Weeknotes 2020 WK 34

Season of Docs starting

The exciting thing this week was the announcement of the Google Season of Docs projects.

Django was accepted and we have a project with our candidate Gabby Precious to make the Contributing Guide more accessible.

I’m excited about this: many times over the last few years folks have told me that this is a barrier to contribution — there’s everything you need to know but it’s a big wall of text when you first get there.

This is a good opportunity to make that better.

There’a welcome thread on the forum where Gabby would like to here your experiences getting started if you have some thoughts to share.

Finding time for open source

I’ve been thinking lots about how you find time to contribute for open source.

The best way is, of course, work. Can your work give you an afternoon a week to contribute?

If you’re a full-time student, and you have the capacity, then I can really see that it pays dividends to spend a decent amount of time volunteering. You build up your skills, and your profile, and it makes getting hired at the end of your course a lot easier if you’ve got a fancy GitHub profile to point to.

But what about everybody else?

I always took it as a hobby, something I do for a bit of fun. So like any hobby it needs a bit of time.

I always allocated roughly an evening a week. No different than an evening class: I’d do Tai Chi on a Thursday; I’d do open source on a Wednesday. So a couple of hours.

Add on to that, I also use the Candy Crush Minutes, those bits of time when you’d be noodling on your phone while the kettle boils, or you wait for a bus, to look at issues and keep up.

For years, apart from some time working on DRF and the Fellow work the last couple of years, which is in a different category, it’s not volunteering, that was it.

The key point was the evening session, once a week: that was when I actually made a little progress. It’s that progress that sums up. Without it, I can make the odd comment, and that can help others along (so if you know a project and that’s all you can do, it still helps) but it’s not the same.

The topic comes up because...

This bloody pandemic continues...

Spain, despite the high numbers, handled the first-wave of the pandemic OK I think. Once it became clear what was happening, they locked down and by June it was looking good.

They opened up for the Summer. The tourist season is essential. It was probably 50% of what it was in a normal year. But at least it was 50%.

Numbers now though are sky-rocketing. Courts are ruling attempts to control, say banning smoking in the street, as illegal without another state of emergency, so it looks like another state or emergency, and they’re talking about delay the school start, despite being adamant for months that it would go ahead. (Frankly I can’t see how it can go ahead with the curve looking like it is.)

I joked in June:

Spain’s policy: Bring us your money, and your plague. We’ll deal with it in September.

That’s feeling overly accurate right now.

... which leaves what time exactly?

Long and short of it is, I’m still not hitting my rhythm with regards to open source. Partly it’s Summer, but mainly it’s that life just isn’t what it was only six months ago.

Some weeks I get my slot, and can write some code. Some weeks not. (This week not.)

It’s something to observe. One of the big problems with open source is feeling obligated.

Well blow that.

The only obligation in these times is to self-care, and doing your best to get through it.

If Tai Chi wasn’t already off, how would I feel about missing a class?

If my sanity, and the wellbeing of myself and my family depended on it, there’d be no question. Same here. It’s about perspective. And about setting goals, but also limits.

Times will even out, eventually, one assumes. We’ll look at more regular patterns, and what hobbies we want to pursue, at what pace, then.

Using Ulysses with Django

I use Ulysses on iOS (and macOS). It’s a really lovely writing environment.

Anyhow, they have a publishing option that works with Wordpress, Medium and the Ghost blogging platform. Turns out there’s only a few endpoints of the Ghost API that are really in play so, I plan to drum up a few DRF serialisers and see if we can’t make Ulysses talk to Django. Do ping me if that's something you might use.