Eric is the co-founder of Read the Docs and the Write the Docs Conferences. He is also a former Python Software Foundation Board Member and Chair of the Funding Working Group. We discuss Read the Docs's origins as a Django Dash project, Ethical Ads, Sphinx, and more.
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Carlton Gibson 0:06
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django chat podcast on the here Django web framework. I'm Carlton Gibson joined by Will Vincent. Hello, Will.
Will Vincent 0:13
Hi, Carlton.
Carlton Gibson 0:14
Hello. Well, this week we've got with us Eric Holscher. Who's that? Well, most famously have read the docs. Eric, thank you for coming on the show.
Eric Holscher 0:22
Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for inviting me.
Carlton Gibson 0:24
It's a real real honor. You've got, we always ask, we always start with the sort of backstory and how people got into Django. And that's kind of the birth story, read the docs as well. So perhaps you could, you know, run through the, you know, the backstory? In other words, your origin story? Sure. Yeah.
Eric Holscher 0:42
I feel like I used to have this pretty, pretty well tuned. But it's, it's like fading into the past each year.
Carlton Gibson 0:48
This is only on a podcast, they'll get pulled out?
Eric Holscher 0:52
Well, no, no, yeah, it's just time, time is a funny way of making the past a little fuzzier. But ya know, I kind of learned Django in college. So I was doing a CS degree, and they didn't really teach Python or Django, I can actually do Perl, going into school, and then just was like, oh, I want to do some web stuff, maybe be on CGI. And so kind of learned. Django actually kind of downloaded the documentation as a PDF and took it on, like, a family vacation or whatever. So it's something read on the plane.
Carlton Gibson 1:20
So you must have printed that?
Eric Holscher 1:22
No, no, it's on a laptop over the way it probably like eight pounds. But yeah, and kinda, that's, you know, the documentation to Django is probably the thing that got me involved, you know, being able to have that resource that I could just kind of download the PDF for free. And then yeah, just kind of learned it, use it for my senior project in college, and then kind of outta University applied at the Lawrence journal world. They're in Lawrence, Kansas, for a job. And so then really kind of got got deep into the Django world out there. It was created in Kansas. So yeah, it was there for a couple years, went to the first Django con did all that kind of stuff. So it was really kind of did learn it in school, but then kind of really kind of got got deeper into the community, they're in university and moved on into my first job.
Carlton Gibson 2:12
Okay, so there's two things you mentioned, those docks and communities that let's get this go would read the docs. So there's get the headline out, right. So what how did read the docs come up? What is it tell people what read the dogs just in case they don't know? But then how did that come up? And what was What's the origin of that? Sure.
Eric Holscher 2:30
Yeah. So and then those are both pretty, pretty similar in in the narrative. So I mean, read the docs, really, what it does is, makes documentation hosting easier. So I was starting to write some open source projects starting to put some docs together and had to get like a cron job running on my server that like, pull down the Git repo every hour and ran make HTML or whatever, you know, like that was like deployment is like this this cron job. And so we were like, Hey, this is like a piece of technology, like web hooks have been a thing for a few years now. Like, we've kind of built the plumbing to make the web a little more programmable. Now, that's really the core insight. And still the core kind of concept, right, is that, you know, Doc should rebuild automatically on push, that should all be kind of tied together. I mean, obviously, now we have, you know, pull requests, notifications, you know, preview builds, all that kind of stuff, but back then it was really just that whole concept of building immediately on commit rather than some background process. And so that's what read the docs does. And then the, the core of that concept was really, you know, the Jango Dash was a 48 hour coding competition. And we were just able to kind of take that that core insight and build it in 48 hours, right? It's like build a webhook receiver from GitHub, you know, pull down the Git repo, like the, the core of that's pretty simple. And so that was what was so attractive for a coding competitions, we were able to kind of put together that, you know, very basic proof of concept and a weekend. So that was kind of the origin of the project as well.
Carlton Gibson 3:56
But that's kind of amazing to like, because, you know, code sprinter Django just 48 hours to put together what is kind of like a cornerstone of the Python community. If you read a blog post about how to build a Python package, it's like, well do docs and read the docs. That's kind of cool. No,
Eric Holscher 4:21
yeah, no, and I believe I think your I saw your Jeff triplet on a few weeks ago. He's someone I know from Lawrence. But then I know he's one of the maintainer. Django packages. Next thing Django packages was created. Danny and Audrey, during a das are actually in Yeah, they lived in Lawrence at that time. And we actually were both we worked in the same room on that Django dash like in Lawrence during the World basement where Django was created, like, it's a pretty cool kind of, you know, confluence of events.
Carlton Gibson 4:51
So, can you tell us about how, like, what's the scale now read the docs, because it's it's everything right? It's
Eric Holscher 5:00
Yeah, so I mean, scale scale is a fun thing. There's a couple different metrics. I think we're doing. What is it half a billion page views? A year now something something in that.
Will Vincent 5:13
Is that internet, Carlton? Is that internet scale? That will do?
Eric Holscher 5:18
Oh, no, sorry, three quarters of a billion. So 2021, we did 700 million. And that number kind of keeps that's up from five at the year before. So 2022, we'll definitely probably be doing over 750 million pageviews. And that is that is actual pageviews. That's not like requests, because each you know, each page view has lots of requests associated with it, I believe that's actually a Google Analytics number. And so that's undercounted as well, because everybody
Carlton Gibson 5:45
blocked because
Eric Holscher 5:48
people block it, we, you know, we respect Do Not Track and don't inject it, if you have that in your browser, all that good stuff. So yeah, I mean, probably closer to a to a billion page views.
Carlton Gibson 5:57
And it's not just serving it, though. It's like the building it because you mentioned so Okay, every time I push to my main branch, you, you build my Docs, but also, if I say want your build X branch, why brand Zed branch and every pull request and like, How Is that doable? It doesn't seem sustainable. So how was that? How was that man?
Eric Holscher 6:20
Yeah, no, I mean, we do kind of for the past year, we've had about eight people on the team, we're, we're down to six at the moment, because we did staff up a little bit, we got a Chan Zuckerberg grant, for the last couple of years. And so we were able to have have a little bit more, more staffing from from the money there. But yeah, so the business itself, like I said, there's six people working on a full time at the moment. And that's all self funded. And so about half of that money comes from advertising with ethical ads, which I know you talked to David about a little bit, a couple of years ago. And then the other half is we do have kind of a private hosted version. So companies or people with kind of public SAS Doc's that don't want ads, and what better support and some, you know, off features, that kind of stuff. They're able to pay kind of for private hosting as well. So similar to GitHub, and all these other things, right, that kind of free for open source paid for paid for private. So
Carlton Gibson 7:15
but while I've got you so I'm a I'm a company director, and I'm using GitHub, and I see they've got GitHub Pages, what's the what's the USP for read the docs for me? Why should I? Why should I use?
Eric Holscher 7:27
Definitely, the big thing is just kind of the core features that we're able to provide, you know, redirects, versioning, all that kind of stuff. And that kind of build and deploy step, right. GitHub Pages doesn't do build previews doesn't do all that kind of stuff. And you can do, you know, if you want to maintain like, hundreds of lines of Yamo, and Python scripts, and whatever, you can kind of hack it all together. But the nice thing is to read the docs, right? It's all integrated, it's all supported. You have somebody, they'll actually respond to your email. And then yeah, the big thing is that kind of integration with building and deploying, and so we have a lot more hosting features, right, with GitHub pages. So you, you basically are just here some HTML on the internet, you don't have any of the stuff we do we do search indexing, we do all that kind of stuff. So it's a much more kind of fully integrated solution. But there's definitely people out there that if you want full control over it, right, you can hack, hack it all together a million different ways yourself. So right, there's a wide range of, of deployment realities in the world,
Carlton Gibson 8:24
that that cost of tacking altogether, yourself is much more than the hosting cost of read the docs, right? On a monthly basis.
Eric Holscher 8:33
Oh, of course. Yeah. And I mean, it's gonna be more likely to break. And then when it breaks, you have nobody to call, right. That's, that's the big thing. I you know, I do think our support really sets us apart, you know, you, you send an email almost always within, you know, four to six hours, you're getting a reply with people who actually know what they're talking about. Yeah, right. Okay.
Will Vincent 8:53
So I'm sure you've you've spoken to this elsewhere. But, you know, read the docs didn't have ads, initially, you've had this growth. So looking back on it now, because how many years has it been? It's been it's been quite a few years since you were waiting for I believe?
Eric Holscher 9:07
Yeah. 2020 10, I believe is when we started at summer 2010.
Will Vincent 9:11
So I just curious how you look at, you know, the costs rising, you're not trying to profit maximize, per se. So deciding to add ads, and then that gets to ethical ads, which I think would be good to talk about again, because that was two years ago. And to me, that's really cool. Like Jeff and I have talked about chenko packages. If he does ads, he wants to do ethical ads. So I guess a loaded question of like, what was that journey? Like, where you've got growth, but then you go, ooh, but costs are going up. And we don't want to just spam up this thing that we that we have.
Eric Holscher 9:41
Totally Yeah, no, I mean, I've I've talked a little bit about this over the years, but definitely, you know, I viewed advertising as kind of the the last option. We tried, you know, there's all these things on open source, how to fund it, you know, you can do these donation drives. You can do these support contracts that don't actually get anything but like it's a way to go backchannel money from corporations. You know, we can do contracting, training, all this kind of stuff. And I have a blog post, which we can probably put in the show notes. But really, like, we tried a lot of these other models, and at the end of the day, they they all distract, they either, you know, bring in almost no money. So like donations, lots of people have tried donations, and it's the, you know, you look at people's GitHub sponsors, and it's like, $32 a month, or whatever it it's like, yeah, that's, that's not gonna sustain someone for, you know, full time team working on this. And so yeah, really advertising, we kind of came to after trying other things. And what I really love about it is it the incentives are aligned to working on the product, right, you get more users, you get more people using the product, and you get more revenue. And it's not a distraction, right, you make the product better. And that leads to more revenue directly. Whereas so many other ways of monetizing open source, it's kind of this distraction, where you're like, Oh, we're gonna do this, like side business, but not actually work on the core product. And so I do, that's one of the big things that I love about advertising. And then to your point, right, like, we are providing a service to the open source community to our users. And if we start just putting incredibly intrusive ads, people are going to leave, right, so there's this tension, where we feel that we need to kind of not add tracking, not kind of add to the data, detritus in the universe. And so that was kind of the concept behind ethical ads was kind of this, you know, no tracking, we only base the ads, bad targeting is all done based on the content of the pages. So we actually, you know, parse HTML that we're you're looking at, and actually kind of are able to target ads, right. If you're looking at a Django documentation page, we can put a put a Postgres database ad on it, or, you know, whoever else wants to target Django developers, we don't have to follow you around the internet and see that you're reading Django content for four months on end. So well,
Will Vincent 11:53
it's impressive to do that. I mean, because it's so easy at any company at a startup, I was out, we start growing, once you put an ad on, you're never taking it off, like you're just gonna be addicted to that revenue. And if you talk to, you know, Google or whomever they're only advice is bigger ads more highly placed. So it really takes not just restraint, but the discipline to say, I'm valuing this product, because in the short term, yeah, the money is gonna go up. But you can't always like put $1 amount on the experience of users, right. But if over time, they say, Oh, it's just filled with ads. You've lost it, so long as I'm very in admiration, that you've pulled that off, because I know, as much as people say they want to do that the realities of running a business, it's very difficult to do and requires thinking in 12 year plus terms to pull that off, you know, and no investors too, are not investors who aren't pushing you on that.
Eric Holscher 12:45
Totally. Yeah, no, if we were venture backed, right, there would be someone who would definitely be like, you know, just put another ad in there and you get more revenue, right? It's a real, it's a real easy solution to it's a very slippery slope. And similarly, like, running the business as well, right? Like we there are certain advertisers that will not advertise with us because they can't inject tracking. And that's not all nefarious, right. Some of that is fraud. Some of I mean, the ad ecosystem is a mess, like I don't, I don't fault advertisers for wanting to know where their ads are running. Right? Like, once you like, put your ad into the ad tech machine, I would be terrified personally, whereas like, I have no idea where this is gonna show up, I get to be on some news expos I have, because my ad is running next to some alt right, content, like who knows. And so, you know, the, the ability to run a network, that's invite only that's, you know, like, we know where all the ads are going. And you know, where they're going, right? We're not, it's not this algorithm, where it's just could go show up on any page. And then similarly, as a publisher, right, you don't have random ads, like, if somebody was just browsing shoe ads, and they come to your site, they're not going to see a shoe ad with ethical ads, right, they're gonna see something tech related based on the content. And so that's the other big win, right, is not having that kind of cross cross pollination, cross contamination of the kind of rest of the world into our ecosystem, right? Like, it's really scary, but on both sides, as an advertiser where your ads are going, and as a publisher, what is showing up on your site?
Will Vincent 14:18
Well, that will link to a site called and I was just gonna say, our just discussion with David, we got into that a bit. So I'll link to that, folks. Go ahead. Carl,
Carlton Gibson 14:27
I just have one question. Listening to you, though, just sort of advertisers before any point of view is, how can I measure return on investment? If you don't try to do any tracking and know do all these, you know, so? How does it come up that all this cross site horribleness occurs? It's because I want to know that when you click my, you know, I want to be able to allocate my money to that click or to that, to that view. How can I measure that without any of the tracking?
Eric Holscher 14:55
Yeah, so I mean, the big thing is right is once you click on an ad, where out of the picture, like, like, you can do whatever you want on your landing page. And we do allow people to put UTM codes and all that kind of stuff. Right? So the sound actually, right, right? I mean, it's not it's not tracking, it's just like a URL parameter that's like, this was, you know, this click is attributable to this ad image and this ad copy, for example, but there's nothing, you know, personally attributable about that about the user. But it does allow people to actually, you know, they understand, like, where the traffic is coming from, and what is performing effectively. But they don't have any information about the publisher site, basically. Right. So they don't kind of have that. Yeah, that the data doesn't cross from the publisher to the advertiser. It's just basically the advertisers data that they're able to track on the back end of the click, if that makes sense.
Carlton Gibson 15:48
Okay, cool. So you've got you've obviously got like, a current setup, but you must have evolved over time. So what's your kind of guiding principle? Like how do you know when a new suggestion comes up? What do you just run that through the how it tastes check? Or you
Will Vincent 16:05
Carlton? Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 16:08
Yeah, things have a taste now. I mean, side? Oh, no, actually, we're not going to do that. Versus Yes, we are, I guess, what's your moral compass? So
Eric Holscher 16:17
do you mean on on kind of the advertising ecosystem? In general?
Carlton Gibson 16:22
So you know, the fruit company bring out a new device as this new ability to do x do we do we use that was part of our platform, I mean, that I'm trying to think of,
Eric Holscher 16:35
maybe, maybe the place that comes up the most is in the kind of like, publisher or kind of advertisers that we get on the network, right? There are some, you know, I've personal feelings about crypto, for example. And there's a lot of people who will come with things that are obviously scams, and we'd be like, okay, like, we are not going to read ads for your scam, even if you pay us lots of money, because like, that's not okay. But then we do. We don't have like a no crypto policy, right? We do kind of exercise judgment, where it's like, okay, if you're building like, a thing that looks like a real product. Like, we're happy to take ads for that. But like, we do, and similarly for for publishers as well, right? There's definitely some publishers who were like, definitely not like that is whatever you're doing over there. Like, we don't want to be a part of it. And so I guess that's, that's where that kind of comes in the most, most frequently. And then in read the docs land as well, there's definitely a little bit of that. But not not quite as much, but around, you know, censorship. And, you know, the question of like posting Russian content, all that kind of stuff has been has been very relevant. recently. And so I do think there's a lot of interesting questions there that are that are becoming more and more relevant to people in open source. So
Carlton Gibson 17:46
yeah, it just a quick, quick, is Russian content sanctioned at the moment? I mean, as an American,
Eric Holscher 17:55
nope. Now, but basically Russian, I think the main issue we've actually had is that Russian companies can't pay us. Right. Okay. Because we lost a couple of customers, because the kind of other the payment rails have all been been removed. But yeah, we're not to kind of answer that question. We're not doing anything beyond what is what is legally required, right? We don't, we don't need to get too deep into the politics of it.
Carlton Gibson 18:18
But no, just wondering if it was from a legal perspective whether it was actually but yeah, it's the payment rails, as you say. So perhaps to change. Just aspects slightly. Sure. Can we can ask about sphinx because you're still very much involved in the Sphinx world. And I, you know, I love Sphinx, I use
Will Vincent 18:35
use it. You've given a talk and integrating it with Django, I believe curl. Yeah, well, yeah.
Carlton Gibson 18:40
Okay. So like, I have a little sphinx Django sphinx view package, which just helps you serve your sphinx rendered content in Django, in via the Django template language, so you can integrate it into your site, which may or may not be what you need, but that's what I knew. What I was going to ask her is like, swings, he's quite older, mature, and it's so it's both got the superpower, but also the craft and it's very,
Eric Holscher 19:04
a lot like Django.
Carlton Gibson 19:06
Well, you know, exactly. So how do we keep how's it keeping fresh and what's the what that exciting technical developments in the Sphinx? Well,
Eric Holscher 19:15
totally. Yeah, no, I think the biggest kind of exciting thing is definitely the kind of the quality of the markdown support that has been built for it. So this is actually also CCI money. This is the executable Books project. And they're the ones who built Jupiter book. And they also built mist, which is like we we originally tried to do recommend mark which is, you know, basically pulling markdown content and generating a doc utils ASD. So basically, just that that first step where you actually take the source from disk and turn it into something in memory, basically, being able to have marked on an RST both get turned into the same in memory ASD. And so we did a version of that originally, but they didn't have any funding and it kind of started to get a little cruft. And it was, it was a lot of work to maintain. And so it was really awesome to see I was able to kind of fund that work. So they actually had some full time people working on it for multiple years. And so the markdown support within the Sphinx ecosystem has gotten really, really good. And so I think that's probably the most you know, that's the biggest impediment that I think a lot of people have in terms of adoption or selling it with inside their or within their company. When you say, go to use RST, they're like, ah, different links and tags. Right. And but then you show them what our markdown looks like once it has all the features of RST. And it's like, oh, yeah, this is really ugly, too. But it's like, yes, that was like to say that about 50% of the complexity in RST, is not needed. And 50% is there because there is just like, a lot, it's doing a lot more than your like basic markdown, right? Once you add directives, once you add these things that have a lot more complexity to them, like the syntax gets less pretty. But I do think there is some like unnecessary design decisions at RST. And so I really love kind of that that mist is able to kind of bridge that gap, right, we're able to take mark down, you're able to introduce the complexity, so people can still use sphinx features. You can have a TOC tree, you can have all that kind of stuff in your markdown, and have it all kind of be pretty, pretty native. But then yeah, it's all it's all just markdown at the end of the day.
Will Vincent 21:24
Is there more that we should ask you about Sphinx, because I want we wanted to ask about that. But then there's a whole host of other things to ask you about.
Eric Holscher 21:31
Um, yeah, I mean, I think the big thing within this week's sphinx ecosystem is definitely is funding, right? Like we actually applied for a CCI grant to, because I think one of the one of the questions I saw in the notes was kind of what's our relationship with Sphinx, right? And,
Will Vincent 21:47
by the way, I asked Jeff, I was like, Jeff, what should I ask Eric and he's like,
Eric Holscher 21:52
but one of the one of the cool things about our CCI grant is that we did write some money in for helping with the Sphinx ecosystem around documentation, specifically. So we actually contributed the Sphinx tutorial. For the longest time, sphinx didn't actually have a tutorial. And so that was one of the things we were able to do with our grant site with read the docs, actually, we didn't have our own tutorial for the longest time. And so so with that money, we were able to kind of contribute that to the Sphinx ecosystem. And we were really able to kind of dig a lot deeper into that relationship. Historically, we've, we've helped, you know, we put a PRN here and there, but we're not super involved with the development. And so that grant money really did allow us to delve a little deeper into that, then unfortunately, we applied for a kind of a more, a larger spring specific grant that actually wasn't accepted by CCI. So that was, we were really hoping to be able to kind of start to build a little bit more in the ecosystem, one of the big, there's a lot of really wonderful extensions for sphinx that nobody knows about. And then that kind of like that ecosystem management, I think, is a huge missing piece, testing those across releases, you know, proteome, who's done some wonderful work with the Pharaoh theme. I think that's one of the other really exciting things lately is the Pharaoh theme has become a really, really wonderful version of a sphinx theme. That's pretty modern. And so that's probably the other exciting thing. But He's also worked on sphinx themes.org, which actually gives you like, a fully rendered list of all the themes with a mobile view and a dark mode and all that kind of stuff as well. So yeah, it's
Carlton Gibson 23:25
done a super job that I would link to.
Will Vincent 23:29
I was just gonna say, I, it sounds like you have a really good relationship over the years with CCI. I'm just thinking, you know, Django has no relationship with them. And yet these things you've mentioned, funding for Docs, you know, all these other things. You know, we're so Django itself. I mean, listeners know, we go on about this, we're about to have the JetBrains promotion tomorrow, June 1. So this will come out, I think, a week after, but djenka was sort of makes enough to do what it needs to but in terms of having a Doc's fellow, having more tutorials, having accessibility, all these things, we haven't been able to sort of tee that up and identify sources of funding outside of Kickstarters, or putting ads on the site, which we don't want to do, you know, we had like carbon ads to speak of one, you know, they're folk vertical focused on tech, and like Vue js just redesigned their docks, and it's in the sidebar. And, you know, carbon helpfully sent us a thing saying, Hey, your sidebar would look great with carbon ads. And, you know, but it was just just just as a, it's interesting to think of the ecosystem of funding out there. I mean, Django has gotten grants from, frankly random foundations. So I believe, not just Mozilla but just some place somewhere in the Midwest, we have no connection with they'll just send us sometimes 1015 $20,000 to help. But we're not as you know, we're not able to we're so small. We can't be proactive about that. And so I guess To lead into a specific question, you've been involved with the PSF, the Python Software Foundation, just I believe, as a director, and then also a working group around funding. So I send that over to you, as you know, what can Django take from your experience at the the larger organization dealing with these issues?
Eric Holscher 25:17
Sure. So so just Just a quick note on the differentiation between us and carbon, which I know you wanted to ask, but I'm sorry,
Will Vincent 25:25
you know, we should we should sit with that. It's important to tell listeners Yeah, please go. Yeah, no, I
Eric Holscher 25:29
mean, the big thing is privacy, right, like carbon, carbon is able to have larger advertisers, because they are perfectly happy to inject Google JavaScript into your website. So that that is the big difference between us is we're actually saying no, to those advertisers and losing that revenue. Yeah. And so that's, that's definitely, you know, I highly respect carbon, I think they do a wonderful job. Like they do a lot of really great work in the ecosystem. BSA is, I believe, bootstrapped by sell ads, which is their parent company. So a lot of respect, I respect them a lot as a competitor, because they have a wonderful product that we're trying to compete with. But yeah, I do. Just want to note, I think everybody, a lot of people have the understanding that carbon has the same approach to privacy that we do. And that is, that is not the case. So but to move on from that.
Carlton Gibson 26:19
To bring out the differentiator, I think that's important.
Eric Holscher 26:22
Well, I think a lot of people don't they look the same, right. And people think they are the same. And I think that's one of the big things we've had trouble with, is trying to really kind of convey the privacy aspects that we're, you know, we're basically losing money over, you know, preserving the fact that your website should not send data to Google unless you agree to send that data to Google.
Will Vincent 26:44
What do you see? I mean, so DuckDuckGo? Right, that'd be an obvious comparison, in terms of how they've managed things is there? What do you take away from there from that experience? Right. I mean, I remember back when I was in San Francisco, even there had the budget for billboards. And you know, actually, I think they just got some flack, because they're, they they have a Nazer not blocking Microsoft trackers. Yeah. But it was I imagine you look closely at the Duck Duck go and other relationship, because it's sort of the same thing, except now there, it seems. From the outside, they've grown enough that they're maybe having any have funding outside funding for a while. So yeah, maybe like down the line, you get to that scale. And it's like, okay, it's the same issues. But how do I how do I handle it and be different?
Eric Holscher 27:29
Yeah, well, I must say, if we were just competing against Google, I would be it would be much easier, like Google is very easy to compete against. However, carbon actually is a great product. And so I do think that I envy the competition with Google, because, uh, yeah, so I don't know if that answers your question. But I, I do think that, you know, we have a harder time differentiating because there are other people providing a similar user experience for advertising. And so in carpet does a great job with that, like I do, as a as a competitor, they are a hard one to compete with, because they do a great job. So why do you think that DuckDuckGo Yeah, maybe had, it's easier to compare and contrast with Google? Right? I
Will Vincent 28:10
guess, because it's not just it's not just that the the privacy thing, it's that, you know, Google, you have to scroll down a full page to see an organic result, whereas DuckDuckGo isn't there yet. Whereas I guess, you know, a sidebar thing. could look the same for carbon versus ethical ads, even though under the hood, it's quite different.
Eric Holscher 28:27
Yeah, but I do I didn't didn't want to sidebar too much on on ad stuff again, but I kind of pivot back towards towards grant stuff, because I do think that's super interesting as well. Well,
Carlton Gibson 28:37
this was the sort of thing is like, what can Django take? I mean, you've you've been very active in, you know, ufology for ages talking about open source funding, and you'd have talked about it before. I mean, what is that? It seems like it's the it's the Gordian knot, like how do we, how do we resolve this is it resolvable, like,
Eric Holscher 28:58
yeah, so I mean, that I can only say positive things about CCI, like I in particular love that their funding nuts and bolts, so much grant funding is is like Kickstarter, right? It's like, Hey, we're gonna build a new shiny thing. We want, we want the shiny thing, you want to find the shiny thing, and you're gonna put the shiny thing on your website. And so like, and then it's like, oh, we're just spent all their time building the shiny thing and like, our like, ci has been broken for three months, but like, look at this new feature or whatever, you know, and I love that CI has, or CCI has really kind of embrace that, you know, this money needs to go into maintenance, it needs to go into the stuff that's not sexy. And I really love that aspect of the program. And I really respect that. The hard thing with Django is is read the docs is heavily used in the scientific ecosystem. And CCI that's really their mission, their funding scientific research, right. So we were able to basically say, hey, look, Jupiter NumPy X ray, you know, like these core scientific mile like ecosystem projects, are you Using read the docs or using Sphinx, so this money is going to be infrastructure funding for science. And so that was really how we were able to get that grant money. And so while there is a lot, a lot of money in that ecosystem, scientific stuff, there's the Ford Foundation. There's, you know, the Sloan Foundation, there's a lot of money around grants, you know, in the 10s, to hundreds of millions of dollars, NASA just announced a big program. I know Europe, the US government is doing a lot more work around this funding, but a lot of it is focused on that science work. And so that was kind of how we were able to kind of sneak in Sneak in that that funding mechanism, right is because our our tooling is heavily used in the scientific ecosystem. I think Django probably has a little bit of a harder sell there. But yeah, I think that's one of the goals with our, with our working group, right, when I joined the PSF board, kind of my big goal was funding. And I actually worked to kind of I kind of got that original moss grant from Mozilla over the over the line with the PSF. And that was really the first big grant that we were able to get and show success from. And that really kind of snowballed, right, it's once you have success, you can sell more success, right? You're like, Hey, look at this money, and look what it got us. And that's, that's the core thing, right is being able to kind of tell that story. So you go to the next funder, which is CCI, for example, with some of the PIP improvements, you're like, Look what we did with this Mozilla money, now we can get the CCI money. And then actually, with the CCI money, they've been able to then actually go towards private corporations and say, Hey, Facebook, you worried you're worried about, you know, like supply chain, hey, Google, you're worried about supply chain, like, give us money. And so then they're able to, you know, then bring in a, you know, hundreds of hundreds of 1000s of dollars of private money to work on that kind of core infrastructure. And but it really is kind of the snowball. And that was, that was kind of the theory that we were working on. Back when we first started applying for grants. But that's really kind of what's what's been able to be executed there. And so the goal, you know, we kind of put that together, and then I stepped down from the board. And then I did actually will start working on the project funding Working Group, which was to try and kind of bring bring that knowledge of funding into the ecosystem a little bit more widely. And I'd say we're medium successful at that. But it is really like, there, there is a lot of money out there. And you grant grant funding is a whole different thing. But I do think having that longer term vision of like, you know, you can't just rely on grant funding, like there needs to be some kind of longer runway.
Will Vincent 32:37
Yeah, and in some ways, because the money is so big, I think it's easier for Mike, you know, like Microsoft, or some of these places, it's much easier to read a million dollar check than $100,000. One, because just the logistics of it. And in terms of are as I see the ecosystem, on the one hand, you have the PSF and all this work that's been done. So you can point to all these things and say, Yeah, we have, we did a follow up report, and the other and then there's Django and then kind of at the bottom end baby is Django rest framework, we're Tom Christie can say, hey, it's just me, this might go away unless you do something. And Django is kind of in the middle where we don't have the resources to fully fund what grant payers need, right? They need someone to, to write the grants and do the follow up. And we don't really have that yet. And the same time, we're not going away anytime soon. So it sort of has this treading water financially, which maybe is fine, because we're, you know, keep pumping out releases, but there's things we're not doing.
Eric Holscher 33:33
Yeah, I mean, I must say, I think the Tom Christie kind of DRF model is super fascinating, because really, really what Tom is selling is a developer that works on your core product dependency for like pennies on the dollar. Because that's basically the pitch, right? It's like, Hey, your like whole backend of your website is built on DRF. Your mobile app is all API driven by DRF. Like, you want to see that continue to improve, you want that dependency to get better and better. And by giving us $500 a month, if you know 50 Other companies give us $500 a month, you all get the same product, you get a full time developer working on this release. For you know, not even that much. I mean, $50 a month 100. I did the math wrong on that. But yeah, like, that's really the narrative that that I think DRF is, is working within. And I think that's super compelling, personally, because I find that kind of business case, right. I do think with grant funding, with any kind of private corporate funding, right that the PSF is getting money because like supply chain security is a big deal. And like, it's still a fraction of the money they should be getting. But it's still you know, they're they're solving that core business business need. And I think that's really the big thing, right? It's grant funding, you know, private donations, it's still it's still sales. You still have to kind of be solving a problem. that that organization needs to be needs solved. And I do think that's somewhere where Django struggles a little bit right is you're in read the doc struggles in this way sometimes as well as like, you're you're almost too foundational. Yeah,
Will Vincent 35:12
you're too stable to mature.
Eric Holscher 35:14
Like, like people don't don't yeah, they don't feel the pain or since the since the pain of it going away. But then it's also, you're not at the project lifecycle where the new shiny thing is, like, a super obvious like Jayco migration Kickstarter, obvious shared.
Carlton Gibson 35:33
But I think you mentioned it before, is that you? Do you do something to raise money, which is a distraction from the core project. So I'm 100% convinced that if we go, you know, if we say hey, do you use Django to use Django juice? Don't you do? Oh, brilliant, let's Why don't you fund it, you know, we go out and do that fundraising effort, we could double or triple the number of corporate sponsors of the DSF are small agencies around bigger bigger companies that are using it, of the DSF. But who in the in the Django community has got that time and skill set to go out there and make those those fundraising calls? Nobody? You know, there's people contributing to the framework. There's people, you know, working on it, but that sales job is entirely distinct. It's a totally different skill set.
Will Vincent 36:26
I think it's also I mean, sort of like you, Carlton and I are a bit of a broken record on this topic. I mean, the fact that read the docs now has full time employees. No one outside of the US very small number of people knows how Django is actually structured. And why should they? But it's, it makes it hard to, you know, DRF, you can say, oh, it's it's Tom. I mean, of course, it's Tom and Carlton and others, but it's made you know, it that's easier to think about, like Django does seems as like an amorphous thing. It doesn't seem like it's going away, it seems harder to just to know and care why things are happening. This. So yeah, it's almost a branding problem. I almost think if we, on the website described how it's like on the homepage, or something more prominent and said, Hey, this is the entire budget for Django is basically $200,000 a year. Like, there's, there's a lot like that's less than a Django dev makes in most major cities. Developers
Eric Holscher 37:25
are scared to like, promote things. Yeah. Like the fact that I can go to the Django project website and not see a logo of a sponsor is a is a failure, because the big thing I've also learned, like with ethical ads, the biggest revenue generation, the biggest awareness we have, is that, right? So by highlighting your sponsors, you're showing that you have a sponsorship program, right? And like, there's the thing on the sidebar, right? That's like, some random Django developer gave us like, $2. And it's like, okay, great. Like, I can give Django $2. That's what you're telling me. But if I went to the Django project website, and there was like, a huge Google logo at the bottom, and it was like, top tier sponsors, and be like, oh, like, that's the thing. I want my company logo there. Maybe I'll email my manager or whatever. But I do believe increasing the visibility. It's very, like, it's antithetical to a lot of what developers think about in the world. But like, increasing the visibility of sponsorship actually leads to more sponsorship. Which I mean, once you think about it makes sense. Yeah. Like, yeah, nobody in the developer community is like, I'm going to put a PR together to put the sponsor logos on the webpage.
Will Vincent 38:34
Wow, this is I mean, you're, you're on the DRF Members list where I send something around recently, I mean, Carlton, I've had many discussions. I mean, that is the obvious, easy thing to do is to like Vue js, you know, have have the sponsors, instead of buried on some page, no one can see somewhere on the homepage, and then just put, you know, instead of a random person have some prominence for certain tear put to the sidebar. But getting, you know, as you know, communicating a financial need when it's not, like you're gonna run out of money tomorrow, but you kind of do need it, like, as treasurer of Django the last three years, like, I would like us to have more than less than a one year runway if something happened. You know, that's not great, actually. And I mean,
Eric Holscher 39:17
I, we've actually been working with the PSF. Like the PSF is using our hosted ad platform with ethical ads to put sponsor logos on every pipe by sidebar, or pipe bi. Every time you go to a pipe BI project. In the sidebar, there is a logo or a sponsor. And if you click on that, it goes to the page with sponsorship. Yeah. And that is really them them. They're working with us and work with them to promote the visibility of their sponsors to get more sponsorship and to provide value. Right. I do think that the idea of having your logo on the peipsi package index is is valuable to sponsors.
Carlton Gibson 39:58
Yeah, well if you're a Django In a Django shop if you're a Django using company to be on the Django website is a great way of drawing. Yeah, potential hires.
Eric Holscher 40:09
I mean, it's, it's a huge value add to sponsors, and then you put that in your prospectus, right. Like, that is the thing when I go to my boss, and they're like, Wait, why should we give Jake good money? It's like, well, because we use it, obviously, because we're good people, but like, the good people argument, like does not sell. Like, people, people love being good people. And so they'll give 10 bucks to like some charity, you know, once a year. But like, if you actually want to get companies to engage with, you know, five, six figures, like, you need to give them that visibility, and you need to give them something they can sell, right? They need to be able to justify it when they go to their their boss, right? It's like, what's the cool screenshot I can send to my boss in an email? That's like, Hey, I'm so glad we did this deal. Look at all the value we're getting and all
Will Vincent 40:51
the traffic that Yeah, well, that's I mean, that's literally I mean, the issue for Django is we have Carleton three days a week. Mario's five days a week and that's it. Then the board who are volunteers and that's it. So for example, Carlton, I have it's documented said Okay, once 4.1 is out, which Carlton is the release manager for? Hopefully we can find some time so Carlton and I can work on this, you know, in Carlton can do it there isn't someone else to rejigger the homepage, there isn't someone to rejigger the sidebar experience is so it comes out of you know, it'd be nice to have a grant and have someone else do it. But, Carlton, what do you think I mean, right? That's just we're just so constrained. Well,
Carlton Gibson 41:29
what is it? Yeah, exactly. That is we've got Eric on this week, confirming that this is exactly what we need to do. So if we can just get someone from a design agency on anyone want to come on, and then they can did like, step up and redo the site. And then you know, hey, presto, it's done. The bottom line is it shouldn't be me read it resigning. I'm not I'm you know, I can tweet, I can do little tweaks, I can put a page together. But I'm not redesigning the site. I'm not really information. architecting it like I just, I haven't been a time and skills.
Eric Holscher 41:59
Like, and maybe there's maybe you've caught on to be into doing the work myself? Because I do I have on the DSF members listed. I do very little digit for jagah. But no, it's like, we don't
Will Vincent 42:11
we don't ask people to do that, though. That's the thing. Like, as a board member, like our whole last couple of meetings is hey, people aren't doing stuff, it's like, well, we don't ask them to write, there's 200 members, they're not asking you much. I sent an email kind of raising a flag. And, you know, I think we're really hurting without from the lack of in person meetings, personally,
Eric Holscher 42:30
you know, COVID COVID is really kind of changed the dynamics, the, the reward you get from going to a sprint or something is a lot less the dopamine hits are not as strong even
Will Vincent 42:41
even, you know, like, okay, so like, let's let's redesign, Django project site. Okay, so how does that actually happen? Right? Like, I'm on the board, I guess we could just decide. But I would rather have discussions with like, prominent Django, people at Django con, I talked about in the members, you know, there's this, because it's not a dictatorship. He's sort of like, well, I could start on it. But I kind of know the pushback I'm gonna get. And since it's all volunteer work, it's a lot of work to do on a maybe instead of somehow getting everyone to say, Yeah, we need to redesign it. And here's these finalists, and who's going to pm it and all the rest. It's, you know, in the absence of in person meetings, it just becomes harder to push that through.
Eric Holscher 43:21
Well, it's it's impossible to push through even with him personally. I mean, I saw some of the background of the Python website redesign. Yes. And that was a huge amount of work. And I think within open source get like governance authority, like, who, who actually feels empowered, that they could actually change the website is a huge question. Right? Like, it's, it's one of the hardest things about open source is like, who is who feels they have the authority to add, say, you put ads on the Django project website, like who feels that they could actually make that decision? Right. And I don't think anybody does. That mean, there's like a person, there's a person who has that legal authority, but do they feel empowered?
Will Vincent 44:01
Well, you're taught you're talking to them? I think so. You know,
Eric Holscher 44:05
but that is, that is a classic thing, right? It's like, who feels empowered to make that, that process and then executing? Doing a web design or redesign is super hard. Like even for people with infinite funding? It's a nightmare. Yeah, it is a Don't Don't feel bad, because it is a hard problem. But I do want to also want to like, step back in scope, and like, I know there's a thread in the website or in the DSF chat about like, redesigning the website, but like, I'm not talking about redesigning the website. I'm talking about like, putting the logos on the current website. Yeah, it's the homepage thing. The sidebar, yeah. Changing the link at the top that says donate to sponsor. Because donate as donate is not like donation is a no, do not use that word. That word is bad. That That means I am a corporation tonight to get no value. What you want is you want sponsors and your members can be sponsors, it doesn't mean they have to give, you know, you can be a $5 a month sponsor, whatever. But I do believe that like donation as a concept is something that like corporations equate with like a different budget than sponsorship like sponsorships. marketing money donation is like we do a matching fund for our employees budget. Sponsorship is how you actually give value to people like, is there a prospectus? Like if I'm a company, what do I get? When I give you money? Like, is there something I can then send to my boss to be like, Hey, I think we should be a bronze level. I mean, it's the exact same thing is as a conference sponsorship, right? You need the perspective. So you need sponsorship, you need value. And the PSF has been doing a lot of work, kind of adding, cut, like selling sponsorships and merging. Conference and community benefits, which is really kind of interesting. We've done some of that with Write the Docs as well, where we actually sell, you know, job postings as part of a conference sponsorship that shows up on our community job board to try and kind of spur the usage of that job board. So much of this right is super basic. But it's really hard, right? If you're just a bunch of developers, and you're like, how do I, how do I build a sponsorship program? It's,
Will Vincent 46:23
it's also not that, you know, it's why do we have fellows, it's all the stuff that needs to get done. That isn't as fun to do, right? Like, all those you know. And for me, like, I would really like to see these things happen. But I like personally, don't have the time to do it on top of being the treasurer, and all the things I'm doing. So one thing which I I saw you did, one path I might take is to step down from the board and to try to work specifically on some of these things so that I have the time to do it. And I'm not doing all the other things I need to do. So it's Yeah, but do we need the prospectus we need the sidebar. I think also, at this point, something you know, it's also as a volunteer it is, I think we would get more people if we had bigger, audacious public goals, it's less enticing to keep something going as a volunteer than it is to, you know, redesign the site, improve the corporate thing, you know, do a new feature, Carlton shaking his finger at me,
Carlton Gibson 47:21
but Well, well, it's kind of what Eric just sort of intimated out before is that if as soon as it becomes redesigned the site and that's a massive job, whereas put the sponsor logo on the front page, that's an address of well, this is what we have a small thing when we have this thing with feature issues, right. So a feature issue comes up. Let me just say this point, because it is exactly like adding a new feature. It's like, can we I don't know at this little tweak thing to the to the to the admin. Yeah, we can add that little tweak thing. But can we add this whole news of major feature? No, we can't. So it's much more addressable to do the one little tweak than it is the big, you know, oh, let's boil the ocean.
Will Vincent 48:05
Well, the plan currently is Carlton, for you and me and others to look at something different for the homepage, and correct the sidebar, not a redesign, and ask for forgiveness, not permission, or ask people to comment, which they probably won't, and then see what happens. But I know it's gonna help ours.
Eric Holscher 48:25
just ship it. And then you'll get all the comments like, Yeah, well,
Will Vincent 48:28
now you commented.
Eric Holscher 48:29
I mean, we already did, yeah, put it on a feature flag. So you can you can just ship it for a day and be like, All right, we'll address the wave of criticism. Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Will Vincent 48:40
I mean, we are though, compared to the Python Software Foundation, as you noted, there was there has been this big shift from generally all most of the funding came from the conferences, and then a that's a weakness in general. And then with COVID. That's a real problem. Django has never made much money from the conferences. So in a way that's more stable for us, even though that is, you know, that's something we could and should do, right. Like we could have part time, paid hourly staff and make the conferences more of a job fair for businesses. It's just a question of who's going to do that. But anyway, well,
Eric Holscher 49:16
yeah, there. There's a lot of really interesting questions here. And I will note this, this is one of the reasons why I read the docs is a for profit, and not a nonprofit, because I actually have some probably unpopular opinions around the incentive structures and kind of public perception around nonprofits. But I actually do think being a nonprofit constrains the way you can make revenue and changes people's perception of when you actually try to generate revenue, along with the tax implications than legal things and whatnot, but like, when people hear you're a nonprofit, that it's just a different conversation. I mean, you can hire people, you can do all the work. But I do think that makes things a little bit harder, at least at the small scale.
Will Vincent 49:59
But I explained that sidebar No, I 1,000% agree. I mean, even coming. I just came from a business school reunion. In business school, I took a class on nonprofits. And my takeaway was, it's twice the work because you have to do all the things in for profit, plus all the extra requirements of a nonprofit plus, people don't want you to make too much money. So it's just, you know, like, for me, like I do books and education, and I've thought, well, maybe I should do a nonprofit, right? Maybe it should be like Free Code Camp. But just the logistics of that cost. You know, you're replacing people who pay you with sponsors and donors who are less reliable. And, you know, again, you get these big spikes, but then you get these troughs. And I personally, if I ever did, like a Free Code Camp kind of site, I would make an a for profit and charge for like, 5% of it or something or have sponsors. You know, ads, right? It just an actual nonprofit is just so much work.
Eric Holscher 50:51
Yeah. But I do think that's one of the things right, it's it. That's part of why it's also hard to define. I mean, it's still just a legal entity, just like a port for profit. It just has a board that controls it. But I think it's just a lot harder for people to understand that. It's like, it also has its own needs. It needs fundraising, it needs revenue, like I mean, for the DSF. In particular, what is overhead? I'm sure is a fraught question.
Will Vincent 51:15
Well, no, I mean, well, you're you're on the Members list. I mean, and this is partly, I guess, my fault, or just, you know, we don't, you know, the PSF has an annual report that says, here's who got paid what, and here's the budget. And we have that now, since I've been there and working with working on that, but I haven't done a blog post to share it publicly. Right. I probably should. You know, it's it's not a mystery. It's two thirds fellows, and then a third everything else, but because people don't know that and see that even the DSF members. Why Why would they know that? Right? So it's, I guess, on me a little bit
Eric Holscher 51:45
and like, who's I'm also the, like, one of the like five people on that list? Probably that even knows what a 990 is?
Will Vincent 51:52
Well, yeah, exactly. I now have to file that. And you know, you know, so it's just an invisible pain for the past six years. Yeah,
Eric Holscher 51:59
we're we're getting a little a little deep in the weeds here. But I do think that in some ways, yeah, like that, that amorphousness is really hard. Because it does make it a little harder to figure out where you fit in, and how you're going to generate funding. And there, there are a lot of funding opportunities, especially with grants that are only available to nonprofits. And so there there are some benefits there as well, of course, but I don't want to I don't want to go too far down the the nonprofit rabbit hole because it's pretty arcane. I mean, it's, it's interesting. It's the
Will Vincent 52:29
only there's this. Catherine Holmes, who's the DSF. Assistant, she's paid hourly, that was added since I joined. That's basically the only way I can do the job, or anyone could do the job before me there was people came in and out because it is even for me, it's hours a week. And she's doing, you know, she's physically filing the 990. I'm reviewing, you know, so I'm sort of, even though I, I've long said I never want to manage anyone, I'm managing her a little bit. But yeah, that's why it happens. So. So yeah. Anyways, yes, all these all these things that that matter, and that, you know, regular users don't need to know, but DSF members, I think should know more about and so that's really probably on the board to communicate the needs. And I think that's one of the the back benefits of having people on the board is they actually have to learn about nonprofits. Yeah, and at the same time having this year, we have the same people as last year, we're, we're most likely going to institute a change where it's two year terms, because if you're just on for a year, you basically takes a year to learn how to do anything, and then you can finally do something. So this year has been great, and that we've been able to just do stuff instead of bring people up to speed on what in
Carlton Gibson 53:37
surely it should surely be three year terms and one year to learn and two years to do something.
Will Vincent 53:42
That's yeah, that's peers. I think PSF is three year. Yeah. Well,
Carlton Gibson 53:45
they just wanted to this. I mean, you know, all the nonprofit stuff. It's kind of interesting, but one thing it does tie into that I think, you know, he's more open and perhaps a, you know, way to segue out of there is that part of the Django sort of feel is the community and now I don't know what's your take on on that on that Eric in that in terms of I kind of feel that the nonprofit and the way Jacob stepped away from the BSDF role and all of that kind of thing PSDF P Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Be there feel that these days? Anyway, I don't know how to turn it into a question. I was like, Yeah, but like how do I like aren't the two don't have to go hand in hand like you can't really have the sort of Django community without the sort of the foundation and the nonprofit status and it being the way it is.
Eric Holscher 54:47
I mean, there's there's nothing like right the docks which is the conference I work on in the community as a for profit organization. There's there's nothing about the governance or the legal entity, like, like for profit companies, actually. To have more flexibility in terms of being charitable, like, like, if we choose, however, we want to spend the money, even if the IRS doesn't think it's okay, like we pay taxes, and we do whatever we want, like, cool. And so I do think that like, this is part of what I'm talking about, right? people conflate the legal status, with the mission with a bunch of other things that are all wrapped up in how they think about it. And it just makes it a little harder to communicate clearly with people. The need for we're going to pay somebody to raise money, as a nonprofit is like, probably a little harder than saying, as a business, we're going to do a salesperson, or whatever. And I do think there are people in the community that have the skill set. But yeah, it's just like, it's not a skill set people do for free generally, like, know what, why, you know, you can't like I'm gonna raise a claim for your, for your organization, and then you're gonna give me none of it. Wait, is that it's like, even weirder, more awkward with with money. You're like, oh, so my job is to generate revenue and get paid nothing. Great. This, this makes a ton of sense. But yeah, no, I, I think that there's a lot of small things that that the DSF could do to better convey the value it provides. And I think the donate page does a great job. But like, it just needs to be more pervasive throughout all of the content, all of the kind of marketing all the communication. And so yeah, but these are things every organization struggles with, right, like, I don't want to make it sound like it's easy.
Will Vincent 56:30
Well, it sounds like you volunteered to review our draft this fall is what it sounds like.
Carlton Gibson 56:35
Could I ask you to do a brain dump when you get off? You know, when you get off from brain dump it to the DSF list is so least we got an action for you. You don't have to if you did that.
Eric Holscher 56:45
I'm I'm definitely I've, there's there's lots of ideas here. And obviously they I've been failing at blogging for a long time. So maybe, maybe that's the proper, proper avenue for these thoughts to finally get a blog post up this year.
Will Vincent 56:59
Well, whatever. We're coming up on time, what happened? We asked you, right, I mean, what do you want to tell people about that? We haven't had too
Eric Holscher 57:07
much little a little sad that we had the PCT on the on the notes
Will Vincent 57:12
and stuff, but it's not. Okay. So So I saw that. And I saw that. So you've done the Pacific Crest Trail runs on the West Coast. And well, Jacob did the whole thing. And you did 800 miles of it. No, hang on. Hang
Carlton Gibson 57:23
on. That's it sounds like an awful long way to go back. So what is this?
Eric Holscher 57:26
It's a hiking the PCT rent one of these 600 miles from Mexico to Canada along basically. But yeah, and I did 800 miles and ended up breaking my foot by walking too much got a stress fracture. So that was I did not did not choose to stop.
Will Vincent 57:44
But which which section Did you do the north south or south? North? South North? So basically, I did the worst part. Yeah, cuz I've, I've done the the John Muir Trail, which is like the best part, which is only 220 miles from Yosemite to Mount Whitney. So you didn't get to Mount Whitney, then
Eric Holscher 58:02
I got to Whitney. So I went out at career search paths. So yeah, go, oh, like the next one, basically. Yeah, the PCT is like 700 miles of desert, like in the south. And then you finally get to the High Sierra. And that's like the best part, you're in good shape. And you're like, ready or do a 20 miles a day. And then my like foot just like stopped working. And it was like, so I did some at Whitney and got to do that. That kind of saw the beginning of the
Will Vincent 58:27
guitar lake and then to cure Sarge. But yeah,
Eric Holscher 58:31
unfortunately, just Yeah.
Carlton Gibson 58:32
Can you just put a marker in the ground and go back few years later and pick it up and say, This is what I was encouraged?
Eric Holscher 58:37
To do? What do they go right back in the same paths if I wanted to, but yeah, it's hard to hard to find the time to, to take five months off to hike across the country.
Will Vincent 58:46
But people do this, Carlton. So on the East Coast, there's the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, which literally, I just would just home at my parents house. It literally goes in front of my parents house in Vermont, and my wife hiked the entire thing after college. I only did a bit of it with her. And people though many people can't take the time to do the whole thing. So they'll section hike it, and they will like, you know, go to it becomes very specific, right? Like, you can't skip this section. Right? You're gonna do it, you're gonna do it. So it may take 10 years. But you you know, you want to do the whole thing.
Eric Holscher 59:21
Totally. But yeah, just a fun fun little let's uh, let's uh, hikers I think in the, in the open source community, but yeah, that is definitely something I still do all almost every weekend and enjoy. So that's, that's how I'm able to kind of do so much work is to, you know, get the endorphins on the weekend, I guess.
Will Vincent 59:39
Well, if you're gonna sit still, you have to move around on the you know, it's like everything's yin yang. Exactly. Right, Carlton, that you would agree, Mr. Philosophy?
Carlton Gibson 59:50
That's I did Western philosophy. Yeah, no, I mean,
Will Vincent 59:53
I do. I know you have a quote of someone from 2000 years ago.
Eric Holscher 59:57
I do Alpine philosophy.
Carlton Gibson 59:59
Whole sounds very sensible.
Will Vincent 1:00:01
Yeah. Well, so we're gonna have links to everything. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for just not just the ideas, but just inspiring me, Carlton others to do the work on Django because especially around funding, like, there's so much opportunity. It's just a question of seeing role models, like, read the docs, and trying to tackle the easy things to, you know, keep it secure, which is what we all want going forward.
Carlton Gibson 1:00:27
Yeah. Thanks for coming to read on security
Eric Holscher 1:00:30
is a great sales pitch a plus?
Will Vincent 1:00:34
Yes, don't be Yeah. All right. Well, well, you
Carlton Gibson 1:00:40
know, security, like the security team who, you know, don't get much daylight, they do a massive job, we get reports every single week. And you know, there's experienced developers giving time there, like that, that if we were to put that works more front and center, there's a thing that, you know,
Will Vincent 1:00:58
can we can, we can have like an unsecure version, right, like the free version, versus the premium version
Carlton Gibson 1:01:05
that says, you can't pay for security is not a feature
Eric Holscher 1:01:08
that I feel like this is a whole nother thread that we're gonna jump on to that we don't have time for. But
Will Vincent 1:01:16
I do think it's a great it's a great kind of Avenue, though, right? To kind of highlight that, that works to highlight it and put it forward. Yeah, I was gonna say we are at Django chat.com chat, Django and Twitter. This is actually our last Live episode of the spring. We'll be back in the fall. So we'll put out replay episodes. But Eric, thank you so much for taking the time.
Eric Holscher 1:01:36
Totally. I appreciate it.
Will Vincent 1:01:37
Alright, we'll see everyone next time. Bye. Bye.
Carlton Gibson 1:01:40
Bye bye.