Django on the Med

Speaker 1: Hello, welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I'm Will Vincent with Carlton Gibson. Hey Carlton.

Speaker 2: Hello, Will. Welcome back.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we're back. We did a sneak peek one for the developer survey, but this is the first start of the fall season, so.

Speaker 2: The long, the long stretch through Christmas

Speaker 1: yeah. And even this is number two hundred and six, it still took us what, twenty minutes to figure out the logistics of the technology. So

Speaker 2: Like just getting the pipes lined up so that they actually connect to each other is harder than it should be.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, you look tanned and rested. Tell us where have you been?

Speaker 2: Well I've just got back um from uh Pescara, Abruzzo in Italy, uh where we had the second um episode of uh Django and the Med where uh twenty-five of us got together and spent three days working on Django. It's growing, right?

Speaker 1: It's growing like a cancer, it's doubling.

Speaker 2: Fif fifteen last year and no we're not gonna do it in Dublin, that would be in the North Sea. Sorry. Not even the North Sea, the Atlantic. Anyway, let's g let's leave that one for kids.

Speaker 1: Okay, so twenty five.

Speaker 2: Twenty-five. We had fifteen last time and we had twenty-five this time. Um so obviously growing, I think the um last time was a bit of a punt. It was an untried thing and so the ver only it only the the very brave could make it. Whereas this time it was a slightly more of a known commodity and so Um actually we we had a a capacity limit. We were we were we weren't sold out because we didn't sell anything, but um it was free to attend. But the tickets were sold out a month more over a month in advance. So that's really that's really nice

Speaker 1: Well, it's so um I feel like a a grandparent seeing you and Paolo spend all this, you know, this idea, the glint in the eye of what if we had you know, Paulo's been talking about this for years and years.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: And then Um, and you've done your part, but I've seen Paolo in person at PyCon US, EuroPython, DjangoCon US. He's you know relentless with letting people know about this. So um That's exciting. And we we'll we'll get to there's some stuff that you worked on that came out of it and we'll sort of do a deep dive for people who missed it. I have some notes here. I'll just say a glad we're not the Rails community. Let's leave it at that Um so DjangoCon US um in Chicago, that was last month. Um great, so nice to see people. Um I miss DjangoCon Europe in Athens. Uh so Got to go to the PyCon US and EuroPython, so it's nice to be in like a cozy

Speaker 1: Django little world. I gave my um deployment speech, which I've given this year. Um super focused on Django, so that I think that went well. Um oh, uh just for people who don't know, um, because you're not sub subscribed to the Django newsletter, uh Django has Finished, I think, an executive director search, or that's still ongoing. There's been some tech governance changes, right? The steering council, as well as versioning.

Speaker 2: Yes, so um so we got two big depth um approved um over the summer. So one was it we'll go backwards 'cause um deb twenty was approved before debt 19. Deb 19 took longer. So debt 20 was the move to the annual release cycles, which I was very excited about. Um the goal there was twofold really. Um one was to bring uh Django better in line with the Python release cycle. So since Python I know a few years ago went um annual release cycles, we've the Django's old Django's old release cycle was leading us in leading us sort of sort of well out of sync with that. So Django four point two which just went out out of life, I think was still supporting Django three point eight, which had been end of life for eighteen months before Django and it Uh we don't want to be supporting end of life um

Speaker 2: Pythons i is a start. But um so we want to get better and um a better cadence in in line with the Python's release cycle and also to eliminate this gap between LTS um releases. So we've had every third release being an LTS, which has three years of extended support. Well that that would mean that people would stay on the old the old LTS and what's going to happen from Django 2028, which will be the first version of Django under the new system. Every single version will get that same three years of support. And the idea being that if you want you want to be on a long-term support version, well that's fine. You can still update and get the fixes that come in on the in the new version and as well as the features.

Speaker 2: Right. But

Speaker 1: right.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: No, it m it makes so much sense. I mean and the old system made total sense when it was first done. Um but This is I mean, even PyCharm, my day job, you know, we have an annual release cycle and it just makes so much sense. And, you know, to the extent there's humans making content, it makes it easier to say this is not out of date. Um that's me sliding in. So last night, if I seem extra tired, I finished, finished, finished uh Django for Beginners updates. So for 6-1 Uh may I won't subject people to a whole episode on it, but I've actually gonna have one book instead of three. So I moved the API's book into a chapter or two, I slim down the uh professionals book into a chapter or two, and I'm just gonna be

Speaker 1: So I won't get rid of the old versions, this will be accessible to people who want 'em, but one book up to date and then I guess twenty twenty eight will be the next update So I'll subject people when I have a cover. It's not real until I have a cover. You know, for me to be like, oh all the text is updated, all the code is updated, it's like I want to see the cover. So

Speaker 2: this at this point will you sort of um phrase it as um six point X, so for s for the six point two LTS to come up and then

Speaker 1: well I'm calling it six sixth edition and I'll try to make clear six one, but it's um I I should be a with one book I should be able to just bump it every eight months. Um I I I It it's not as simple as bumping it. Um people don't want to hear me lament being a technical book author book author, but it's like it's the least of it to do it. But it should be much more manageable. Um and so I'm excited about that because there ha there's a ton of new stuff with um, you know, mailers and then the fetch modes and um and at the same time the professionals book had a lot i is the one that's a bit old, um, had a lot of Docker stuff. Like I feel like that's that's a nut that's hard to crack. So um even though it's Django for beginners, it's really takes you into some professional territory.

Speaker 1: Um and it's just um Yeah, anyways, I'm doing the plug for the book that wasn't gonna do, but I'm just excited because I stayed up last night and finally finished it. So

Speaker 2: I think in this day and age, I think the the the the value of the book is the kind of high level understanding, um and if certain eight tooling can help us to produce, you know, the exact Docker file we need this week Um but the understanding of the general principles around deployment, that's that's something that, you know, a human can bring to the table at a higher level, I think.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um and also I found out this summer um Sarah Abdermain is one of the two authors updating Django by example, which is the other ongoing book. Um so when they have an update, we'll bring her on and we can have a book off and uh

Speaker 2: And I think Giuliano who was at uh Django on the Med might be one of the other. There's I f

Speaker 1: I'm s I'm sorry, I know there's another, I don't know Who it is, yeah.

Speaker 2: I think it's Juliana. She was writing a uh chapter on um Django Tasks, who's bemoaning to me, not give them giving her enough pages to do it. See, this

Speaker 1: this is what I need, Carlton. I need fellow tech authors to like

Speaker 2: Okay, we we will we will have a a tech author support group on the podcast one F to C.

Speaker 1: Alright but anyways that's that's coming very soon. I think that's the So that

Speaker 2: anyway, that was the annual release cycle, which is debt twenty, and then the technical governments, which was debt nineteen, um was about the um Uh the governing rule. So DEP ten uh was the one which m when we moved from um uh the core uh jet the old core developer mailing list, the private core developer mailing list and um retired the core the core developer label and the old team there. And we had uh Deptem, which was super. It di it got us out of the um the history, but it turned it turned out to be quite um legalistic and difficult to work with. Um and so the idea in debt nineteen is to very much loosen the the the the feels and have uh something that's slightly more human, slightly more um fitted to the scale of organization that Django really is. We're a very small and tight community

Speaker 2: and sometimes trying to legislate for uh situations which were uh uh uh far removed from the norm, didn't leave the the day to day you working with debt ten and then debt twelve where we tried to clarify it. Um I it wasn't that easy. Um and so the big the Tim Schilling has worked on that very heavily. Um so full credit to him. Uh he really has pushed that effort. And I think one of the bits we're most pleased pleased with is uh the section where it it describes c some of the candidate features that you might meet. It's kind of like a you know, you might have two or three of these of these qualities and you'd be qualified and if you read it, it basically anybody who's engaged in the Jenga community w should be qualified and should at least have written down that you are qualified, whereas previously it was very much like you must have five years of serious contribution.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Which makes it sound as if only the old grey beards can can be involved and that's not what we want. Um

Speaker 1: speaking of which I think uh vodcast viewers are not gonna appreciate you had quite a beard going uh This spring as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It was a little while and then it got really hot over the summer and I was like it's gotta go. So maybe I checked us the weekend.

Speaker 1: I even checked in with you and you said it wasn't you weren't getting was it hot beard beard hot face or you had some phrase?

Speaker 2: No, it was fine and then and then like You know, so in uh Catalonia we had the ho um hottest um August ever recorded and the hottest day in September ever recorded and things like that. It's been a h a hot summer and I was at the point where I said, No, it's gotta go for a while. Um so maybe I put it back

Speaker 1: This is what passes up for a hobby for a hobby in our days, in our age.

Speaker 2: No, but it's a nice hobby. It's good fun. I've got the brush, got the oil, that's all fine. So I can get

Speaker 1: this is a This is the thing, is that it's a lot of work. It's way less work to be clean shaven ish. That's the that's the you know, you see someone with the hair and it's like, oh, the maintenance, I can't

Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1: Anyways. Um I do want to say so Jane go on the med, you had uh some sponsors. Should we shout them out?

Speaker 2: Yes, uh no. So fantastic as well. So we had JetBrains um who sponsored social events, we had Cuttlesoft who sponsored the coffee, we had the DSF who sponsored the event. So They were financial sponsors and their their f their sponsorship was, you know, really appreciated. It really did um help help the event and that was wonderful. And then we had EuroPython, uh the PSF and Python Italia who came on board as community sponsors as well. Oh communities Yeah. Community sponsors or community uh partners, uh perhaps so we say. Um we did tr try and get a few visa applications for people from outside the the the who didn't have visas, that turns them out to be very difficult. Um Python Catalia they bent over backwards to try and help us there. But um but I think for a small organization like Django on the or for a small event like Django on the Med, it's really hard to see how that's feasible um with the amount of

Speaker 2: work it takes. Um so maybe the DSF can step forward and find a way of doing that in the future. I don't know. That's something that the board can discuss. But it's it really isn't simple because it it's not the case that an individual can just sponsor somebody to to come. You can't it i i it's it's quite it's a lot more to it than we uh than I 've seen before.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think conference organizers would know about that. But um and then also

Speaker 2: Jan Con Europe, the same difficulties. It's it's it's really not.

Speaker 1: Well, and then the US, again, don't wind me up on it, but yeah. Um but I did want to say so Python Pescara, the local group I think also helps

Speaker 2: the p fol yeah, the folks from Pi Python Pescara they came at they I think they were helping Paula organize as as well. But I think they um so thank you those there they but they also came at some of the social events and the meals and you know, it was really nice to to meet them and they they were kind of would act as our guides, you know, oh yeah, go here, see this, do this, uh which was wonderful.

Speaker 1: I saw the photos, yeah. I was I was like, Carlton, give me photos and I know Paolo's put together, I think, at least one video, so we'll try to we'll link to that when he gets a chance to put it up.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so Bella has a family friend who came and did photos, like you know, the missing bar tech so we had Alicia and um uh and then um she was doing videos and she's putting those together. We've got a Django Med 's Instagram account now of all things, so do follow that if you're on IG people. Yeah. You told me. Yeah. This is so far beyond like, you know, what we what we do normally. So Paolo r really has pushed the pushed the limit far out so we're never going to be able to compete with this in the future. Um

Speaker 1: good. And then I think i is it uh announced next year? Is that formal?

Speaker 2: Yes. Well it's it's ninety per ninety five percent for the plan is Yeah, is the p the plan is for it to be held in uh Malta. Um Joe Samet who's uh who lives there, he's gonna be on the ground there um and put together so we'll be in Malta probably in the second week of October. Um which is just a little bit more.

Speaker 1: But it's in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 2: Yes, you will.

Speaker 1: Appreciate the joke, Carlton.

Speaker 2: Come on.

Speaker 1: And then there's talk of Django off the med, you know, in Cambridge and other places. So we'll see how it grows from there. But uh

Speaker 2: I hear Frank's gonna organize one in Kansas.

Speaker 1: Well and um in Cambridge, UK, potentially too. Yeah, I would I've never been to Kansas. I would Only go to Kansas for that.

Speaker 2: So right, okay. So let me let me put it this way. We when we started Jangle at the Med, the idea was to have these sprint events and then If then when there's only one event then there's a great pressure to try and uh make it accessible to everybody from all around the world. But the idea with the local event is you can't bring people from all around the world. So it's much better that we spin off um you know, other events elsewhere and then, you know, some people can travel to sure. So we had Lillian um we had Simon Charette, we had um uh Jacob Wolves, they all came a long way. But Um th it the m the vast majority were much more local to Europe, you know, o Austria, Italy, Spain, you know, these kind of striking distance type um type locations. And that's, I think, a much more sustainable. It's going to be a much more sustainable model, but that requires that we have people

Speaker 2: take the bat on and and run one in Britain or run one in America or run one you know, we had various people like, Oh, we could do one in the Alps, we could do you know, so

Speaker 1: Well, so DjangoCon Europe, February twenty twenty seven Innsbruck Innsbruck, Austria. Uh speaking of the Austrian.

Speaker 2: Why Innsbruck? Well, because DjangoCorn Europe needs a backdrop and the pictures of Innsbruck with the mountains right behind it. It looks very Looks very nice.

Speaker 1: No, it's exciting. Um Well let's Okay, so let's oh go ahead. I

Speaker 2: I just wanted to talk quickly about the work that was done.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you about.

Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah. You know, the marketing for Jang on a man is all very holiday, but it's three serious days. We've got twenty-five people together and we work solidly. Um for the mornings and then the afternoons are for more social. And you do carry on the discussions in the afternoons and you know on the bus coming back from the restaurant says, you know, talk people talking about nested transactions and all sorts of things going on. But um uh the the core that core time that we get stuff done, it it is phenomenal. It is uh and it's not just me that says that. Like you know, there's been p um blog posts already a couple of blog posts already published and the and the key point that keeps getting made is that this These these um advances, they wouldn't be possible without the time spent in person. It really is a different environment than online. Um so Matthias, uh whose surname has totally escaped me, um find

Speaker 2: CMS person. Ah, Matthias and Jo and then Joe, um who's coding Joe. They they're both working on the front end. They've both been working on import maps. They've both been working on um you know as asset handling. Uh but coming from different approaches. And then they get together. And they sit round a table and within an hour they've realized that actually their approaches could be compatible and if they just d did it this way, then they could come up with something which satisfies both their needs. Now that But that conversation has been going for literally years on the forum. If you go on the forum and you you look up for about the form media and and and related tickets around there, it's like two, three years of chipping away and d and bubbling and and whatnot versus an hour in the room together. It's right.

Speaker 1: Well it's also it's also if they know they're gonna be in person, right, you can sort of do your prep, right? It's another I mean because part of the issue You know, sprints are in some ways the best part of DjangoCon conferences, but you're already four or five days in, right? So you're already a little fatigued and not everyone can, you know, extend. So to have Uh so I assume that's, you know, in person, but also like you're kind of like, okay, I'm going to see Carlton, like let's let's hash this out. And then to your point, it's usually in yeah, in person You can get way more done. I mean that was yeah. We we we've lamented it. I mean we did we did this podcast in part because without the Django cons for, you know, during COVID Not that it falls apart, but it's a lot harder. As digital as we all are, like you do need that in person.

Speaker 2: Yeah, no, i it's Yeah. So anyway, it's amazing. Um is all I can say. For my own work I was working the the big thing I wanted to make progress on was um async transactions, so being able to await a transaction atomic and then use the async methods of the O of the ORM within that. And I was able on the first day I was able to sit down with Jacob Walls, a fellow with uh Simon Chalette, who's a you know, big RM contributor with uh Lily, um uh steering council member who's a big RM contributor, and then uh Charlie Denton and Sam from uh the Kraken high performance team who are working on the um subatomic package and um nested nested atomic. And we were able to um have probably half an hour, forty minutes, where I explained the the problems and the issues and we went through the foot guns and

Speaker 2: just brainstorming back and forth. And by the end of that, I was able to get a com that morning I was able to put a really nice comment on the on the um issue, which then Caleb Hattinger, who who was another sprint attendee, picked up. And then on the second day when I was busy ru um reviewing a um uh another A-shink PR which has been on my backlist for six months, he was able to make progress on the basis of the comment. And then on the th third day we were able to work together and I think, you know, within a few weeks we will have something, so I'm ac I'm very excited that we will get this into Stanley 6. 2 now. But that F first of all that big session with the the you know, half a dozen people working together where we we were able to to reach an understanding which otherwise wouldn't be there. Then him to be able to pick up that on the basis of it, then we act that That work

Speaker 2: just literally isn't reprobable in just an open source environment, an online environment. Um so that's phenomenal. And then, you know, I could talk for days and days about the other the other things that are going on. I don't want to

Speaker 1: minimize Right, you the the word BGT?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so m um Mark Smith and I did um bootstrapped a package based on so Hinnick put together a package called um uh but BGT uh For background threads, I guess it stands for. But um I think we we we think we should pronounce it Jang a beer gut 'cause it's BGT. Um so but we we put to together a Django version of that. So that um that enables you to run um supervised uh background threads um uh with exponential back off and retries and all the all these things you want plus it's got a uh leadership um mechanism where um if you run it in multiple processes you can set for one of them to take a lock via a lease um table in that the ORM provides and then um that will only be rubb be run once. So you might say want the report, the Monday morning report to the CEO. It's really important that that only goes out once.

Speaker 2: You don't want like ten of those arriving on the CEO CEO's desk at once. So you'd have a leader for that and that That can only happen the one time. Um, but that's a very exciting um additional tool in the toolbot, the the exponential back off, the leadership, that that kind of Those those kind of features are very hard to write and we're leveraging um Hinux expertise there. But that um that can work then with any database that um the the ORM supports, so you know SQLite or uh MySQL or PostgreSQL or Oracle or you know whatever. Um so very excited about that. There's a there's a channels wake up Um so wake up so you normally um by default it wakes up on an interval, so you know it's like a cron job, you know, you have it at um every every hour, say, clear out your sessions. But also um there's a channels wake up where you can subscribe to a a a channels group and then it will wake up

Speaker 2: on an event of the channels group. That's in the code base but it's not documented or tested yet 'cause we didn't quite get to it, but that will be there shortly. And It's yeah, it's going to be a very useful tool in the tool belt. So very excited about that. Justin Meyer and Zan Anderle, they worked on a Django benchmarking project where we're going to be able to load test different configurations. Which is something that's been on my backlog forever and ever and ever. Um, but they were actually able to dedicate it the time. And so, you know, we all how always Django fast enough? Well, it's fast enough for my blog running ten c you know, ten requests an hour sort of thing. Yeah, no problem. Um What about if we put it under log? What about if we're running ASGI under load? What if about if we're running with uh free threaded Python? What how does that change the So to be able to construct these different scenarios, run them with with

Speaker 2: locus to show their actual performance profile, I think that's going to do a lot more for or to to sort of um lot to enable us to have a more sophisticated discussion about performance than oh look how many requests per second it does in this you know hypothetical. Right, it's also abstract

Speaker 1: uh or can be abstract um Yeah. Well that um also I'm just reading your notes here because I want to make sure we highlight everything. Uh was Simon also mentoring Annabelle on Something?

Speaker 2: Yes, so um Annabelle was a uh surname again, I don't know. I d only met her at at the event and I I didn't uh internalise her surname, but she was a Janganor. um group uh alumni. She went through Janganaut Space and um she's interested in the ORM and I was sat across from the table while Simon and Annabel were working together and Simone was But they were it was just amazing to watch. It was the best kind of mentoring, the sort of thing where um we've we've got a but essentially a new contributor. She's not a new contributor, she's you know, been through the Janganots Hospitalum, but she's still a a a a an entry-level contributor. She put her hand up at the beginning when I said who consider themselves new. So okay. She's a new contributor and s Simon was able to sit with her and they were able to go through things and she's left the event. as an established ORM contributor.

Speaker 2: Now that is that is just gold dust. That's l again, literally not replicable in an in another kind of environment. Um and I've got um Jacob Wolves, I've got him committed to um auditing our three free threading uh readiness in preparation for Um who else? Ah, I can't remember. Juliana was working on Django Tasks. Lillian was helping work on the benchmarking project for a bit, but she was also then working on other stuff. I don't know what exactly, because she was the other side of the room. There was people working to update um the uh Unit testing for anyway, I'm I'm listing the the work that gone on, but it's it's it's prolific. There are half a dozen um PRs on Django that which haven't been closed. There have been some that have been closed. There's um two or three depths being written, there's

Speaker 2: You know, progress on longer. Yeah, it's it's literally amazing. Um so anyway, that's like a ten minute monologue about Django on the Met, but I cannot express enough how effective these sprint events are for pushing forward the project. So thank you to the sponsors once again. Yes. Brainscum shelf Dank software.

Speaker 1: Well it helps that uh Mark Smith is the uh head of Python ecosystem at PyCharm, JetBrains, so

Speaker 2: well he's aware. I mean I think the difficulty that we have as a community is making the the marketing case to a company that it's valuable to s to either either sponsor the event or to send their teams. And so one other thing that we're doing that's based off um advice from uh Daniele uh Profida is to um uh keep a record of the event of when what's started, what's finished, when's it completed. And so for the next, for the yet marketing for the next one, we want to say, look, we've done two now and here are the concrete things that were achieved. And so there's a real case that you should be sending your team, um, you should be sponsoring the event.

Speaker 1: Do you think I mean there's a limit on the size that you know, separate from space constraints, right? Because you if it's two fifty, that's different than twenty-five.

Speaker 2: Yes, I so I think about twenty twenty five is about the right number for the dynamic and the event, which is why we need to have more than just Django on the Med. Because if we only ever have Django on the Med, then there's too much demand for that event to be the place. Um

Speaker 1: Jang on the biggest.

Speaker 2: Well, Jang on the Prairie, Jang on the Camp, Jang on the Alps, Django like anywhere we you know, p yeah also, you know Django in countries in Africa, Django in um Asia, why can't we have these these sprint events elsewhere rather than just, oh, let's do it in Western Europe? Like it's really important that we try and help grow this lo um globally. We're a global community. We can't be insisting that you have to come all the way to as nice as coming to the Mediterranean is, we can't be insisting that you come all this way to join in. That's

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. I mean, and I have to say we we just, you know, here in New England, USA, we had a nor'easter, so I had nothing but rain and cold and wind. And then you were showing me uh Pescara. So I felt ever more

Speaker 2: I even got the mug. Oh

Speaker 1: you got a mug? Oh

Speaker 2: yeah, I love Pescara.

Speaker 1: Okay. I survived. Or no is it oh I love

Speaker 2: No, it says I love Abruzz Abruzzo Pescada. So Abruzzo is like the region.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: Anyway.

Speaker 1: All right. Thank you. Um Okay, can I switch gears or is there anything else on the side?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so yeah, yeah, that was a massive d monologue about Django and Med, but it wasn't.

Speaker 1: And I think d you know, Danielle's right, you do need to document it a little bit so people can see, okay, well they clearly had a good time, but what actually came out of it? Um and so one one canonical place to quickly see just the things you mentioned helps helps companies justify it, helps peop you know, I don't think people need to justify it, but companies to see, oh, the yeah.

Speaker 2: Well it's uh it makes a difference between whether people can come. Like to have um Sam and Charlie from Kraken there. I mean Kraken are one of the the most serious um users of Jangood scale.

Speaker 1: And sponsors

Speaker 2: and to ha And yes. And to have them there though, working on, you know, the the key bits of the ORM that they that causes them difficulty in their their business is really important for them. It's important for us. It's just win-win-win. But If they have had to come they they were sent by Crackham, but if they were had had to come on their time it would be less well, can I take the holiday and the personal expense to do it? Is if the company even if the company's not sponsoring the event itself if they can fund the team going because it's an investment in the framework they built their business upon, well then that's a worthwhile result.

Speaker 1: Totally. Um So this is not gonna be an hour-long episode. I think the main thing was Django and the Med. There are some projects. I guess I'll just highlight so this is the twenty-ninth. Um tomorrow the 30th, uh Air, which is the new uh AI agents in the IDE, comes out uh for jet brains for PyCharm. So that's That's been really interesting. Um been playing with it for months. Um so not really a third-party package, but something that's taken up a lot of my time, and uh I'll have more to say in an interesting, non-promotional way, but it's you know, forced me to I think like a lot of developers, I'd been sort of separate panes. So I have my terminal, I have my git client. I've been using fork more and more, Carlton, slowly morphing into you.

Speaker 1: IDE of choice. Um, but having it in one interface is the goal. And it's just a question of how customizable is it? What does that workflow look like? Can you spin multiple agents going on at the same time because of the weighting? So All of all of which is to say like that's been really interesting for me because I've been a little bit I don't know about behind, but like I'm busy trying to like get stuff done. I can't endlessly fiddle with the next framework. Or not the next framework, but you know the next tooling, because the tooling changes so fast. So anyway, that's been fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a longstanded advocate of adding up all the time you didn't spend fiddling with tooling in order to you know, get stuff done and over over the long run, you're like, oh no, I missed that tool entirely, but I saved, you know, numerous hours in in not playing with it. I think it's interesting to see jet brains take care. They're clearly amongst the most experienced in the industry about what developer tooling is and could look like and, you know th th the

Speaker 1: only ones knowledge at scale still believing in the IDE um of any kind. Um, you know, windsurf that uh anyway, so it's you know, even if people aren't writing as much, you're still hopefully reading it. Um So yeah, it's been interesting. More to more to say on that. Oh, I was gonna uh one thing that's um we also are gonna be launching uh an AI off mode, which Finally. Um, so Zed has had this, but we've you know, many people just turn it all off and we weren't able to have that. We will have that in the new release that comes out um in like a month. Um, because we heard from enough, you know, educators in particular who say, you know, we use PyCharm in the schools and they get the free trial of AI. And once the kids get a taste of just tabbing, they're not gonna type.

Speaker 1: Right. And that also extends to sometimes for my own work. Sometimes I'm like, I just I don't want the AI, you know. So you'll be able to toggle that on and off. And so it's a technically simple thing, but it's Important that JetBrains is just trying to be open to like whatever the developer professional developer wants. And that's certainly one of the things we've heard, right? Sometimes I just want to focus on the code. Um so I'm kind of ex I'm low-key excited for that one. Um

Speaker 2: I think that like just go back to the async um kind of cases, these the the the problems that come up in async are so complicated that you literally d have to spend the time thinking them through. And if you if you can't remove yourself from, you know, some from from the the candy machine, so to speak, that's just going to give you answers, regardless of whether they're right or wrong, you can't you can't get the mental space to think them through. So it's kind of essential that you are able to step away from that work in quiet work quietly and then, you know, come back and then we'll we'll discuss the the the the mechanics of editing, you know, as a separate thing. But human understanding still requires time and effort um and a quiet space in which to do it. So I think that's quite a nice feature or idea.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's uh there's a whole series actually. This professor is called AI by hand, where he now teaches, he's a you know, CS professor, and he teaches AI by hand, specifically to kind of slow it down to the point where your brain can can take it in because you know AI like I you know for my book update I used AI to review stuff. If you use it in the right way, it's unbelievable, right? Like I can have it look at Every change I've made, all my past versions, the Django docs, you know, and it'll spot like, oh, you used a, you know, single quote here, double quotes there, or something changed, you know, for that kind of stuff. for for search basically, it's phenomenal. The problem is, you know, you sort of like lean back and then you lean back and then you've kind of fallen over because it it sort of lulls you into like you're like, oh that's

Speaker 1: but It's it's not thinking, right? Like I still constantly am trying. I'm like, just one shot, like a new chapter on, you know, tasks in my voice, you know, give it everything it can have in my voice. And it's still Thankfully, it's nothing I would pass as my own, right? So again, that's that's the sort of nuance in the debate is like of it's phenomenal for a lot of things, but if you Um yeah, anyways, that's a separate discussion though. I think for many programmers though, it's it's it's hard because it is so good. You know, not everything we're doing requires deep thought, but If you don't think about it, like, you know, my point is if you can't do it manually, you shouldn't be letting AI do it for you. Um, but how do you find the space to learn anything manually? You know, you have to put in some of the reps and some of the space mentally to to think about it. Um

Speaker 1: Anyways, I'll stop there, but

Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. I mean I'm sure you'll bring it up every week for you know the rest of the seasons. You don't need to s get it all out in one. So your project was is there, it was a work. My my project I'd just say look come and look at some of the ones from um that come out in Django. So do go and check out uh Django BGT. Um Justin Mayer's Django Benchmark Project. I think okay, there's a couple there that um have kept it.

Speaker 1: Okay, we'll put links.

Speaker 2: You know, check out the de uh Django Depth repo if you're more into that 'cause there's a couple of new draft PRs that have been opened up there for to have a read of those and input and um you know give your support or input or comments.

Speaker 1: Okay. Um books. The most important part of the show. You must have read something. What have you read?

Speaker 2: Yeah, well I've been um reading um a bit of uh haiku actually, um Bashu, with the the narrow road to the uh to the deep north and uh it's a collection of um haiku uh um an old translation it's penguin classics. Um but yeah, I like it a lot. Um this grassy hermitage, hardly any more than five feet square. I would gladly quit, but for the ray.

Speaker 1: There's just no topping you, Carlton. Um well that sounds like fun. Maybe not my cup of tea, but I can see how it's like a palate cleanser from code and everything else to just sort of Enjoy the wording. Yes. Um I have been reading The Wall by Marlen Hossefer, Austrian author. Uh like f So that so she so as a woman who goes to the countryside and then a this mysterious wall comes up and she's isolated from everyone. And so through that is a way to examine uh society and herself and It sounds like it could be very boring. In fact, it's really, really, really interesting. Um they've made film versions of it.

Speaker 1: It's I think it's quite famous in its own little genre, but I've really am liking it. Um and it's definitely a female It I would har I not to I don't want to be sexist, but it feels like this would be difficult for a man to write. There's a lot of things that the the author who's a female talks about that seem more female than male in terms of responsibilities and caretaking and all these things. And so she finds a a cow and a cat and Yeah. I'm not doing it justice. I enjoy it. It's kind of what I wish things like, you know, like the Hunger Games and all these sort of like YA apocalyptic books. Like they're fine. You know, but there's such better stuff. Um

Speaker 1: but it's it's very philosophical. I think you would like it, Carlton, right? It's sort of like this more.

Speaker 2: There's such better stuff that's targeted for YA, though. Like 'cause all my kids have eaten the Hunger Games books and they you know through them and they they really get a lot from them. But

Speaker 1: No, no, my kids too.

Speaker 2: If I have to give them something more s sophisticated, quote unquote, they they couldn't read it. They're not ready

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's it. I think you you're you're blinded by plot when you're younger and then when you get to our age, like there's only so many plots. Like you kind of seen them all. So it's more the like What do you have to say about anything? To me, or you know, combine.

Speaker 2: Oh, this is just another hero's journey thrown away.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well the Yeah. No, that's that's the two plots, right? Hero comes to town or someone goes on a journey. That's every story ever. Uh anyway, so I'm enjoying it. Um it's also nice to read it's a really good translation. I mean I can't read German, but um it translates very well, very smoothly into English, so

Speaker 2: it might be a terrible translation, but it's a good read either way.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I recommend it. And it's short. It's 240 pages. So you can you can feel like you accomplished something. It's not these, you know, thousand page bookstops.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: In any event. Um Anything else to mention? So we we are going to start up the season, so we'll try to get back to our usual cadence. We'll have some great guests. You won't have to listen to just us blabber on. We have guests with things to say.

Speaker 2: That's probably it. Let's wrap it. Let's call it a day.

Speaker 1: Okay. All right. Well, everyone, thank you. If you made it to the end, thank you for hanging with us. Do check out the links and we'll have guests coming soon. So we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye