to the education world. My mother's an educator, my wife's principal, why don't we have teaching materials and I know that starts to get into a very weird space that especially for will wills, like, hey, that's how I make money. And but that's not meant to be but like, like, what, you know, we have the how to, and we
Will Vincent 26:41
don't care if the money comes from readers and the DSS There we go. That's good.
Chaim Kirby 26:45
But again, I go back to this kid who requested stuff for club at college like that, could we, you know, it would have been probably five or 10 kids. But it's like, Hey, this is a community that's welcoming that, you know, the software does what you want it to do, it's very open for you to do what you need to do. But we didn't have anything to give them whether it's swag, whether it's finances, whether it's we have nothing, right, and I'm using them a bit as a touch point, because it seemed like an interesting they, they came to us and we're like, We got nothing. It's similar
Carlton Gibson 27:16
with people who want to contribute is it's it's really hard to point to an easy issue or an easy on ramp, or, like, it's, that's not for lack of wanting to or lack of thought about these things. It's just that I actually, I don't really know where to guide you to immediately begin.
Will Vincent 27:32
Well, I think, Wait, something you said earlier home, you know, I guess with Carlton, the postgres is that, you know, it didn't scratch your itch, so you didn't do it. That's kind of the problem with the non code part of Jango is that it doesn't scratch your particular itch, like you're helping to help, but setting up our merch store, doing the doing a developer survey, all these things, it's largely invisible, and it doesn't, it's not something that is helping you day to day in your job. So you know, you can do some of it, but to do all this stuff. It's just, it's not sustainable, someone unpaid isn't going to do it. And that's kind of the problem. I think, fundamentally, is that, like no one can really expect even following, right. I mean, why do we have fellows because it's just unreasonable to expect volunteers to push out these, these updates. And so yeah, highlighting what you know. But if I could, if I could push you on. So what, how does something actually get done? So if I put in a PR, on Django project for, here's a box for a newsletter on MailChimp or something? What is Yeah, see, the thing is, is like, I don't know, I or someone else, I actually know how things are. But like, I don't want to do put in the work to do that, unless I know it's gonna be approved. But it's hard to know in advance if it'll be approved and who even approves it?
Chaim Kirby 28:54
Right. So that's an interesting question. Because, I mean,
Will Vincent 28:57
yeah, we can talk about how things actually get approved, Carlton and stuff on sort of developers list?
Chaim Kirby 29:02
Well, that's a really interesting one, right? Because that's, that's an approval for like code change to the website. But it's also asking for approval to a change of how we use the website, right, and what its goal is, which is a little bit different. And is a very interesting question. And I think part of that is, there are two large things that are very conflated on the website that make it difficult more for one than the other. One is Django. Yes, Django projects.com. It is Django. It is the code. It's how to use the code. It's how to look at the code and how to think about the code. But then you go to the footer, or the side, it's like, oh, and it's the DSF. And it's fundraising. If you click the, you know, 14 links, plus maybe, you know, put in a code that we never send you. I mean, I'm being facetious, of course, but it's not obvious. Right? And so when you bring up a newsletter that has a weird, maybe overlap of both, right, we're talking about Django in the context of making it available in this web. So but it's about the bigger DSF community thing. So who to prove that the ultimate change on the website? You know, one of the fellows would merge it, I guess. But the I don't
Carlton Gibson 30:13
know, no, no, it's okay. Okay, I'll tell you what would happen in that exact case, what would happen in that exact case is we'd go, code looks fine. But there's no way I can merge this without the board's approval. And we try and get the board's approval, and it probably wouldn't happen. And we'd be we talk around, we'd be stuck. And it just, it'd be like, ah, paralysis,
Will Vincent 30:33
if I put it, I put it on the developers mailing list. And you know, a lot of people quietly say, yes, then a couple of people would have probably current, you know, logical objections, and then we get stuck in the mud. Yeah. Unless someone really, really pushed it.
Chaim Kirby 30:46
Yeah. And I think, unfortunately, something like that is exactly how will come about, you know, I don't know, but spitballing needs to be part of a larger organizational community, whatever overhaul? So like I said, Our membership is sort of it's an unusual inbetweening place, right? There's plenty of people who, what do they mean by members? Oh, I want to get the email or I want to just be aware of what's going on. Right. We don't really have that. But there's probably a space for that. There's also we didn't even talk about corporate membership, which is a whole other thing that is hopefully getting an overhaul. The website is I believe, getting an overhaul there's a process in place that we're doing that I don't know exactly the exact timeline. I mean, I have a sense of the exact timeline, but I don't feel comfortable sharing it. Let's put it that way. But so there is going to be an overhaul, whether that overhauls some of these larger questions, is a big dependency. And again, it all comes back to everyone's a volunteer, and everybody who volunteers for these various roles beat on the board beat on the committee. The fellows aren't volunteer, but even they have a ton of work to do.
Carlton Gibson 31:57
Too much to feel like the best
Chaim Kirby 31:59
intentions are wonderful, but a lot falls by the wayside a lot is like, yeah, we can keep talking about this. But you can talk about something for an hour. But if it turns out that it's going to take somebody 20 or 30, or 40, or 50 or 100 hours to do. That's a much bigger ask.
Carlton Gibson 32:15
Yeah. Yeah. So I had just to come back to the idea about the merch store, like I had, somebody suggested me at Django con us about doing T shirts, and they were prepared to do the T shirts, and they got graphic skills, and all the rest was last year. Yeah, just last discount, you're gone. And like, I was like, that's, that's all brilliant. But they're asking me as the fellow to sort of facilitate that. It's I just don't have any bandwidth or capacity or authority to do any of those things. And I don't really know how to enable you to step forward and make that happen. And we can have we can have released teachers like Django 4.2 lts new T shirt. But we there's people who, who does scratch their itch to create such a thing. But how do we enable them to? to actually do it?
Will Vincent 33:10
Well, be you you didn't mention this to me, Carlton, it will. So like, we're talking about all the things we can't do. When I when I ran for the board, two of the things I wanted to do was Reve re bring back the Django developer survey, which I only knew from talking to Tim Graham had even existed, and to get the merch store up. So like, I set up the merch, or people had already done quite a bit of work on it, but it wasn't live and there needed to be a final push. So the Django merch store that exists, like I did that I think one or two other people have access, but like, you know, I set that up. So if somebody wants to do it, it's like, okay, like, should have been come, you know, but here's the cross channels like, asked me, since I used to ostensibly run it, I still have the login. And like we can put the designs up and make it happen. Like actually, I spent, I spent quite a bit of time with what is her name? Libby, who does the beautiful shirts for us, the Australian ones trying to get a little bit nicer things. So it's totally doable. I think that's that's the problem is that there isn't like, there isn't like a place to ask or it isn't clear, there isn't a committee. Like I was gonna ask what the committee so how does? Are they formed? They're going to be formed? How does someone get on them? Like? Absolutely.
Chaim Kirby 34:21
So we we're in the process of getting our ducks in a row on the board to put that together. One thing that we decided is at least in the short term, is that every committee will have a board member as like a liaison member just for to get things going and you know, sort of corral for lack of a better term. There will be an invite probably for the first two or three are an open call for interest. I guess for the first two I think both of the funding ones, hopefully coming soon. And I don't know the exact time that's been delegated to another board member but but hopefully hopefully coming soon. A lot of that is going to be level have interest. And it's hard to say, Oh, here's two committees and use that to evaluate level of interest for committees in general, because people might not be interested in those. But if we went whole hog and said, Hey, because we probably could vision 567 committees in different spaces, but if we went whole hog and they got zero interest, that's really hard, right? But it's going to be, you know, we'll post it freely. It'll show up on Twitter, it'll show up on the news, it'll show up on the mailing list. My expectations is it's going to be a lot of mailing list, people who are going to be the ones who feedback. And we also have to make decisions on who can be on different committees, right. We haven't set any hard and fast rules, but like people who decide funding grants, we probably want those to be individual members, right? They have skin in the game, for lack of a better term, fundraising, that could probably be open to anyone, you know, who has an interest in or use Django? I don't see why not. And also, that becomes an entry point potentially to be coming in to do visual memory. Right, you gave back you were on a committee, like you definitely did the work. But, yeah, I will say sort of going back to who to contact. So this is going to be I guess, an Easter egg for people who actually listen to the chat. So please don't put it in the show notes. Feel free to and I hope I don't regret saying this. Feel free to email president at Django project.com. I know when I was, you know, not on the border anything, not often. But once or twice I emailed Russell, I emailed frank with a thought with an idea, whatever. And it took a while to get back to me because of course, right? It was just a random thought. But so yes, please, if you have an idea, if you ever thought of your question, not just a random question, right, we have the correct channels for that. But if there's something that doesn't seem right, yeah, email me that you think it's a board? Or it's a community thing? That that's a question, feel free to. And I do want to say that I think me saying that is reflective of I think the Django community and the Python community more so which is I feel comfortable saying that because the people in our community are good and nice, and, and helpful and not, you know, negative. And also, I say that, because before I was President, I felt comfortable doing that. And that probably says a lot about me. But anybody in this community really should feel comfortable and say, Yeah, I'm gonna reach out with idea your ideas are valid, they might not be actionable. That's a separate discussion, but they're valid ideas. So yeah, bring them up, then I'll be that sort of sounding board.
Will Vincent 37:40
So the committee thing sounds great, because we've actually talked about this with Deb from the PSF, and we on the board have talked about this a lot is that it's too much to expect board members to both delegate, manage, and organize and do the work. But if they can, you know, it's already a huge lift to just organize, but I think if you have these committees, and you know, the remit, the point is like, you're gonna make recommendations, and then things will happen, because I think it's that things will happen, right? Like, if there's a Marketing Committee, and they make a recommendation, they do their thing to make a recommendation to the board that says, We really think that we should have an email newsletter and official Django newsletter. And then that goes through the process, right? That makes a lot easier to do the work if you know, it's going to be lit, like something's going to happen. And like someone wants to object they can object, but like there is a process. So all that is pretty exciting. I did want to circle back to Carlton because at one point you were, you know, fellows, if they had more time, like since your this is your swan song, like, you know, we could and you and I have talked privately like, what, you know, if money was no object, how many fellows should we have? Like, what are what what's the scope of things that could be done that aren't being done? Because people don't see that they just see as a new release, and it's relatively secure.
Carlton Gibson 38:52
Okay, no, I mean, so what we hit very well, we hit, we hit the releases every month, we hit that we handle the security issues very well, we've got the issue tracker under control, and I did a post a while back about the different scenes, I did a talk in 2018 on your web remote need you and we had, I can't remember exactly, let's say 12 150 tickets, opened open accepted tickets, which is the metric and now we're down to about 900. So the five years later, it's been down by about a third, which is, you know, pretty good going, I would say because historically had been had been building up. So we do all of that really well. But then there's other packages in if you go to the Django GitHub org, there's other packages, which I maintained the channels packages, and I don't get as much time on those as I want. I'm hoping to have more time now. This morning, though, because Django Django is under control. And we had, there was a Redis PI security release. I'm like, right, I really need to do an update for channels. Redis. So this morning, I spent working on channels, Ron, it's like, you know what? That's amazing, because if I could do that, just, you know, occasionally, it doesn't have to be all the time but if there was sort of fellow capacity to occasionally make sure these other packages were better looked after That would be amazing. That would just it wouldn't have to be a lot. There's the whole jazz band orc, right? Which massively under, under mandate, not for lack of love or what, but just one person doing it to people doing it. Like, if a fellow had from time to time, a bit of capacity to just sort of be at large amongst the jazzman packages that wish to Yeah, just you know what I'm going to sit and merge these three, I'm going to sit and resolve these three hard tickets on, you know, debug toolbar, which everybody uses the debugger works fantastically maintained. So but it's perhaps not the best example. But, you know, everybody relies on this, it needs, you know, somebody to sit down and do two or two hard days on this. And actually, it would be resolved. If there was capacity to a fella to do that. What a difference to the ecosystem, it would make, you know, like, or Django all off, which is massively well maintained, and well sponsored and whatnot. But do you know what, that's so crucial to the Django ecosystem that if a fellow needed to spend a bit of time on it and had that capacity, what a return on investment to the Django ecosystem that would be if that was available?
Will Vincent 41:05
For the sanity of the fellows is? Doesn't that feel nice to do? Right? It's not always, like, just in terms of keeping the fellows that we have there. Yeah, yeah. It's,
Carlton Gibson 41:14
it's, it's intellectually rewarding, not that in a way that the triage can be like drained, the triage is intellectually rewarding, too. But if you if you're doing the triage and the pull request review on Django, Django all the time, it can be hard. You know what, I may not have the capacity ultimately, after five years of it, I have to stop that I've had. Okay, that's enough. For me, I'm moving on to other things. I'm very excited to be I'm not leaving Django. I'm very excited to be building stuff with Django as it now it's because it's a lot different than it was in 2018. It's like, oh, yes, this is, this is fun time now for me. But if you if you as fellow you know what, you know what you've gotten away, day over in jazzman index project, brilliant. I've got to cut, you know, what a refresh, because one of the hardest things is dealing with people, right? People turn up, they've got an issue. And again, and again, you have to in goodwill and good spirit reply to them saying, Oh, this isn't an eye on it, you know? And people, they get really upset when you say no, and it's, it's hard to handle that. And you know, it's always with the right response and all that, you know, you want to reach out and be like, I just got away, you can't do any of that. So to go off and just do some coding on a different project. Wonderful. Wonderful. And what a difference it would make to those other projects, and what a difference it would make to Django secret sauce, which is third party packages.
Chaim Kirby 42:32
Yeah. I'm wondering, we should set and Randall Munroe, the idea has, and I think it's come up on the XKCD has come up on your podcast before that with the one it's like, you know, the huge tower with a one little tiny piece of like, you know, some random developer in Ohio. But like, there's a recursive version of that, right? Like that might be Django. But then like you say, Carlton, it's like, oh, there's a third party package that actually everybody relies on that we can do a ton of work. And there have been questions, you know, about bringing various packages under the DSF umbrella, but then it gets into a question of time. And, again, comes back to mention it comes into question of funding. And I know we've discussed this before, and, you know, we'll in board meetings, and I'm certain it's come up on Jango chat before, right? Like there's this there's a chicken and egg problem like a do we want to raise more money? Do we have reasons to do it? And I think potentially, yeah, there's probably earmarks, but more fellows, or even for the fellows to have, like you say, you know, one day, a week, one day, every two weeks, whatever, instead of working on Django, go work on a jazz band project, or like, sort of the 20% time if you want to call it that, right. But it'd be good that we start a fundraising committee to work on that. But like, honestly, to do any initiatives that we've talked about that we've thought about whatever, it's like, close to doubling our budget, like right off the bat to feel comfortable. ngadimin Well,
Will Vincent 43:58
maybe this is me a couple months off the board. So feeling somewhat, or refreshed, but I mean, it's doable. I mean, our budget is, it's less than it's less than a big Corp, a single big Corp, software engineer, and, like more to the point, like if somebody goes, and um, so I'm really excited about these committees, because that's been a wishlist for a long time. But and like, I'm not you know, I will put my name in for at least one of them. But you know, there is a issue on Django project repo right now the Carlton, I have filled out saying, Okay, if we need more money, like, we don't need to reinvent the wheel here, like we have all this real estate and Django project on the sidebar, and right now, it's just a random thing of some random person, like, just do what every other site, like look at Vue js look at like, just say, if you give a certain amount, boom, you get a little more placement. Like, you know, like, it's not, it's not rocket science. It's been solved. Or, for example, we need another fellow. Let's have a three year thing. Python has done this like spot brought to you by microbes. oft, right? I mean, maybe the timing is not great now, but like, We could totally do that. Right. I mean, that's, that gets back to the democracy, democracy thing is that like, it's really hard to rely on small donors when there's these huge Puranas, you know, these great white apex predators out there that want to access our community, that if we structured correctly, like fine, like, you know, we do the jet pi charm promotion every year, right? Like, I don't think people have a problem with that that's been a great partnership that's led to them helping with the survey. There's no reason if, you know, we couldn't do that sponsor, the fellowship program, or some of these other things. It's just that, you know, it's all this extra work for the board. And so we talked about it, it doesn't happen. But I'm optimistic that if there are these committees, we can have a newsletter on the website, we can fix that sidebar, Carlton, I have gotten to work on it. It just needs to be approved. Yes,
Carlton Gibson 45:48
absolutely. There are people in the Django community who have the ability to communicate with enterprise companies and do the long thread that's necessary to get the sign off on the funding, but without the thing is these kind of big companies, they can't they just literally can't give you the money unless you go through that process. But it needs somebody to bid say, right, I'm going to be the front person to speak to Company X, which we know uses Django,
Will Vincent 46:11
that and they can't bother unless it's a significant amount of money, because it's not worth their effing time. You know, so like, they want, like, I know this, they want to be asked, give us a half million dollar, or give us mid six figures to fund the program for three years, like do it once, boom, all this amazing placement, right? 50,000 20,000. Like it's not worth their time to respond. And that's partly why they all give their money to Python instead of Django, because they assume we're part of the PSF anyways. And also because easier to read a million dollar check the Python and get placement at a conference and you know, then to deal with the small fish. So it was yes, good.
Carlton Gibson 46:48
Go. And before I let you speak, I'm just gonna say, you know that not reinventing the wheel thing, the mailing list on the thing could just literally be RSV RSS feed to email on the blog. It could be it wouldn't be
Will Vincent 46:59
I mean, I know we're all I think we're all an environment agreement here. But like, do we know someone who's run a Django newsletter for a couple years that can help out? I know, Jeff, to me, like, it's trivial. Like,
Chaim Kirby 47:13
yeah, no wonder, was it. I mean, the fundraising thing is an interesting one. And I agree with you, there's a ton of place I have concerned potentially, if the focus becomes completely like, huge enterprise people, because if we make big changes due to a whale, and then they're like, oh, no, you need to change this, or we're going to pull our money, like suddenly you're stuck in the water. It's definitely direction to go. I think the other direction, right? Talking about materials, we don't have a one pager, which is like I'm a random developer to random company that uses Django, but that has been using Django for years. And everything's built on Django. Just hand this to your CFO, your CTO, here's the one pager that you know, if nothing else, right, we could legitimately say, you're getting $200,000 of fellows value a year, right? Minimum by donating $5,000. Right, like, we want the big we want the little we want everything to
Carlton Gibson 48:01
get $1,000. Easy.
Chaim Kirby 48:05
But yeah, I don't know. It's it is a chicken and egg problem. We the monies.
Will Vincent 48:13
We're getting the chicken though, because we ran deficit. And Carlton has just spoken about all these things like so maybe it's partly we need to articulate not just what's being like more clearly what's not being done. Yeah, if for want of some money, but also, if we just stuck the sidebar on there, we could get some more corporate money.
Chaim Kirby 48:30
Yeah, I think it's come up before so I hesitate to ask this and feel free I know. burned out on talking about it. All we talk about this specific one and feel free to cut this well. What about like sponsored releases, right, like we put, you know, some amount for part releases and a larger amount for an LTS, this release brought to you by so and so. And they gave money for it. Right? That's a simple one. We put
Carlton Gibson 48:53
4.2 lts, won't you by Rusty? Exactly.
Will Vincent 48:56
Why not? I think as long as it was clear that we needed the money and where it was going, it's just so that's
Chaim Kirby 49:03
another interesting point. And that's come up at board meetings of various time that people you know, maybe know somebody or inside a lot at the level of funding that we're talking about. There's like, oh, we'll need one or two of these. And we're golden. They're very interested in understanding specifically to some degree, how the money's being used and talking about fellows, right? They're interested in it can pay for another film, not that it's going to continue paying for a fellow so so that's that. So that's an interesting thing on how we articulate that in how we targeted or not and, and, frankly, how we do we publicize our financials in what way
Will Vincent 49:37
and to whom? Well, and that's, I guess, I'm, I don't want to say the word guilty. Like that was one thing I wanted to do was, was do a public post on the finances. I did do some work behind the scenes to tidy things up. And maybe maybe Peter will do this. Yeah, people are unaware. I mean, I remember at Django con talking with Jacob and Simon about the finances of the DSF and they had no idea but How could they like they don't sit on board meetings? Like, you know, now again, but Well, Jacob does, yes. Well, that was part of he mentioned that he was thinking about running. And I was like, Well, you know, we could use you. Yeah. So yes, anyway, so it's all those things. But I, you know, and it is true that there is a risk that if the funding, you know, right now it's a third to a quarter comes from the pipe just well, maybe not, but a fifth comes from the just the PI charm campaign. So if you have all your money from a couple fish, then like, that can be a weakness. Like that was pythons problem, all their money came from the conferences. And so with COVID, they didn't have conferences. And so that was a problem. But, you know, having more money gives you more options to Yeah, absolutely. To do things. And it's, you know, they hired like Python, they hired someone who, like there are people, we'd probably would need to hire a consultant who does this all day long and knows how to tee it up and deal with these companies because they know what they want, but they just can't be bothered unless it's put to them on a platter. But if it's on a platter, like they're looking for, I think wins and Django is a pretty feel good. You know,
Chaim Kirby 51:06
story. So absolutely. And I don't want anybody who's listening to this to to feel like the sky is falling, the sky is falling. We it's not we have money in the bank, we have backstop we could run for a while at current levels and while years, but it limits what we can do what we're able to do, you know, fellows, we, you know, are in the process of hiring a new one. Can we pay even approaching competitive rates in certain areas? Right, right. There's all sorts of questions on where that goes. But yeah,
Will Vincent 51:35
well, Carlton in a way, this is your I mean, not that you're leaving the podcast, but this is your last podcast as a fellow. Yeah. But
Carlton Gibson 51:41
the next week, I won't be a fellow for your
Will Vincent 51:44
relevant Do you have any thoughts?
Carlton Gibson 51:48
Not beyond what we've said. I think you know, that. I remember speaking to Frank, when he was the president that I must mean, 2018 something at Django con, and we were having this conversation there about, you know, why don't we raise more money? I think you must have been, you must have started it well. But Frank will say, Well, you know, we could raise more money, but what for? I think at the time, there was a kind of feeling well, Django is sort of, you know, getting old in the tooth and whatnot. But then the time since then, it's really kind of refreshed is, you know, just 4.2 release what we've got going on psycho PG three, the the async changes over the thing, the forms changes have come through the last few, you know, this is exciting time. It's not like that. It's like, no, no, no, actually, we should be out there competing with the fancy JavaScript frameworks and going oh, do you know what Django is cool. And it's boring, boring in the good sense, right of being, it's reliable, and it's got things like LTS releases, and you know, that a couple of years later, your code will still work, those kinds of things. But Django is cool. And we should be promoting it. And we should be out there saying no, do you know what we want to 3x the budget in order to be able to do these things, and 3x in the budget? While it sounds that hard isn't really because the budget so small, it's easy to get exponential growth from a small base. So let's do these things. Like I honestly, I'm really excited about Yang I really, it's such a vibrant place. It's like, I haven't felt like this since the DRF. Kickstarter all those years ago, if you remember that, right? I think we really are in a ripe and fertile time. Let's maximize it.
Will Vincent 53:23
Well, and I think having committees and stuff is a good way to keep people involved who have knowledge, but maybe can't do the full board or following like, like, I'm definitely gonna volunteer for something. We can't endlessly rely, I mean, you know, behind the scenes, when we talked last year, like a bunch of board, people stepped down because COVID and other things. And thank god, you're still there, like, because, you know, there's only a couple of you with that institutional knowledge to do it. And, you know, but just because somebody needs to take a breather on one of these things, doesn't mean they're stepping away from the community, but they need to be asked and needs to be someone needs to kind of structure it. And it can't, we can't just rely on the board to do all that as volunteers.
Carlton Gibson 54:04
I think the board with the help of committees could come up with like actionable to do lists, like do all this needs doing that. And he's doing that and he's doing it would be quite easy to reach out to the wider community, or those all those people who are active now with using Django and say, hey, look, there are these projects that need people pal come and come and help us
Will Vincent 54:25
improve but like mostly approved, yeah, but it's the it's the
Carlton Gibson 54:28
lack of the that clear direction, which gives us nothing to call put the call out for to you know, so there's, you know, yeah, I It's like chicken and egg again. I mean, we've used that phrase 58 times already, but if we had those those calls to action, we'd be able to put out the call for volunteers.
Chaim Kirby 54:45
I'm definitely an optimist, possibly in the face of, you know, research that suggests otherwise, right? I forget the research, but basically, you know, the idea is, in any community like you know, 2% Or like, do everything Another 10% sort of participate in the rest are just sort of like I'm an optimist, that if we do make give more opportunity to the greater community, when I say the greater community here, I'm saying explicitly, people in this world that use Django, whether that's 100,000 people, 2 million people, I can make arguments both directions, right? People in this world that you say go, what can you do an hour of your time? Say, Yeah, this has helped me in my career, this has been fun. This is whatever, you know, yeah, it'd be lovely. If you come on and give five bucks. That's easy to do. You can do that. But you know, what, if you don't want to give them money, what can you do in an hour, that gives something back, or that gives you you know, a little more exposure to the community to help us out as help you, whatever. Maybe I'm wildly starry eyed. But I wouldn't be doing this if I weren't. Right.
Carlton Gibson 55:50
Right. But yeah, you're right. All communities, all volunteer committees have this power law, like where the top contributors, they don't do masses, and then it drops off almost to the bottom and it takes long tail it but you can move that head outward. Right. So that, and just by moving that head outwards, you've sort of you know, massively changed the sum of work that's done over the over the whole graph? Yes, it's always going to be a power law. But what we don't what what we haven't historically done, I think, is tried to be open to moving the curve away from the axis. And we could do that.
Will Vincent 56:23
And the thing is, you, you get something from it. It's not this just this altruistic thing. I mean, we all met each other through Django, like that's enrich my life, right? You meet people like it's, it doesn't need to be just this thankless thing, because it's not because it's, it's an opportunity for you to meet people to learn how things work, like to have to sit in on conversations with Microsoft and Google or, you know, whatever level of things you're doing. I mean, you know, it is a community that is, you know, obviously we think is, is worth being a part of, and so finding that way to do that first thing, you know, it's nice to work around a common goal, you know, however it is. So, you know, I'm very happy to hear that the board is putting in place plans to like, tap into that a bit more. And I know we're basically yeah,
Chaim Kirby 57:09
go ahead. I was gonna say, just to piggyback off that will I know I said to Carleton, I'm not sure if we'll share it. I said to will, you know, life is busy. You're both friends. I love talking to you guys. But I have no time on the podcast just because I want to hang out with you guys. More than anything. You could say. Yeah, it's more efficient. Right. And I think that's the point. Right? I've made friends, deep friends, long lasting friendships. You know, I think I hope when we travel around Carlton with the family, I know we've talked about this. We hope to visit you guys. But yeah,
Will Vincent 57:39
yes, I know. You're both you're both families have six, which is yes. Unbelievably impressed. Yeah, we could have
Chaim Kirby 57:45
another podcast about having four kids.
Carlton Gibson 57:51
This week, we've got home and I've got well with us. He's only got three.
Chaim Kirby 57:53
Right, exactly. I got to bring those.
Will Vincent 57:58
Nobody knows what it's like. I mean, even I can just share because my family doesn't listen this podcast, but like, my, my brother has one child and my mom was visiting and helping and she said, Gosh, it's so hard raising one child in the city will and it's just my brother's younger. His kids are younger is not his his kid is younger. Just like just like I'm like God. Three is so hard. And you're like, Yep, and for gonna walk in the shoes. Alright, well, it we're basically at an hour at home. Is there anything that you wanted to? I didn't get a chance to ask you. Why did you went to law school? Because i Oh, my goodness. I
Chaim Kirby 58:31
mean, we could jump back on. We could do another podcast or just chatted him. Yeah. So um, I have some lawyers in the family. So to be clear with everyone I did my undergrad and I did a master's sort of four and a half year joint program in computer science, started my career in software. And then law had always been something interesting to me. I sort of love learning and continuous learning. Yeah. And I was like, Hey, I'm gonna go to law school. Boston, Suffolk University in Boston has a official law school night program. So that's unusual, mostly, when most people when they go to law school at night, it's like, oh, yeah, if you put classes together over a period of time, you can eventually get a law degree. at Suffolk. It's a four year program as opposed to a normal Three Year Day Program. It's a four year program. So I did that while I was working, deep focus and intellectual property, as one would expect, which was lovely and wonderful. And I'm very happy I went to law school and took the bar and all that fun stuff. I happen to finish in May of 2008. You take the bar in August of 2008. Between the time I finished and the time I took the bar, there was one Friday in Boston and sort of the greater community at large in the US that some I think 900 attorneys were laid off across various firms because it was 2008. And I said, Okay, that was a fun idea. I'm not interested in just like putting up a shingle and doing you know, personal injury law. It wasn't bad law is where it's at. So patent law is interesting. I could get into a whole argument. So I'm interested
Will Vincent 1:00:00
I have friends who are patent lawyers, if I was going to be a lawyer, that's the only area that
Chaim Kirby 1:00:04
I write. So patent, you could go two directions, your patent prosecution, which is writing patents, USPTO, things like that you do litigation trial. Litigation interests me a little more. And honestly, for my background is the only one that's available to me. For patent prosecution, you need to have a background in a hard science and a BA in computer science does not satisfy a BS does. But most universities in the US has a BS in computer science. And actually, it's why did my math about an MS. MS. No, well, maybe. So I did my master's. So So I went to Brandeis. And three, and I was three years into my program. And they added a BS, and you had to take like two semesters of physics, to get the BS. And I didn't know this history of the law school stuff at the time. And I said, Well, I could take two semesters of physics or at Brandeis a Masters, if you did your undergrad at Brandeis is only a year, two years, if you didn't do it said or I have enough credits, I can graduate a semester early, and just do the year, which is only a semester beyond what I would have done normally. So I did the Masters instead.
Will Vincent 1:01:12
So the legal community lost a great and
Chaim Kirby 1:01:14
I don't know, I mean, thank you. That's very kind of you. But it brings an interesting point of view, I think into business, right? I did business classes, antitrust, everything, right? And I think I come to problems with a different ions probably helped me in sort of my career progression and growth to sort of leadership and beyond the, you know, whether it's an IC role, and there's a whole nother conversation, we started a second podcast, but Right, like you have places where there's five or six or Google right, there's 11, I think engineering steps on their engineering ladder, but their ultimate one only two people have ever been like a Google distinguished fellow or whatever, they bought YouTube and their CTO became that role. The first half of that are very much you do software, right and their software skills and you're getting better and basically you're expected to get better over a period of time until you reach that senior level whatever the steps after that principle staff whatever people call it, bring in very different skill sets that people may or may not want to exercise or do even if it's a considered an IC role. And you can have a wonderful career as a senior you don't want to do that extra stuff don't because a lot of times it can be annoying, getting into the business I like it, but I think law school brought a lot of those skills that we don't learn as just sort of you know, engineer trainees for anybody who did traditional university.
Will Vincent 1:02:37
Well, nobody on this podcast Well, I guess you did, but sort of didn't but Carlton, I didn't so anyways, Carl, did you have anything to add? I know we're pretty we don't have any plans to stop doing these podcasts so we could always
Chaim Kirby 1:02:52
do plenty of topics and I love talking which is you know, you know that I've never noticed but I so I tell me if the podcast goes well because I won't be listening to it because I love you know performing but I can't watch myself perform.
Will Vincent 1:03:08
Oh, you would love doing one then you get to edit yourself? Yeah. Oh, god. No. Oh, God. Well, anyways, thank you for thank you for doing this. Let's instead of doing in private we did in public, but that's what this has meant to be. It's just a chat. It's on people using Django and hopefully it illustrates some things to people listening and we'll look for announcements on the new fellow on committees, and Carlton's on Mastodon if you want to say thank you for all his service. He's not going away. But Thursday is his last official day. Yes. But it's right. Okay, we are at Jango chat.com. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye, everyone. Bye bye.