Djangonaut Showcase Session 6

Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to the Jangonaut Space Showcase for session six, where we celebrate the Jangonauts and what they've learned. We're here to celebrate their wins, honor their personal growth, and recognize the effort and courage that they put in over these eight weeks of contributing to Django, the ecosystem, and beware this time. So this is a series of lightning talks from several of our jangronauts. There's going to be five minutes or less. And so the people we will be hearing from are Brian, Rodrigo, Jacaion Alua, and Victoria.

Speaker 2: So hi everyone. Yeah, I'm I'm Rodrigo. I'm from Brazil. And I joined this uh session six in the Jupyter team, which works on Django Core, right there. Like ORM and admin and so on. And I'll talk a little bit about my experience. And so the reason why I'm showing this YouTube video here is that this video was a link we got in our workbook when we started the the the session and it's a video from Ryan Chelle and in this video he explained how he fixed an ORM bug uh and also uh his the way he works is by r making notes of his discoveries, you know,

Speaker 2: what he tried, what worked, what didn't work. It's like a journal, right? And I thought that was really cool, really really nice idea. Um especially because you know when we're working on these kind of issues in our spare time so to speak, sometimes we spend a few days in between uh sessions so it's good to have a place where I can co come back and remember what we're doing so on right so I decided to start taking notes And from there, I decided to actually transform these notes on a blog, right? So I I created this uh a blog called Django Nell Diaries on DevDot2 just to start writing down what I was doing. First first blog post

Speaker 2: was just sh uh writing down how I managed to get Django to run on my machine and to debug it, right? So And I had some issues because I'm using Fedora, there are some missing libraries, so I had some issues, and so I wrote everything down And from there I start working on my first PR, right, which is uh this one here. Where so the thing is suppose that you want to you're on Jang Admin and you want to delete an object, right? Like a blog post. And when I click on delete, we see this confirmation window, right? Are you sure you want to delete this? Because it has this child just write this note child node and

Speaker 2: and it can say okay I'm sure but the problem is when you when you click On an object that has a lot of children like this, it the button goes all the way down, right? So it downloads like maybe one megabyte of text to show the button at the bottom. And this and this issue was 17 years old. And in a way, I was like, okay, maybe if it's been around for 17 years, it's not really important. People don't really care about this. Maybe it's not very common. But at the same time, I was a bit annoyed with this because I work on a system on my day job that we actually see this kind of thing here and it annoys me a little bit. So I thought, okay, maybe it could be good to work on it And then I started work on it. I create the PR.

Speaker 2: The first approval was actually pretty fast uh from uh But then uh from a fellow, right? But then uh we started discussing a little bit about uh some UI options, like okay, how should we truncate this list? Should it do it by object? Should it be a global thing? And then it was suggested to go to the Django Forum. to to ask, right? And the funny thing is that there is that um so I wrote them message there asking, showing the options and so on. And the funny thing here is that the first message was asking, okay, should we really be doing this thing? Maybe we should just scrap this ticket on track. Because and and at at first I was a bit like, come on, it's my baby, you know.

Speaker 2: You know, I wanna I wanna finish this, you know. But then after a while I noticed that actually it makes sense, right? And and then I wrote my my latest blog post was about this thing actually, about what happens when you post something and people tell you maybe shouldn't be doing, right? Because I think the learning from this is that, you know, when you're working on a project like Django, that, you know, every, for example, to implement this, it's a new setting on the module admin, right? It means this setting will have to be up uh maintained for 20 years. I don't know, right? Maybe in 10 years somebody decides to change the screen and they'll have to remember of the setting and do a special test for it, right? So the thing is, you know, it has this high cost of main of ownership and maintenance, right, for every new setting in Django.

Speaker 2: So maybe it makes sense. To not implement it, right? So it's a bit like you know, in our day jobs when we decide to do something, we say, yeah, sure, why not? But maybe in big projects like Django, the question is a bit like why yes? You know, why why should we really do this, right? And the cool thing is that it survived this process, this test. You know, uh two fellows chimed in and say, no, I think it's useful Because you know it's a question of accessibility and so on. And it survived the test. So I'm glad that it survived. And actually yesterday Uh the PR was approved again. So now I can just prepare the commits. That's another thing I learned, you know, use a lot of rebase and and stuff to make the commits in a way that makes sense for the future.

Speaker 2: uh if a bug appears and so on. So maybe now it's gonna be released soon So yeah, so I I invite people to have a look at my writings there if you if you you know if you like. No, I I also talk a little bit about use of AI, because since Django takes a while. to for in between reviews it may take days, weeks. It's actually good that you know we have time to think because in our day job we don't really have that time. So yeah, that's it. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1: Uh yes, so next up is Jekiayan Alua.

Speaker 3: Hi everyone, I'm Jekiayan Alua from Nigeria, and I will be sharing my experience in the Django North Space Program. Firstly, this program was made up of amazing people. I had an awesome navigator to work with, a great captain. on the team nepton and my fellow Django not also amazing teammates uh iron and uh daniel uh captain natan natan was very helpful all through the program offering insights and you know guidance on how to uh Take uh the best uh opportunities out of the program and also my navigator uh Fabian

Speaker 3: was also helpful right from day one. In fact, setting up my Django CMS project which worked on Simnet Sun , I got my first uh I mean my first pull request. virtually on the same day, you know, when I was setting up a project and I noticed the uh Django CMS dashboard does not re respond to theme changes from dark theme to light theme, light theme to dark theme, and I was able to present the PR then. And the key lesson I learned in the program is to interact with people every time, show up, shout out publicly, help. Nothing is too small to

Speaker 3: tell or to show people and seek help too. So that was very helpful for me all through the program. Well interestingly, uh I picked up a complex task uh when I interacted with uh Other maintenance in the Django CMS ecosystem and it also adapts uh different image backends for Django CMS picture problems, which you have like uh a template or a guide for other plugins uh in the Django CMS ecosystem which is an ongoing work and I'll also continue it after the program Then community contributions. I was able to work on the Django Note Speech uh

Speaker 3: refreshed websites. Hopefully that goes live soon and everybody will see it. I recommend this program 100% for everyone who's interested in getting into open source and contributing to Django or just being part of an amazing community. Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 1: Next up is Victoria.

Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so much, Team. Hi everyone. My name is Victoria Yamai from Team Venus. I was really happy and excited to be part of the deployment team because we were handling the Django Simple deploy. Uh when I first started out development in my life in in university uh it was quite easy to develop things on your machine then translating it to deployment really became a whole new concept. Like you know, I'm not done, like there's more. So Uh throughout my career I've never really had to understand the deployment processes because I've entered into teams where these pipelines have already been preset.

Speaker 4: So it was really exciting to come and work on Django deployment and really understand what it actually takes to deploy an application once you've built it. So I started interacting with the Python Anywhere plugin and that's the plugin I chose to work in during the Django Simple deploy. Exercise and uh one of the things that I realized is that deployment tends not to be very beginner-friendly because there are I wouldn't say this is a blame on Django itself, but there are different limitations put by different platforms depending on the tier that you pay for.

Speaker 4: And as a beginner, you may not be aware of such things. So for example, in the Python Anywhere in which I was working on, uh things like outbound requests, maybe if you're working with third-party APIs, they might not work if you're on the free tier and it may not be really common knowledge to every beginner who's working on it But uh it might be something that someone who's been deploying for many years might be aware of. So that's the approach that I took when I was doing the project so uh I decided that for my contribution I wanted to create like a flag. Okay, we had an argument in our team whether it's a flag or an argument or

Speaker 4: whatever you want to call it. But sort of adding sort of like free tier which helps you if you're a beginner and maybe you're doing tutorials for beginners if you add that flag in your command it can be able to list down or explain certain functions or certain uh things that you expect might fail. For example, if we detect in you when you're deploying there is some DNS configuration that needs to be done. And um, you know, as a beginner you didn't know that if you're on the free tier, it won't work. We just list DNS configuration won't work So at least it helps you to be able to make the decision on do you want to upgrade, do you want to switch to a different platform, or you know, do you want to rebuild your whole application again?

Speaker 4: So that was really uh it for me and I'm really glad that I got to join the Django space because first of all the community, the kind of people that I met. in not only in my team but also in my country that were in the Django note space and I didn't know about. They were really helpful with their feedback, with uh pushing me to apply for things like talking in conventions and attending them, it's really been highlight for me. And also the knowledge sharing that is in the community where people are always happy. to share resources, to share uh information that they have that could help you or someone else.

Speaker 4: It doesn't even have to be themselves. And I think I also like the Uh I'll call it the wins in the Discord. I really like seeing the different things that people are trying out and I realized I'm not nadty enough. in life I need to try out more things like crushing and music and yeah so yeah that's it for me thank you very much

Speaker 1: And next we have Brian.

Speaker 5: Yeah, so hi everyone. This is uh Brian from part of the accessibility team. So my presentation walk you through my journey in the Django space contribution. So just to share a little bit of story I've been a user for over five years now and over that time I've never got a chance. To be able to contribute to any form of open source. Until um eight weeks ago when I heard about this program called Django at Space. And that is where a normal Django user to be able to actually be part of the build of it. So that was one of my main goals when stepping into this program.

Speaker 5: Move from using it to actually So I'm going to break them down into three main parts. Yeah. As a first-time open source contributor, I learned that there's a huge difference between just working in a solo repo to a webcast repository like the Django repository. So I learned that the little things such as the full stops, the white spaces really matter. Reviews They are not just formal critic, but it's also the way that you actually learn something. Okay? And then leveling through the bugs like some things might seem small. But if you don't have that resilience, it's gonna be hard for you to be able to push through the program. So it really taught me to be resilient throughout the program

Speaker 5: and also the technical side of it. I was able to learn the small little things do matter and also Uh shout out to my navigators and um captains for being amazing people and being able to guide me through the program. writing for me I'm using uh reviews and actually getting my first PR merg that was last week. So I'm really happy about that. And then uh lastly, uh what I've been able to learn is that I thought that okay, this is just another program. But it turns out it's more than just a eight-week program for open source contribution. I'll be able to get a lot of uh mentorship for my

Speaker 5: captains and navigators. That is something that I never thought I'm going to get from this program. and I'll be able to move from just a normal user to a confident open source contributor. So my For today from anybody here and also the message to anyone out who is looking forward to join this program is that you can actually team that is actually building the great framework Django And

Speaker 1: next we have James.

Speaker 6: Okay. Like hello everyone. Um wherever you are in the world, like I'm James. I'm from Thailand. Even though right now I'm in the UK for a while, but like my I'm I'm originated from Thailand. So like Um, if you don't know about Thailand, Thailand is a small country like in Southeast Asia if you can imagine, you can imagine of like Japan on the right side and then like the Europe right now is is on the left side and Thailand is on the middle. Bottom of the world if you can be. It really like lovely place to, you know, visit for tourists and and go south. And uh Yeah, um I'm I'm Django Nas for this session in Saturn team and we are the um focusing on like the Django like framework And like to be honest, like to share with you at first, like, um, I

Speaker 6: joined here and it like I expected that like yeah, it's gonna be like, you know really, really like technical hard, like challenging and coding things and then like you know, people will do the stuff trying to contribute a lot of code and you know, we will write we are going to write like ton ton of line of code. But like Yeah it is and I'm like I I still like write a line of code like several line of code but uh this is not about like only the technical stuff that in reality when contributing to like especially like you know the large code base like Y Django or any like open sources like you know we we have to not really do technical We have to discuss. And like I still remember like my first PR that like I was like discussing for like a whole week.

Speaker 6: And like it's it was like it was like endless and I feel like oh wow okay how long could it be to to end this PR But like thank thank to my like thanks to my team, especially like my navigator, my captain and my my teammate to like chilling me up and then helping me to get through this one. Yeah and Like another reality is like it's really confused like at first because like you know we're not talking about a small project. Django has been there for like over I'm not sure like years So like just to edit or do some modification on a sync and function in the code is really confused because you have to trace back to okay the lower layer again and again and again and yeah you get some like

Speaker 6: confusion back then. But it's really really like helpful and it's really like like learnable experience because like Um um um the main thing that I um I have learned a lot from this one is like you have to I mean you have to be consistent and focused. I I still remember that like Um I I mean I dedicate like an hour, 30 minutes to an hour every day to do the task. And like the the first three days really, really Like just like I standing at my monitor and I I don't I don't know I didn't know how to do or how to go further. But like I keep doing that and then like 30 minutes pass I close the door I close the monitor, get back here again next day, keep standing again, and then

Speaker 6: like I don't know. I mean keep talking with people and then like out of my mind feel like yeah we can do this you can do that and like yeah I managed to like get first my um first PR got merged like for the at the second week of the program and like it just a small Like change. But like it's make me plow because like um there were like overliter discussion. Ten or twenty, I forgot And and yeah, like it it it's it's walked me through the the whole large court bed of Django and I feel like yeah that is how it should work And and yeah, like that that first PR is facilitating to do the second PR. Like, even though it's still challenging, but like uh because of the experience again I feel like yeah I I feel comfortable more

Speaker 6: to to do and deep dive into single post right now my second VI is still under like reviewing and I hope that it's gonna be gonna be merged or it's gonna be like you know accept like really soon. And yeah like to m I really want to like thank you like everyone especially for the organizer. who hold this up, like my teammate and like author DJ and um um my navigator as well or like my reviewer if you are here like a little appear too how patient you are to to review my VR and to give me the really useful comment. And yeah I I hope that like can see you in the next session as the author role. Do you have the author low for me to to contribute to the genreus?

Speaker 6: Let's see what's gonna be and yeah for for someone Like anyone, if like if we don't connect yet, like please see me in the LinkedIn. You can scan the QR code or like we can, you know, ping in the chat as well. Like it will be here in in the Django Discord. Later as well. So that's all for my side. Thank you everyone.

Speaker 1: And next is Jan.

Speaker 7: Alright. So let's talk about Django Note session six Uh quick recap about myself. Um I'm Foodstack developer, freelancing My pronouns, him. These are my emojis. I'm sure you're all well aware. Do a bunch of yoga. Love bouldering, gaming, lego, love my dog, love my wife. The ordering since this is being recorded is in reverse if my wife ever sees this. Um what I did uh part one uh as um expected still absolutely

Speaker 7: great and uh Very happy about it. So I published a plugin for Django Simple Deploy, which is about simplifying deployment. off any Django app to any VPS. So absolutely happy about that, but kind of also what I really wanted to do and what I expected to do. Um then what I did part 1. 5 kinda saw this coming. So uh Still super happy about this as well. Um I did a lightning talk at DjangoCon EU uh last week about this plugin.

Speaker 7: Um So uh yeah, super exciting. It was my first Django con and was really happy to be able to represent something there and had some great conversations afterwards. But to be honest, this is also something I did put into my application. Like I was like maybe I have an idea and I could give a talk. So uh yeah, super happy about this, but also kind of saw this coming. Um now what I did part two did really not expect this to be honest Um so uh uh this is really great. So it it started with me uh registering a Fossodon account. I think

Speaker 7: I think Eric um kinda had one and um and uh we talked about it and um He uh announced I think another plugin on there and then I thought, yeah, maybe I should do do that as well, give it a try. And um yeah, I I was uh that kind of uh led me uh down this whole path where uh I then also decided to publish uh an intro video for the plugin that I did and this is really something um I never did before so I have I I do already have some open source projects and they

Speaker 7: they kind of found some audience, but I never actually um really uh advertised for it or or even um uh made it known i in in in a more active way. And so here there's a whole uh side quest in here about me really struggling uh with this. So um since this was the first time I recorded myself to be published online, I was uh really unsatisfied with the voice quality and um Yeah, just uh I don't know, just the overall process. And uh so there um yeah many things were really helpful

Speaker 7: and I I wanted to share this uh with you. Um So one thing was that at some point I discussed this with Sean, who's the navigator on our team. And um and I was really, I think I was kind of um at a place where I felt a little down because I had published this great plugin. But now I felt like um I didn't even tell anybody about it. Um but this was also kind of putting then pressure on me to release something, but I also didn't feel good about the quality of what I was doing. And I started to get into this

Speaker 7: uh overthinking loop really where I was then contemplating should it be a 90 second video or should it be maybe a five minute one should I start my own YouTube channel I mean it's really funny now, but I was really struggling and um Sean um uh really helped me to gain some perspective on this and um He was like, well first he was like, isn't it kind of funny? You published a plugin for a simple deploy and what you're missing now is a simple deploy for the intro video. So um I thought that was funny and um and also he was like um you know maybe uh maybe you're overthinking it a little bit

Speaker 7: and uh and maybe um we just don't know like Is the video gonna be super helpful? Is it does it have to be 90 seconds? Does it have to be five minutes? Does it have to be on YouTube? And then And then I think this kind of mindset really uh works for me anyway, just this kind of experimental mindset. And once I adopted this, I think it worked much better then It still took me um I think definitely a day to just cut down 12 minutes of me talking to 90 seconds. But um I got it out there and uh I'm really happy about it and um I think I'm I'm gonna keep doing this um with future things I I develop.

Speaker 7: Um yeah, so um uh that's that was definitely uh totally unexpected. Um so this is a little um screenshot of the video And uh I'm very open to talk about this. Uh if you want to approach me later on how I did this and everything, I can share some details about the technical setup also. And then what I would also like to mention, some very honorable mentions. So I already said it was very helpful to have one-on-ones with Sean. I also um tried to um have one-on-ones uh with the team overall from time to time. And uh that was also yeah just super helpful for me to

Speaker 7: Stay engaged, get feedback and also get other people's perspective on the things that we are working on here. Yeah. So Yeah, maybe for bonus points, this is definitely something um worth doing, I think Yeah, and that's uh it already. So um I'd love to um keep working on this, I'd love to stay in touch, so um reach out uh on Fostodon now, of course. And uh uh if you haven't, please check out the plugin, uh check out the video. Um once the talk, the video of the lightning talk gets online, I'll share that of course

Speaker 7: as well. Um yeah. That's it. Thanks.

Speaker 1: Next we have Vui.

Speaker 8: Hi everyone. My name is Vui Nguyen and I had a chance to work on the BeWare project on Team Mercury. And I'm here to talk about uh how my uh Python interpreter got uh effed up So this is what I'm going to cover my talk today. I had a dream for working on a Django space program that had to be diverted because of a bug that I encountered. So I'm going to talk about how that bug happened, what I did to fix it, I'll share some takeaways from my experience and share any resources, which by the way I will share these slides later for anybody that wants them.

Speaker 8: So when I began the Django Knot Space program, my dream was I was hoping that by the end I would be able to have at least several PRs merged into the BWAR codebase. But the reality was while I was going through the B-Work tutorial, I ended up discovering a major issue that would take weeks to solve And what ended up happening was while following the BeWare tutorial, I was trying to launch the tutorial app and the iOS simulator. And the simulator came up, but the tutorial app failed to launch. So what happened? It turned out that the Beware scripts

Speaker 8: that were used to launch the app in the iOS simulator was calling the Python interpreter, which was designed for an x86 Mac, except I was running on an Apple Silicon machine So now we're digging deeper and you're like, well how did that happen? Well it turns out that when I had upgraded my Mac to an Apple silicon. I ported all the data over, including the Python interpreter, and even when I upgraded my Python interpreter later, it kept the same architecture. So basically my Python interpreter was effed up. So how did I end up fixing this?

Speaker 8: Well, it turns out I had to remove All instances of Python from my Mac, and this was not an easy thing to do because you know there are aliases and symlinks all over the place So once I finally was able to do that and start over with a clean slate , then I installed the Apple Silicon version of Python onto my Mac. And finally, I added a check to the Beaver code base to flag the existence of an x86 Python running on Apple Silicon Machine so that this problem won't happen for anybody else in the future. Then after I did all that, finally I was able to run the tutorial app

Speaker 8: in the iOS simulator So yay! Um so obviously this was not a trivial thing. Uh it took weeks of work and a lot of collaboration with my team members on Team Mercury on on BeeWare to help me uh discover the bug, uh diagnose what was the root cause of the bug Then I had to create an issue and document everything that happened. Then finally I had to fix the issue, submit a PR, and get the PR merged So, some other takeaways I learned from this experience was sometimes you plan on solving one type of problem

Speaker 8: and then you end up solving a different problem. But You know, the important thing is that you're solving problems. It doesn't matter how big or small they are. It's not about how many PRs you've merged because you know when you solve a problem you might be helping someone else that could experience the same problem. And other takeaways I learned from the Django Knot Space program is what's important is how much you learn from this experience the experience of team collaboration and learning how to document things well, learning how to communicate what's going on with your team members. And it's also important to submit whatever work you have in progress.

Speaker 8: You don't have to have your PR completely done before you submit it for review, and draft PRs are totally okay. And here's some resources for anyone that's interested in following up on this. There's a link to my PR. And I have some links that I use to help me figure out how to uninstall and reinstall Python. And again, I'll share a link to these slides a little bit later And finally, I want to give a big thank you to the Djangonaut Space Program for this incredible experience, and I want to thank Team Mercury. Our navigator Katney was amazing

Speaker 8: and Captain Johannan and also my fellow uh Django Nauts uh Scott and Juan. So thank you all for this amazing experience.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Vui. And thank you everyone, all the Jenga Dots who presented. That is it for session six. We will see you next session.