The internet is such a strange place. It allows us to collaborate on projects without ever seeing each other in person. It allows us to meet new people, discover interests that we never knew we had, and keep in touch with friends. However much the internet allows us to connect, though, there's simply no replacement for face-to-face contact. Who would have thought that a piece of software whose main goal is to ease the pain of creating websites could bring people together from Prague, London, Germany, and even Lawrence, Kansas? To me, it's nearly inconceivable. But inconceivable or not, Django now has its very own conference.
What I noticed about this first DjangoCon was a strange and exciting dichotomy of sorts, best exemplified by the opening and closing keynotes. On the one hand, it's difficult to believe just how far Django has come since it was first released in 2005. On the other hand, there are so many great ideas for Django and Django-related projects that it's nearly impossible to fight the urge to pop open your favorite text editor and start coding right now.
For some people, it was great to meet them for the first time, and for others, it was great to simply reconnect. (Apologies to those that I couldn't fit into those links, by the way.) Below is what I find to be a hilarious image, courtesy of Sebastian Hillig--whose Flickr page has some really well-shot photos of the conference.
For those of us involved in the Pinax project, DjangoCon was a bit of a coming out party. Firstly, in a literal sense--as cloud27, the flagship website built on Pinax, was launched (real men launch during presentations). But also in a figurative sense--as most of us sported our Pinax-branded shirts and trumpeted the features that Pinax provides out of the box. James Tauber's talk that kicked it all off couldn't have gone better, and I'm certain that when the video comes out on YouTube, it will enjoy a second and third life while people discover and become interested in the platform.
Another thing that surprised me about the conference was the amount of healthy criticism that went around in the conference. Only a select few presentations escaped the constructive criticism of James Bennett, the wrath of Cal Henderson, or the healthy reminders by Mark Ramm. Instead of people getting upset, though, I heard all sorts of conversations throughout the conference discussing ideas and strategies for how to overcome the shortcomings that were pointed out.
But in the end, what would DjangoCon be without a good old fashioned group hug? Thanks to everyone who made it possible, and here's to another year of friendship and achievement for everyone in Django-land!
(Picture by 704race, whose pictures are also really fun!)
Journey to Intermediary Models
It's been around an 8 month journey in adding intermediary model support to Django, starting with a ticket opened during a sprint by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Earlier that month I had been wrestling with several pretty nasty models, each with two foreign keys and many extra properties on that relation. I kept thinking that Django makes everything else so easy, but that in at least this one aspect, it doesn't make things easy enough. When Jacob posted his API idea, I was hooked.
I quickly posted some thoughts and asked for a bit of clarification, and volunteered to write the patch. Jacob responded saying he was glad to help me out. It was only then that I actually delved into the code to see how it could be done. It was only then that I realized that I had absolutely no knowledge or familiarity with that portion of the codebase--a portion that is nontrivial, to say the least. But that's the good thing about committing to something: you feel pressure to follow through.
Despite my incredible Naïvité, the patch got to a rudimentary usable state very quickly, and then started to flounder. It was then that Russell Keith-Magee came into the picture, continually prodding me to add more tests, and thinking up many different test cases that I would have never come up with on my own. I'm 100% certain that if Russ had not lent his expertise and guidance on this patch, it would have gotten lost and forgotten for a long time until someone more capable came along to take a look at it.
A few hours ago, Russ committed the patch to trunk. It's interesting to see the reactions that some people have, but on any project like this you'll always be scrutinized. In any case, check out the two new bits of documentation, and see if intermediary models are right for your project. After having this great experience with working on a patch for Django, I'll definitely be looking to help out in other places as well. My advice for anyone looking to get involved with the project is to, well, get involved! Jump in over your head. It's more fun that way.
PyMag
For around as long as I have been working on intermediary model support, I've been supporting another Django project of mine: django-threadedcomments. One of the things that I noticed a few months into maintaining the project is that outside of a few people who were actively using it, not many people really knew about its existence. So when Doug Hellmann (of the famously excellent PyMOTW series) contacted me about writing an article for PyMag, it was immediately apparent what I would love to write about. Over 4000 words later, between finals and school projects and moving across state boundaries, the article was written.
To be honest, I had almost completely forgotten about having written it, aside from one short e-mail conversation with the technical editor. It turns out that the July 2008 edition of PyMag has arrived and my article is listed under "featured articles". How cool is that!? I'm quite proud of the article, and really hope that it helps some people out with their Django websites. If you aren't a PyMag subscriber, then what are you waiting for?
This post seems to be doing a lot of self-promotion--sorry for that. But these two things really made my day, and to me, blogging is about sharing those awesome days with others.
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