Weeknotes 2021 WK 22

Thoughts on DjangoCon Europe

It was DjangoCon this week. As usual, totally exhausted by the end of it. šŸ˜ƒ

Virtual again. It was good. The organisers did an outstanding job (again) and the LoudSwarm platform is super. The gather.town space was great too. All round very successful.

For me, personally, virtual isnā€™t something I can really do well. I have four kids. Being at home means I canā€™t dedicate myself to the conference fully. Itā€™s constant nipping in and out as best I can. Itā€™s catching the beginning of this, the end of that, and trying to sneak back in to catch up with someone, when really other things are calling. (ā€œOther thingsā€ being bath-time, bedtime, dinner, lunch, school run, and so on.)

Itā€™s just about do-able, but itā€™s not ideal.

Better than no conference? Clearly. Something Iā€™d want to do in general? No.

I can imagine that if youā€™re able to concentrate on the conference, and find a way to grab the one-on-one chats, the virtual way could be just as good. Maybe. The coffee is certainly better.

But not for me. I need to get away to make it work. Hopefully, next year.

As an aside, zero chance of my attending the sprints. Coding at the weekend just doesnā€™t work.

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There were a super selection of talks. Theyā€™re on LoudSwarm for attendees for the next month I think, then on YouTube publicly after that.

Iā€™ve still got a backlog to get through: they were tightly packed.

I was pleased to see HTMX, and Alpine, get some good airtime. Iā€™m really excited about these more light-weight projects, HTMX in particular just fits with Django so-well.

There were a couple of talks on Channels, and we had an encouraging discussion after Calvin from Six Feet Upā€™s talk on how they're using it for LoudSwarm.

The fundamental issue there is maintainer time, or lack of it. I did a big push at the end of last year to get the update to ASGI v3 out, but have had little capacity since. Itā€™s on my list for the summer now to potter on the next batch of updates (including a Redis PubSub version of the channel layer which is ready for folks to try-out) but I really need companies that are using Channels to allocate some engineer time to helping out on the repos.

I think that point came across, so Iā€™m hopeful weā€™ll get a bit more input. šŸ¤ž

Ā§

My talk was ā€œDynamic static sites with Django and Sphinxā€, about using Sphinx to manage (at least part of) the content of your Django based site.

This was first thing on the second day, so, as ever, despite weeks of preparation, I couldnā€™t relax properly until after then.

I introduced my new django-sphinx-view package. Inspired by the way the Django docs do it, this lets you serve Sphinx rendered docs via a Django view using the Django Templating Language to integrate it into your site.

Iā€™m using django-sphinx-view myself. Itā€™s young, so likely the docs are a bit sparse. There are issues and discussions on the repo if you want to use it and need input.

Ā§

It was fantastic to see folks. Talks were awesome.

I miss the IRL event.

In Spain here, my age group can book for a vaccination from tomorrow.