Weeknotes 2020 WK 37

Entering mid-cycle

It was quieter this week. With 3.1.1 out of the way, the first batch of Release Blockers for Django 3.1 are resolved. With that it starts to slow down a bit: people have tested out the new features and found the most obvious bumps.

As such we can allocate a bit of time to some of the more difficult issues: the ones that have been lingering. These tend to be subtle questions that need sitting down with the debugger and seeing exactly what the behaviour is. They often require a long review the history. In short, there’s a reason why they sit there a while, and they’re not something we can take on whilst preparing the major releases or dealing with a rush of new reports.

This week I managed to clear up a 6 year old ticket on the intricacies of BooleanField with various combinations of blank, null and choices, plus take on the proposal to add HttpResponse.headers to match the HttpRequest.headers we added in Django 2.2. I was pleased with the last as, after much looking at similar looking minute changes, we caught a small behaviour change that would definitely have raised issues later.

Sunsetting Django People

Mid-cycle we also get a bit of time for housekeeping. One thing that’s been pending is the situation with Django People, the GeoDjango project where you could add yourself as a Django user. This has been more-or-less unmaintained for a long-time now, and was causing issues: folks unable to recover accounts, or reset credentials, or all the rest of it.

As such the Board agreed that we would archive Django People, we sorted that this week, and it now redirects to an explanatory page on the Django Project website.

And some yak-shaving for my DjangoCon talk

Then the rest of the week has just been working on my DjangoCon talk.

In true programming style, this ended in round of yak-shaving as I found a bug in Django Debug Toolbar whilst putting the final touches on the code examples for the demos. A bit of time digging down the rabbit hole for that and everything’s all in place.

I'm quite pleased with the talk as I’ve hit all the major points that I wanted to make. Just have to decide now whether to go with the pre-recorded video, or do it again live… — still not convinced by the Remote-ness of it all. That’s 2020 I guess.