Weeknotes 2020 WK 38

It felt like a busy week.

New season of Django Chat

And we’re back 💃 It’s been a good break over the summer but Django Chat kicked off again this week. Will and I just discussing the Django user survey results, with the usual other stuff thrown in.

We’re going fortnightly at least for the next few months, just to ease up on the work load really. (2020 etc.)

If you’ve not listened to the podcast, do check it out: https://djangochat.com/

DjangoCon Europe

Then Friday and Saturday were DjangoCon Europe. I would say in Porto, but it was all online, for the obvious reasons.

I have to say the team did an amazing job. Slack played a big role, as it has in previous years, but there was LoudSwarm for watching the videos, and then quickly switching over to Jitsi for the Q&A session. This was so well coordinated that it went very smoothly. I can’t imagine the effort that went into making it work so well. So kudos to the team. Thanks all!

Talk

I gave a talk. It was called Choose and choose quickly. It was about optimizing ModelChoiceField. I see a lot of issue reports about slow form rendering in Django, or the admin, or DRF, or with Django-Filter. Mostly they come down to ModelChoiceField. This was my plan to have somewhere to point those issues. Rewatching the video quickly I think it went well enough: I hit the main points I wanted to make.

We were meant to do a recording before the talk. In the end I couldn’t get that out. Mid-week I decided that I’d just do it live. (I saw a good tweet about nerve/excitement trumping perfectionism, which is about right.)

Live to just your slides is a weird one. It’s not quite like being on stage. To simulate an audience I had a row of teddies lined up under my monitor. That seemed to do the trick.

I always forget quite how much work getting the talk just right is. In previous years I’ve had the journey and time at the conference before the talk to polish and bring it up to par. I’m not a professional speaker. I don’t go to a lot of conferences. So for me talks are a once a year kind of thing. I’m very much working on them right up to the wire. Mark Smith’s excellent opening talk, on how to give a talk, touched on these kind of topics. I must say, I don’t think I follow all his advice. Being at home, and not having all the travel time, really made me see the effort that I put in. This otherwise I probably don’t put on the official count. It’s something I’m going to need to think about if we’re going to continue in the current remote vein.

If you’re a DjangoCon Europe ticket holder, the talks are all available on the LoudSwarm site, otherwise I believe they’ll make it to YouTube in a few weeks.