When I stepped down as Django Fellow, I joked that I was retiring. I wasn’t really going anywhere. I still maintain a whole load of packages, and I remained on the Security Team, but I was stepping away from working on Django day-to-day.
Somehow I ended up running for the Steering Council for the current cycle, and being duly elected, I found myself back in the midst of it.
We’re coming up for the first 12 months of the current Steering Council’s term. We’re about half-way through, and — on top of the day to day discussions about 6.x — I’m pleased with what we’ve achieved so far:
None of these are perfect. I’m sure we could communicate more. The Ecosystem page is still very basic, and not yet as prominent on the website as we’d like. The flow for the new-features repo still has some ironing out to do. But they exist, and they’re not too far off, each of them, and they directly target the topics we said we wanted to address when we ran.
I’m going to go so far as to say, so far so good. I’m proud of what we’ve managed in this first year.
In the next year, we want to rework Django’s governance, to make it easier to understand and to work with, and I want to push the proposal for an Annual Release Cycle to its conclusion.
If we manage to get all that done then I think we’ll be able to hand off to the next Steering Council without regrets.
But then I’m done. Back to retirement 😅
The thing I was most keen to push was the ecosystem story.
There are camps in Django, basically corresponding to small vs big core. Do we include everything, or do we keep the core minimal and then leverage third-party packages?
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I favour the small core approach. I even ran on it.
I have an answer to the but how do we…? questions that come up, but — beyond making the ecosystem visible and actively promoting it from within Django — the rest of that necessarily involves sitting down and building things outside of Django. (It would be ironic otherwise.)
I have a personal roadmap as long as my arm that I want to work on, and being deeply embedded in the Django org isn’t compatible with getting that done. There are too many topics, too many notifications, too many things asking for attention. None of that is a problem, per se. But if I want to get the things done that I have in mind, I need to step away.
(I have a business to run, too, remember.)
To that end, I’m beginning my process now. I’ll see out the Steering Council term, those are good goals.
I’m stepping down now from the Security Team, for which I’ve read every report for the last eight years, and (first more actively as Fellow, and then just as team member) inputted on the ones that were relevant to my interests. That’s been great but the last few months have been increasingly tight, with multiple Django related commitments, and real life combining. As such, it’s time to pull back from that.
I’m also steeping down now as a moderator on the Forum. I was always low-level activity there, mostly catching the morning slot before Ken wakes up 🙂 — But it’s one more source of noise.
I’m still on the Fellowship Working Group, but will likely step back from that next March at the annual check-point.
That should free me from the most of the non-coding tasks that I currently have.
I’m not going anywhere. I will continue to maintain the packages I’m involved in. My hope is that I’ll actually get to work on my ideas for them, as I did in the brief summer between stepping down as Fellow and joining the Steering Council.
Neapolitan has a whole load of updates sat pending in the work project. There’s an HTMX v4 coming, which I’m very excited about. Neapolitan UI anyone? 🥳
I have a story about Battery Packs to get out there, and a demo of how I do serialisation, that’s quite enjoyable. I’m pretty sure we can make Django go faster too, but more on that later. 🏎️
I’ve increasingly come to see the open contribution model — the Working in Public approach — as failing us. I’ve seen us talk about diversity for as long as I’ve been in the Django community, but, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t see that we’re really making progress. If anything we might be going backwards. I have ideas for different models that I want to try. But I can’t try those on Django. I need to work on smaller things. In quieter spaces.
I want to continue to work on Django on the Med 🏖️ and local efforts, here where I live.
Still lots to do. Not a boring retirement then. 🎁