Fireside Chat with a BDFL¶
Moderated by Sean O’Conner and starring Jacob Kaplan-Moss
How did Django get started?¶
2002 - 2003 LJ World hired Adrian Holovaty to become their dedicated Web Developer
Previous to 2002 had Frank Wiles making things for them in Perl
Adrian hired Simon Willison as the most overqualified intern until Alex Gaynor
Because of the fast news cycle at a newspaper you don’t have the luxuries of other jobs.
Sometimes you have to build a project within 24 hours
Adrian and Simon decided to do it all in Python
The Python ecosphere didn’t have all the tools they needed so they made things up
- Zope/Plone couldn’t cut it
- No light frameworks existed
At PyCon 2005 they went to a success story workshop and Adrian demonstrated a blog in 5 minutes
- Nothing else in Python could do it at the time
- People asked them to open source it
- LJ World was okay with open sourcing it
In July 2005 they released it as open source
Why did Django get traction and other light Python frameworks didn’t?¶
Luck of timing
They did a lot more documentation than any other emerging option
- Jacob and Adrian focused on the on-boarding of incoming developers
- Good input from Wilson Minor on design and the result was that it looked better than it’s competitors
Spent a lot of time considering how the community ought to be built
How has Django’s community and structure has changed?¶
- Jacob mentions their are 6 developer journalists. The reality is that there are a lot more
- Linear community growth until 2006 and then it’s grown exponentially
- 20,000 members on the mailing list
- Huge issue: Not enough man hours for the leadership to increase the number of contributors.
What about Django 2.0?¶
- Jacob never wants to have a not backwards compatible version of Python
- Doesn’t want to see Django 1.11, wants to go Django 2.0 at that point
- Massive incompatible rewrites are really challenging
Wishlist?¶
Wants to see a better job for formalizing the app interface
Wants to see Django become a micro-kernel.
- Less features and more APIs and hooks
- No more features in Django
Delighted that Python Package has been shaped by the Django community!
Wants to see more people empowered to help build Django
How can Django can become a better part of the Python community?¶
- 2 years ago the communities were a bit separate
- Some tension caused by Django because we as a community sometimes get aggressive
- Some tension caused by Python because the anti-establishment guys don’t like winners
- Django needs to help push for better Packaging in python
- Let’s port to Python 3!
Note
I think having the Django community cook up a good alternative to PIL and make it pure Python.
In your role as BDFL have you had to go against the community?¶
- Jacob/Adrian admit being wrong about the template language not auto-escaping
- Doesn’t want to overlord too much
How have things changed for the Django community since the last hate talk?¶
- Changed the core developer rules so that the quorum for new core devs could work
- Any time a core developer says “no” to something, they have to explain why