Lightning Talks (Monday) with Andrew Mshar

Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome to Lightning Talks. I'm gonna go through the rules quickly just one more time for the folks that just came in. uh maximum of five minutes per slot. I am your host, Andrew Michar, and I will be off the stage for most of your talk. When I come onto the stage, you will be at four minutes And then I will get closer as the time fills. And so when we're giving the talk together, that's about your time to wrap up. And then I'm just going to go through the speakers quickly just to make sure everyone's here, and then just so you can hear the name of the speaker before you so you're ready when it's your turn. So Tim is starting. Adam, Tobias, I saw a walk in. Great.

Speaker 1: Chase, great, and Eric. Good to go. All right, then we will start with Tim Allen. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 2: Hey my friends, can everybody hear me all right? I think so. That's normally never a problem. I'm Tim. I work at the Wharton School. I'm a principal engineer. I'm also an unapologetic liberal and progressive. And uh something has frustrated me throughout my entire life, and that's that the Democrats in this country are the worst marketing department I have ever seen in my life. And we are witnessing that more than ever right now. And uh it frustrated me. I've been really frustrated these past couple months seeing uh the country I love fall apart. and seeing uh a little too much Chuck Schumer energy. I've had quite enough of this Chuck Schumer energy and I think it's time for uh something new. So I started this and uh I absolutely detested Project 2025 and everything it stood for, so I decided to stick a knife and twist it a little bit and create Project 2029.

Speaker 2: What the Democrats should do to bring back the middle class. And uh what it is, it's a progressive vision to bring back the American middle class, and it starts by giving everyone a tax cut who makes under $235,000. Um the Democrats for my entire life have never had a tax plan. The d the Republicans have always been on message like we're gonna cut taxes, we're gonna cut taxes, we're gonna cut taxes. And it sounds great to everybody just sort of listening without really paying attention. They always leave out the bit, We're gonna give big tax cuts to the rich and nobody else. Um but if the Democrats could actually get behind this and have a tax plan for the first time in fifty years, that would be kind of amazing So what I've built here at Project2029. site, S-I-T-E, you can bring it up. It's all just a React app. And what I'm trying to put together here is a platform that

Speaker 2: the Democrats could actually use for marketing. And what I need is all of you to help me out here because so far this has just been me working solo. I need a diversity of voices to make this good. I just saw the talk on governance. I need help getting a governance plan together to get this working. I do have connections in Philadelphia to both Josh Shapiro and uh Malcolm Kenyatta. So we can get this in front of eyes if it actually gets some traction And has some good ideas, but right now it's just me. So what I put together, right, is just a place where you can put in what you make And it shows you right up front instantly what taxes you would have made versus what a millionaire makes in 1974 And you'll see it drastically shows that in 1974 a millionaire would have paid a an effective tax rate of fifty two point two. It is adjusted for inflation.

Speaker 2: And now they're only paying 32. 8. And under our new tax plan, we would bring them back up to where they should be while keeping a lower tax plan for everybody else. Again, this is geared to give everybody who makes less than $235 ,000. a tax cut on the current tax rates while taxing the rich. It also shows how if we enforced a corporate minimum 10% tax, these following companies that sometimes pay less Than 0% taxes. Yes, less, a negative tax rate, would have to pay their fair amount. I also talk about healthcare in here. Where I showed that the United States spends far more money for far less life expectancy than many other countries. What is the one difference here? Universal health care.

Speaker 2: So it shows obviously here on this chart that the United States spends more than three times as much as Spain, but has ten years less. of an average lifespan than it is given. I also talk about plans for elected servants here by codifying presidential norms that existed until oh 2016. I wonder what happened then. We need to codify these things so we don't get another person pushing the limits of what used to be norms. These things should be codified. It also calls for congressional accountability and guardrails to be put up to keep them from investing in anything other than index funds. Since it basically amounts to insider trading. And uh if you look at what congressional members have invested in and their performance, it far outperforms the SP 500. So that's just not right. I also go into some consumer rights here.

Speaker 2: I haven't even touched what I think about education yet. I would love to hear a whole bunch of ideas from a whole bunch of people. Because I think a diversity of voices coming together on what we really want to see our country become is absolutely necessary. And frankly, the Democrats aren't doing anything about it right now. So it is a ripe opportunity for all of us to get our ideas out there. And if we create some kind of interactive tool where we can appeal to people and just say, hey, come to our site, put in what your salary is and see what you make, I think that's an interesting way to try to get people's attention, to try to maybe leave some of the cynicism at the door. And to try to force uh, you know, some some interesting votes in Congress like, well, why didn't you vote for something like this? That is so obvious. I've tried to only put things in here that I honestly think that 70% of citizens of our nation could get behind.

Speaker 2: This has forced me to leave some things I really care about off the board, but I am really trying to have mass appeal here. So if that sounds like something that might interest you, I'm going to be around for sprints and I'm hoping to work on this a bit. I'm happy to give anyone access to the repository if you want to talk about governance, if you want to talk about ways that we could maybe make this work This is a couple weekends work for me that I've done because I had to do something. I felt like I was doing nothing. I was going to protest. I was doing all the stuff I regularly do, but this was a way I could use my expertise and move my feet a little bit. And that helped me feel a lot better. So thank you. I'd love to have you all involved. Come see me.

Speaker 3: Hello. I am Adam. I'm so glad to be here at DjangoCon. This is my third Django Con, and I'm really enjoying it. And um I've been using Django for over 10 years, right after this uh picture was taken of me. That's a joke. And I built a bunch of Django libraries. So um I also co-host a podcast called Django Brew with my friend Sengita. We talk about Django and coffee and I don't know all sorts of other stuff. So listen to it if you want to. Um but I'm not here to talk about any of these libraries or or that podcast. I am here to talk about three things and I don't have a lot of time, so I'm just gonna get to it. So who here has used SQLite?

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a lot of hands. I expect 100% of us have used it. It is everywhere. And Every new Jenger project also uses it. So there's only one little problem. The default settings are great for unit tests. They are pretty terrible for serving production websites. So if you use the default settings in production, you get all these SQLite busy database locked errors. It's pretty bad there's a lot of these, okay. There's one more, that's me. Um no. However, with some small tweaks, SQLite can serve most websites just fine. And to make that easier, I made a little library.

Speaker 3: It's called DJ Lite. Um coming down from the heavens, uh it provides some reasonable defaults so SQLite can handle production web traffic instead of database errors. uh you get some great performance out of the box. And the best part, since the database is all in process, you don't need that and you don't need that. And that's Redis and that's RabbitMQ. And uh you don't have to manage any of it. So that's pretty cool. And there's no network latency between any of those things. So things are pretty pretty quick. Uh you don't have to be a DevOps master. Um you can have a really simplified tech stack. And uh that helps me focus on the fun part of making websites, which for me

Speaker 3: is writing code. I don't want to handle all the other stuff. And that brings me to my second topic. The reason I started looking at SQLite was because of BSocial Which is a site that I recently launched with my friend Sangita. And uh this is just a side project, so our time is really limited and we want to code more and deal with servers less. And we are trying to build this friendly place where techies can show off all the things that you work on, you can follow other developers, you can get inspiration. And hopefully we can avoid some of the toxic things that are in other social networks. At least that's the plan, that's the hope. But we need you to sign up for it, check it out, maybe give us some feedback. We have lots of ideas, but

Speaker 3: we want to know what people are doing right now to follow people in the tech industry. And to get that feedback, we have come to the third section of this silly lightning talk, um, which is free stuff. Uh everybody loves free stuff. And if you have been to a DjangoCon in the past, you might have gotten these cute stickers at Sangita designs. I mean They're so nice, they're cool, they're neat. How many are there? There's a lot of them. So they're all really awesome. Who could hate the Django Pony? Nobody. Um right. Uh anyway, so uh Sangita has done uh designed uh four more for Django's uh 20th birthday. And I'll be giving out some of those over there. I'll be sending out a table so you can come and grab some if you want, one or two, maybe not all of them.

Speaker 3: Um she's also designed this cool like t-shirt, this special edition t-shirt. t-shirt I'm wearing and uh we'll be giving away one of them to a lucky winner. Um who goes to bsocial. dev. It's a little giveaway. You sign up, you click this give feedback button at the top nav. And we'll email you, email one person, and um and get a t-shirt. So to wrap up, you can use SQLite in production. I'm using it now, it's awesome. Um there's a lot of benefits You just have to use DJ Lite. So get my get my library and and check it out. Also check out BSocial. And give us some feedback. We'd love to hear it. And come find me for a free sticker, listen to my podcast

Speaker 3: where we just ramble. And follow me in all the places. I'm Adam G. Hill. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Wonderful. Um hi everyone. Um My name is Tobias. I'm a co-founder at uh Cactus Group. Um we're a Django consultancy based in uh North Carolina in the uh US, here in the US. We were proud to have uh DjangoCon uh there in Durham. uh the past two years. Um and for uh uh eighteen years now we've been building uh Python and Django apps uh for clients. We're also really proud to sponsor DjangoCon this year and a number of other Python and Django conferences around the world. And we are also a silver corporate member of the Django Software Foundation. I'm also a member of the Django ops team and help uh maintain a library of uh AWS uh cloud formation stacks uh called AWS Web Stacks.

Speaker 4: Adam, you inspired me to insert this picture on the Django birthday event that we held in the triangle uh this past month. Shout out again to Sanguita for this beautiful photo which we somehow managed to get put onto a cake. If you do not get one of these wonderful t-shirts, I encourage you to try this. Uh so yeah, what is CloudFormation? Um I was partially inspired to give this talk um by uh Grace uh Carson Gross's keynote earlier today. Uh CloudFormation is a pretty uh ancient and seasoned, uh even boring technology for uh creating uh resources in AWS. And it allows you not only to automate the initial setup of the resources, but also to maintain and and change them over time.

Speaker 4: And we found that this flexibility is really really critical on the client projects that we work on where a cookie cutter approach might not work for deployment, might not always work for deployment. Um a cloud formation blob is also really hard to read and understand. This is a a piece of JSON that uh represents a single S3 bucket. Uh it's also possible to write this in YAML, which is uh You know, a little bit easier to read, but it's still a lot to write, let alone to maintain over time. A project that I uh redeployed this past week uh includes uh A couple of stacks with 16 and 52 kilobytes of YAML respectively. So you can imagine that's not something that you would want to write and uh maintain by hand.

Speaker 4: Another option is that you can use a Python library called Troposphere, Pipinsol Troposphere. This allows you to define the resources in uh Python in a you know pretty s you know a stateful way similar to Django models and is a little bit more compact to read and you can you know use functional you know things as well to to create and manage different you know versions of these resources. This is what the same S3 bucket looks like in Troposphere. And uh again, you you know you can uh yeah declare uh exactly what you want and cloud formation will figure out how to or troposphere excuse me will figure out how to compile this down to YAML and then uh cloud formation will create that for you in AWS You can also use tools like FlakeGate or other

Speaker 4: Linters to check this uh um at uh you know compile time when it's compiled down to uh YAML. For example, if I had misspelled uh Core 's rules, uh Flake Gate and Python would very quickly catch that. Troposphere also has some uh level of runtime validation. So uh you know for example if we forgot in our template that the core's uh configuration parameter uh was required is this uh wrapper class um you know with the highlighted portion there removed so our template looked like this um troposphere without ever needing to upload this or do any server-side validation uh troposphere would catch us and warn us uh give us an error and allow us to fix that before um uploading that to a ws so this shortens the Development

Speaker 4: and debug lifecycle and helps you get more quickly to working code and infrastructure Cactus writes very regularly about this and lots of other topics on our blog. We invite you to check that out. And that's all I have for today. Thanks very much.

Speaker 5: All right, excellent. So around the world with Wagtail. Who am I? I'm Chaim Kirby. I'm the co-founder, head of engineering and compliance, a lot of titles, because when you have a 10-person company, you get a lot of titles. At Budgie Health, I'm the workspace owner at Pieslackers. I'm the immediate past president of the Django Software Foundation. And most importantly, for this talk, I am a husband and father of four at World. Um, what does that mean? Well , On July 28th, 2024, my wife and I took our four children and we left the United States and we returned on July 27, 2025. For this adventure, my wife said, we should have a website. And I said, sure, I kind of do that. Our kids will post and we'll put pictures and our family will track us and anybody wants to track us. And we also use Instagram, but that's boring.

Speaker 5: So yes, I know Django and I know websites, but she wanted blogging. I don't do blogging. Django isn't a blog tool, but Wagtail is. Enter KirbyWorldTour. com built with Wagtail. But we wanted more than just blogging. So I used Wagtail and I use my Django knowledge. And Built a website. So here's our website. And it starts off pretty straightforward. You've got a front page. It's cool. And we have A lot of posts and this uses Wagtail. We made posts. I made posts. My wife made posts. Our kids made posts. Um we're still posting. It's sort of like time travel. Our trip currently, according to our website, I think is in April. We're still updating it. We're trying to get up to date, but you can keep up to date with us on our website if you so desire,

Speaker 5: even though it's in the past. It's pretty cool. But we wanted more than that. We wanted people to have a sense of our adventure, to have our adventure with us, so they could track where we were in the world. And what we'd done on this cool little map, which in the past had different colors for if we'd been there already or if we were getting there. They could come down and see where we went. And you too could do this with Wagta and a little Django expertise. We come in. And we have some of our pictures And I decided to not be online for this talk because uh I don't know if anybody else is noticing, but the network is having various latency difficulties as the day goes by. Um but this page actually does lazy load as you scroll so it doesn't load 10,000 pictures in one shot. And these pages actually, these

Speaker 5: are driven by Google image folders, which we could talk about a little bit if we want. We tracked things. My kids love this page. They said, Oh, can I add another bus? Can I add another train? Uh we just got off uh out of a car. Can we add that? Um and I said, sure, but you're all looking at this and saying, Well, how do we add that? Well, when you're logged in as an admin Like that. We had pluses and minuses. And we use a little bit of HTMX there. We've all had seen an HTMX talk today with Carson this morning. And um yeah, nice little bit of HTMX. So coming in, taking a quick look. If anybody's seen Wagtail, this is Wagtail, out of the box. It's wonderful, it's beautiful, it has dark mode. Uh and this is all of our posts And we can look at it, yeah, dark mode's important. Um and you see editing articles, it's pretty normal, but I have a few extra things here.

Speaker 5: How long were we somewhere? Where was our starting location? Where was our ending location? And the reason I did that, and like I said, I'm offline, so I can't load one of these pages, is each of the pages, when you go in, it has a little dynamic snippet at the top that says starting on date X and ending on date X and for that duration, and there's like seven or eight different amounts of text it can select. if you do that um for each of those. And the reason we can do this is because we input all of our locations. And the locations drove that tour dates map as well as the posts on where we were and everything. And it's quite lightweight. I put in a latitude and longitude, where we were, what was our start date. And did we start in the morning or evening? Because we had some days that overlap two places. And so when you pull in one of these locations or two locations, it knows where you start,

Speaker 5: knows where you ended, and it's wonderful and it's fun. And that was the website. Oh, and then finally, um, if anybody's interested, the gallery. Um I'd have to find it again. I think I have it quoted yeah, down here. Um there's this cool build photo wall script that you can find online that somebody posted that it You give it a Google image full uh shared folder and it sort of will run a little thing and they'll give you this own little photo wall, but I couldn't get all their JavaScript to run, so I just use that and then wrote some of my own little JavaScript to make a nice little gallery of it. and look at. So coming back. Kirby World Tour built with Wagtail. It was fun. It was an amazing trip. If you want to hear anything about Healthcare, health tech, health finances, Django, the DSF, myself parenting, parenting around the world, being around the world.

Speaker 5: Also, given the internet iffiness here, the best internet in the world that we had anywhere was Cusco Peru. I legitimately had half a gigabyte up and down Symmetric, it was amazing. Um and if you enjoy Slack and enjoy hanging out with people who do Python and things like that, come check out pythondev. slack. com. It is the official Python Slack. But yeah, a lot of cool stuff, and I'm happy to talk about any and all of it. Thank you.

Speaker 6: All right. Uh I'm curious how many of you um saw or saw online Corey Doctoro's uh PyCon keynote this year about agidification. It's been a been in my mind since then. Um so toward an anti-inchidification commitment. Most of the anti-inschidification conversations I've seen have been from the consumer side. How do we avoid avoid enchidified projects and s products and services? But we're builders. So if we want to build and help build non-inchidified products and services, what kind of commitments can we make that people can hold us to? Inchidification, if you're new to it, is the process of making a product or service worse for users to the benefit of its owners. That's my paraphrasing. For more background, read Corey Doctorow's writings. I feel like we might be in a new golden era of app development.

Speaker 6: In 2005, you could build anything. In 2010, it felt like everything had already been built. By 2020-ish, it felt like almost everything that had been built had been pushed until it was terrible. So it's 2025. Let's rebuild all the things that were once useful. But how can we trust new services? What would an anti-inchidification commitment look like? I think we need measurable commitments. It's easy to make a promise, it's easy to make a pledge. We're looking for a set of measurable, falsifiable commitments. So these are 10 equipments I came up with in making notes recently. All data can be exported at any time. I've seen companies whose data export gives you thousands of links to your data on the original platform We want a full, complete data export that lets us carry on our work anywhere we choose.

Speaker 6: Founders retain controlling share of the organization. Non-inchidification requires a sustainable funding source that does not put ultimate control in the hands of investors. Use open standards whenever possible. Interoperability is inherently anti-incidifying. AI is opt-in if it's used at all. Nothing to add to that. No targeted advertising. Targeted advertising sees users as potential buyers of a wide variety of things not related to the actual product or service. The targeted advertising we're used to has no place in a non-inchitified offering. Usability is prioritized over competing interests. This should probably be higher on the list. A public statement towards anti-incidification.

Speaker 6: It's a known problem. We should see clear, measurable statements against the common pattern. Simple, transparent, non-entrapping pricing. Users are often seen as deep pockets, and one of the main goals is to discover how deep their pockets are. Price the actual service, don't build a money extraction service. Clear user-controlled cancellation and deletion policy. Users should be free to leave at will And last, anti-fascist design. We need to think through all the ways a product or service could be used against vulnerable people and make that difficult or impossible. Thank you. I did want to add one thing. I had an image of the Merlin Bird app on the opening slide. That's my like shining example of the promise of what a computer in everybody's pocket should have been.

Speaker 6: So thank you, stop me anytime, tell me your thoughts on this.