Your Web Framework Needs You: An Update by Carlton Gibson

Right. Hello. Who am I? I'm Carlton Gibson. I'm a long-term Django user, maintainer on Jesuit Django Rest framework. Along with my friend Will Vincent, we do a podcast called Django Chat. Please listen. But mostly along with my colleague Marius Felicia, I am a Django fellow. What's a Django fellow? Well, we are contracted by the Django Software Foundation to do the day-to-day tasks that run the framework. So we do triaging tickets, we do pull request review review, we do security, we do the releases. We're kind of like the janitors. We do the stuff that on a project the size of Django size just wouldn't happen. And the idea of that is that it lets the contributors, that's you, do the fun stuff, which is Coding, which is making contributions to Django.

So last year I did a talk just like this one and I said your web framework needs you. Now you can what Sorry, I still haven't got the um had a bit of a year. I haven't still got the uh Django Pony cosplaying Lord Kitchener that I wanted for this. But um the I gave you a rundown of the state of play, how we're trying to open up contributions from across the community, and how you could get involved. Right, come on, get involved. So, what's the state of play? Last year, we this was the state of play. We had thirteen hundred and twenty-eight open accepted tickets on the framework. That seems like quite a lot. This year we've got twelve hundred and sixty-two. Now I'm like, yes! Yes, that's less Now

you might not think that that's much 1328 3%. I don't know, right? But in the last year there have been over a thousand new tickets opened on Django So we've closed all of them and some. So I think that's a massive achievement, right? We've had over 1200 commits to the Django's Master Branch from 290 separate contributors. Right now, there will always be some contributors who do more, but we've had new contributors and we've had more contributors overall. So I'm like, yes. But I look at that 1200 and I think there's still more to do. Right? So I just want to break it down slightly for you. I don't know how well you can see this. Don't worry, don't try and read it. It this is broken down by components. So the 1200 1200 tickets you go to the Django issue tracker, it's overwhelming.

But you can break it down by component. Now the biggest one on the left there is the ORM. So if you know a lot about databases Come and help us, right? The next to that is the Django Admin. If you use the Django Admin, it's the most of these aren't difficult tickets, it's just that they're time consuming. Right? So you could come on, you could make some big differences to the Django admin there. I don't know. Become an expert on one of these ones further down, become an expert on the caching framework. 15 tickets. Well 15 tickets is probably addressable. You could become an expert there, you could take on those tickets. you could make a real difference to Django. Okay? The one I want to just quickly focus on for you here is the third column, which is documentation tickets. That number that goes ORM admin documentation Okay, documentation tack tickets. There are 119 documentation tickets.

Now these I don't know. Do you have good written English? You do, you're all you know, you if you do, then these are perfect opportunities to get involved. They are a great learning opportunity because to solve a documentation ticket you have to go and understand something And then you have to phrase it nice and clearly and and make the pull request on the docs. And it's not like you're writing docs x, you know, ex Nilo. You're tweaking an error in the docs or you're clarifying something. So come on and join us in the documentation tickets. Right? Another great place which is relate directly related to this is um needs documentation. There are tickets in the direct where we get a PR and we get a PR perhaps from someone who's native language isn't English. And so they might not be able to write the docs very well. So the PL gets stuck.

We take it, we review it, it's like, yeah, the code's okay, but it needs documentation. Now if you've got good English, you could come along, find those tickets. There's a hundred or so of them. And you could come along and you could finish off the PR, you could get credited as a co-author, and we there's another hundred tickets we could clear off there So just as an example of where there really is an opportunity for you to make a difference, if you can, you know, put together a decent sentence, if you can write clearly, there's 200 tickets that we could clear up, more or less. Okay. Right. So what else are we trying to do? Can we communicate better? So this is an this is an area where there could be contributions. Right, fundraising, the fundraising section of the Django Project. com site. It's okay, right?

But it could be really good. There could be a really good user experience there. Now that's not a little project, but well hang on, I look around the room. There are professionals that are building good web experiences, right? Perhaps a group of you could self-organize to come along and improve the um fundraising section of the Django Project. com site. That might be a project. The contributing guide. It's massive. It's like 6,000 words long. It tells you everything you need to know to contribute to Django, but I feel it might be a slight barrier to entry. It might be overwhelming. So can any of you self-organize to come and think, you know, we can read we this is how we could make the contributing guide more welcoming to new contributors. This is what it's missing. This is what people aren't seeing. Now if anybody

any of you do want help doing that, I'm here and Maris is there and other people on the Django Developers mailing list are there to help you along. But if you think, yeah, I could I could make that contributing guide more accessible Super, come along, join us. What about announcing the DSF better? Who didn't know there was a DSF? A Django Software Foundation? Who didn't know about fellows? Right? Will Vincent was at Django Boston the other day and he's been nagging me. He's like, but nobody there knows about the DSF. Nobody there knows about fellas. These are people who have been using Jang Django for ten years professionally. Perhaps we can explain better about what we do as a community. Now again, these aren't little projects, right? But We're prof we're professionals at creating good web experiences.

Maybe we could do this. A thing I'd like to do better is to recognize contributions better. So if you contribute to get to Django, you can you you get listed as a c contributor. But on GitHub, if you go to the committer the contributors tab, it's like the Hall of Fame because there's you know the top people there, 3,000 commits. or something. If you're making your first PR and you get your first PR mage merged, there's nowhere that you are celebrated for that contribution. So, what I'd quite like to do, and this is still at the discussion ideas phase phase exent, but it's gonna it's gonna happen, is we're gonna make it so that per release or per month we're calling out the people who've contributed. So the people who've contributed most, the new contributors, the You know, to make make it a celebration of what we're doing here rather than

oh well I don't know who does who does Django, I don't know. I mean added to that can we find other ways to celebrate all the other things that we do as a community that don't get celebrated? There's much more to cut to Django than code, and we don't I don't think we call it out well. So again, there's great opportunities to contribute. I'd like to put together a triage and re-review team. These are people who give up their time to come and help Maris and I, and they review pull requests, they do triage. And I'd like to celebrate those people because without them Django wouldn't really work. Now this ties into what I talked about last year with the dissolving of Django Core. Is that Django Core was meant to be this this thing which celebrated people have contributed, it got a bit stale, it got it got in the way, so there's a

a move to dissolve it. And that's progressing. These things go slowly. But the triage and review team, I want to set up and give that a trial, and I don't want it to be like Django Core again. So what one thing I want to do is it refreshed every release. So you know if you've do you want to still be on this team and still want to be active, and if you're not step down. But also just have it look. Ex contributions and you're invited. So it's not like some cabal of how do I get in that? Right Now this is just a trial we're going to set it up, but hopefully it will be more accessible. If you'd like to review PRs, if you go back to those documentation tickets I was talking about, if you want to get involved on helping with the documentation on PR get store, you could be in the triage and review too. Okay, so right, and then the other opportunities are beyond Django itself.

There's the supporting sites that are under the Django organization, Django people, Django snippets, Django packages. All of those need masses of love. Right, but again, we're web professionals. Surely we can make them good if we have time and bandwidth. Okay Then there's the third-party apps that I haven't even talked about, right? There's Jazz Band, there's DRF, there's all the other apps out there that are under maintained, need help. You can contribute there. So all I've done there is told you that yes, we still need your help and listed a whole load of places that you can contribute. Come on, come and join us. Summary, there's lots of opportunities involved. Your help is needed, you are qualified, it will make a difference. Your web framework still needs you. Come and join us.

Come code. Thank you.