New packages and contributions
I’ve been quiet on the Stack Report, the last couple of months. I had a very busy start of the year with work, and then with the other things going on, I got to plenty of drafts but nothing quite out the door. This is a subscribers only update to let you known what I’ve been up to.
Meet Django Mantle
First and foremost I’ve been pulling together a new package Django Mantle. From the docs:
Mantle:
- Allows you to move your business logic into type-safe Python classes, decoupled from the Django ORM.
- Provides automatic generation (with declarative overrides) of efficient ORM queries, including limited field fetches (
only()/defer()) and prefetching related objects, avoiding N+1 query problems.- Uses a modern and performant approach to serialisation and validation.
- Provides a progressive API, with a minimal surface area by default, and depth when needed. It’s your type-safe layer around Django’s liquid core.
This is the wrap-up of how I’ve been handling serialisation these last few years, and it’s what I promised to show on that “Django needs a REST story” thread on the Forum.
I was invited to speak at the JetBrains PyTV Unplugged event in Amsterdam this week, and you can see the talk I gave there on YouTube now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKkyBhXIJJU&t=10591s
It’s about 30mins including the Q&A. Link with timestamp, in case the embed doesn’t preserve it properly.
I’ll be talking about this again in more depth at DjangoCon Europe in Athens next month — hope to see you there!
Currently the docs are still under-development™ — I need a couple of weeks — juggling as ever 🤹 — but if you give Mantle a run and hit any questions, do reach out and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Searching for a new contribution model
At the same time, I’m experimenting with new non-GitHub contribution models.
For as long as I’ve been in open source we’ve complained about its lack of sustainability. I remember talking at DjangoCon Europe in 2018 about maintainer burnout and setting limits to your commitments.
We’ve talked on this newsletter about GitHub’s “open contribution model” leading to extractive contributions, effectively serving as a DoS on maintainer time.
So, for the last few years, I’ve been pondering a different model.
Then came AI.
I’m sure you’ve seen.
It’s just made everything worse. To the point where, something has to give.
I’m not sure what the new model will look like. It’s an experiment. But one that I can do on my new small projects, that we probably couldn’t do on Django itself.
I can say it won’t be open contribution as we know it.
The concern there is locking out contributions from under-represented groups.
But in all my years, that never really happened. We hoped it would. But it didn’t.
We do relatively well in the Django and Python communities at inclusion. But that doesn’t translate to maintainers on repos. Or even contributors. It’s still almost entirely men, and white men at that.
Women (still) often don’t have the free time necessary to work on open source. But it’s worse than that. There are roughly (at as best an estimate as I could find) about 30% females in tech generally. I’d say it’s less than 1% that I see active on GitHub — either reporting issues or working on them. There’s something deeply amiss.
The bottom line is I don’t want to work in such an unbalanced environment. (When discussing this with someone, they mentioned that many women present as men on GitHub in order to have their PR taken seriously. Well, all the more!)
The idea that by being open we’d get more diverse contributors is just refuted as a matter of historical fact. It was a nice idea, granted. If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got. So, time to try something new.
These are then problems to work out. But we begin now. I do know that whatever the end result, folks that support my work by being valued subscribers will be involved. So, thanks for your support, and until I come up with something better, do just reach out if there’s something you want to discuss.
Right, go watch that video 🍿