Django on the Med is underway in Palafrugell in Spain, the first edition of a twice-yearly Django development sprint in southern Europe.
There are 14 people in the room including two former Django Fellows and one current Fellow, three former members of the Django Core development team, two members of the Steering Council, a board member and a former board member. They’ve travelled from across Europe and even from Canada and the USA to be here.
Just as important (arguably more significant) is that there are also multiple new contributors.
Everyone present is keen to be part of a renewal of Django as a contributor-driven project with a shared purpose.
Aims
Our aim for the event is to work on Django, and to do that in a future-minded way, thinking about how this sprint can be a regular pulse in Django’s development.
We also want to do it openly, so that all the community can see what we are doing as we are doing it - as far as that’s possible, if they’re not in the room. Being in the room is important for inclusion, and being transparent is the next best thing. This is a first edition, and we hope that the next will include more people and different voices and faces.
Our shared drive for documents is available to all.
Outcomes
Roadmap - development
One outcome we’re aiming for is a well-articulated development roadmap for the project, to put in front of the community. We want to show a clear way forward for Django and to build consensus and acceptance for it.
Roadmap - contribution
We also want to create a roadmap that presents potential contributors with a clear picture of opportunities for contribution, that they know will be supported and can be part of a long-term development relationship with the project.
Actual patches
We also hope to land some commits into Django too; various participants have come with projects that they’d like to get over the line.
New contributor on-boarding
There are new contributors present and we aim to get them through the workflow to a concrete contribution.
Knowledge sharing
Some contributors have come with new ideas and research that they want to share - to get feedback, and to advance work in new directions that they’ve already started.
Activities
We spent some of the first morning taking stock of Django’s situation and future.
Work in progress
(last updated morning of 8th October)
General
- outline of work to be done on a “fast Django” project - benchmarking, baselines and metrics on various different Django set-ups
- exploration of removal of jQuery from the admin
- investigation into the modernisation of contrib.staticfiles and asset pipelines, in the context of techniques like JS import/export statements
Documentation
- a proposal for improving the presentation of the documentation, including a new page layout and improvements to home page and landing pages (better accessibility, user orientation, use of good patterns)
- work on a how-to guide for file uploads
Database and ORM
- review of work to add support for database level constraints configuration through
on_delete - work on Django Subatomic
- work on a “feature matrix” for the ORM and different database backends
- resurrection of work in query expressions, to generalise handling of null
Contributing and development
- discussion of/work on Django New Features
- fix to “new contributor” GitHub action
- work to make it possible to exclude certain tests, based on Python version