I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

Djangocon

by Jeffrey Weston, Mon Sep 8 5:30 pm, 2008

Djangocon was a lot of fun. Held at building 40 in the Googleplex this past weekend, they limited the con to 200 people. And I think the majority of those 200 people each made the following joke at some point:

* a PHP scaling joke
* a Zope usability joke
* how long it took Django to get to 1.0

The few who did not make these obligatory jokes were forced to rewrite Lawrence Journal World in Extreme Programming Perl and are no longer allowed to wear t-shirts with the Pownce logo.

There were a couple fantastic talks (Flickr's Cal Henderson for instance), a few decent ones, some really well done lightning talks, and what felt like several (one explicit) "I want a pony" sessions where everyone asked for what they'd like in Django. Team Onion's requests were for a real object cache with proper validation/invalidation, singleton, a killer set of debug tools. Most of which we and others are already working on. Perhaps the most popular overall request was for multi-database support.

Everyone was blown away by GeoDjango, which does a fairly amazing and complex set of geo-calculation, utils, and packaging of disparate geo libraries into a really usable system.

I got to meet all the folks I'd seen committing, and arguing about code, and a few more who were all really nice and excited about Python and Django. The level of intelligence in the room was overwhelming.

I don't know if Django is still flying under the radar, I mean Google is using it, but it still feels like it's flying under the radar -- and that is a good thing I think. It's a relatively small group of folks, and there wasn't much of the kind of discussion you would've seen at a Linuxcon in the late 90's when suddenly it was 'discovered' and hence, 'monetized' by companies and labeled 'enterprise'. While we would like a high performance Django group, it's not what you'd associate with business 'enterprise' software. I'm all for keeping the enthusiast element as long as possible before business concerns move in. And I wonder if part of that security about being community driven rather than business driven is actually due to Google, at least this last year, sheltering Django from the less desirable elements or circling sharks. But, also, Django made itself into a foundation in June, and the core is under a simple BSD license, so once again they're being super smart.

As an aside, I also realized quite demonstrably -- and I really need to put pretty radius graphics up on Google maps around my continually updated geolocation to visualize this -- that I am the only person who has visited Mountain View or San Francisco who does not own an iPhone. Do you know what it's like being surrounded by a couple hundred people all on iPhones? It's like watching kids gorge themselves on candy at Halloween. How did they let me in? Did I sneak by the iPhone checkpoint somehow? Shrug. "Think Different".