If I went through people I got to touch base with, I would have to list three digits worth of people and play favorites. That just ain't me, so I'm just going to say everyone there was awesome and I hope to see you again at Pycon!
Alright then, some reporting:
Django Software Foundation Panel
Russel Keith-Magee, the new DSF president hosted a panel with Ben Slavin, Sean O'Conner, Jeremy Dunck, and myself. Russ went over plans for DSF finances and the hopeful creation of a DSF ecosphere of applications.
My own contribution was talking a little about Django Packages, and bit more about "Why Django".
Why Django, or maybe one day "Enterprise Djangoproject" is an advocacy site for Django targeted not to developers but to decision makers. It is a work in progress, we are collecting case studies and articles, and building out the site.
Ben Slavin then challenged me about the code and data. Other Django community projects like djangoapps and djangosites are closed source efforts without an API and this causes problems for the community. If a site goes down or is unmaintained then the community loses.
I agree.
So I promised that for these Django community projects the code is public, APIs were being made to support people fetching data from them at any time, and I'm trying to figure out how to do data dumps without handing out even salted passwords. Furthermore, I would give full access to these sites and servers behind them to those that Russell appointing to the position of being watchdog.
And I'm working on that promise. Django Packages now has an API and a BDFL has server access to Django Packages. Why Django is still a work in progress, so things are still in flux. I'll post updates to my promise of openness.
Furthermore, I challenge anyone who puts together a site useful to the community, be it a new version of Django Apps or Django Sites to follow my own promise. By all means maintain and work your project, but be willing to publish all data and keep your code under an open source license. Also provide access to whom the DSF president appoints so that others can provide maintenance for your site.
Eric Florenzano's Keynote
Eric Florenzano gave the keynote on What Sucks about Django (and how we can fix it). He did a very good job of it. Watch his talk. It has some amazingly telling points.
Anyways, I'm challenging for Eric to eat his own dogfood. The only people I saw Eric talk to were the same people he is always around and conferences. How many times did he go up to a person he didn't recognize and start talking to them? How many new people did he meet at DjangoCon 2010?
Portland Views, Food, and Beer
On Saturday, as a break, I went with Eric Holscher, Ben Firschman, and Andrew Godwin to the park around the Portland zoo. Below you can see where a lady pointed out that we could see mountains 50 and 150 miles away. That left three geeks speechless while
Ben Firschman captured the moment. This picture is Ben's and all rights belong to him.
And then I had my action shot taken by Ben. Again, all rights to him.
I just have to say that Ben is an amazing photographer and I'm honored to be in a few of his pictures of DjangoCon. In addition to that he presented on class based views in Django, which I plan to blog about as well as incorporate into Django Packages in the near future.
Edit: Blogspot is acting really oddly which is why I took out the linking and other things.
Edit II: Eric ate his own dog food. Awesome!
I met a *ton* of people I'd never seen before.
ReplyDeleteAlmost all of Wednesday night was spent meeting people I'd never met before. Starting with dinner with the Mahalo guys, and then at the bar that night I met tons of cool people from all over, like the guys from LexisNexis who were incredibly cool.
That's also the night I learned to swear in German from the django-de people who were representing at DjangoCon.us :)
Of course, I did spend a good chunk of my time working with people I already knew. But that's to be expected--they're friends who I only see a couple of times per year.
The main point I was trying to get across in the talk was the perceived futility of *contributing code back into Django itself*. Maybe I should have worded it differently, if that's not the impression people walked away with.
@Eric - I posted an update to my blog. Let me know if that suffices.
ReplyDelete