Lightning Talks Day One with Kojo Idrissa

Speaker 1: So uh I just wanted to remind everybody that uh on April 8th, 2024, there will be another total solar eclipse. Um and it will be the last to cross the continental US until 2044. That one's not great. 2045 is kind of the next that'll be pretty big. Here is the path. It's the kind of purpley one that goes that way. That was the annular, that was just a couple of days ago. And um thanks to Wayne Mary, uh, so in 2017, I was at DjangoCon and he gave a lightning talk, much like I'm doing. that took me I had bought my glasses and sort of planned to step outside and look, but hadn't really decided to do much.

Speaker 1: And he really pushed me over the line to, okay, I'm gonna take the day off. I'm gonna like chase this thing and so I hope to do what he did to me um for you. In my case the weather was troublesome. Uh I bought tickets to two different events that I never attended, paid to park at a third place, and then only to have the clouds roll in about 40 minutes before eclipse time, so we had to jump back in the car, go somewhere else, and finally found a random city park with a bunch of people parked in the grass. We pulled over. three or four minutes before totality and then finally experienced it. It was somewhat stressful.

Speaker 1: Uh it's one of those things that if you miss it, then you truly miss it. But as the sun just sort of disappears, it's this amazing thing. You get um You get the bugs will start to interact in weird ways and do things. Um the temperature drops. It just it gets dark. It's just really, really bizarre and cool. And then you start to see the typical stuff as you can take your take your safety devices off. And it's just It's overwhelming. It's really hard to put into words. I would hope that everybody has the chance to see it. And then as it's as soon as it's over, we're looking, I think my notes said four minutes and 15 seconds at kind of the peak area um it starts to undo itself.

Speaker 1: The whole time leading up and going out you will get little crescent moon shaped shadows as the sun goes through leaves and any little pinholes That is really cool. The whole process is just nice. So just prepare. It's going to be a little bit of a crazy thing. Make sure you buy your glasses and your filters early. There's a specific IO certification. I tend to lean toward photography and uh video and like telescope dealers who have been in this a long time uh to try to get fully legit stuff from vendors that are fully legit. There's lots of good write-ups about what you need to do and they last a really long time.

Speaker 1: As long as you don't scratch them or have holes, they're supposed to be safe. And so you'll have organizations that will collect all of them after an eclipse event and then send a really big box to places that are less privileged. So it's not just a total you know waste of money that you're throwing away or you know environmentally we're not uh we're not completely destroying these resources. And you can use them anytime, so keep a couple of sets, and then if you ever want to just go look at the sun, you can expect a lot of extra traffic. in the areas near the totality. It's already price gouging is amazing if you look inside of the area, what these little towns that have never had a lot of tourism and now everybody wants to stay there.

Speaker 1: And so it's very expensive. Just kind of be aware. And be aware that you might go somewhere and just have a bad weather day. It can totally happen. You just kind of have to be flexible. Many people are going to have better cameras and gear than you. And so my recommendation is automated stuff. Put an intervalometer on your camera where it's taking pictures on a timer for you. Set up a video that's far back and watch yourself and the people that you're hanging out with experience the event without truly taking away and watching it through a camera. And uh you NASA will also do live stream coverage and other places online. So if you can't and don't or don't want to travel, that's an option too, but there is something to just

Speaker 1: fully taking it in and just being present. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Cool. So I think Everybody here has heard the words AI and probably large language models. Something we did recently was actually incorporate the two of these with Django and HTMX. So if you saw Chris's talk earlier, it was a great primer to why you should be using HTMX. And chatbot is an excellent reason to do that. There's actually code that goes along with this talk. I will post the link into the Slack someplace as well. That QR code will take you to a GitHub repository underneath SixfeetUps like main org. There's actually code in there. If I get enough moments, I will show it. But I think what's actually interesting about uh these AI journeys is like we have to think about threat AI as a thread or a multiplier. And I'm definitely on the multiplier side of those things. And data is what's going to drive really good interactions with these AI pieces So we're going to do

Speaker 2: actually do a demo and I'll show off some of the things we did. But again, the data is the real key here. We're talking about data that has quirks. This is not clean stuff, like unstructured. things made with like you know InDesign, you know, desktop publishing type apps that you're trying to extract information out of. There may be hidden fields, hidden text in those documents that's just been dragged off the side of the screen but it still exists in the file. So if you go scraping data out of those files, you have to be careful of those kind of things because you're going to grab data that may actually not be valid or was was thought to be deleted and maybe just someone put a white box over the top of it. Who's seen that? Uh I'm sure you've all seen this. So our tech stack for this project was Uh Langchain, we did do some stuff with Simon Willison's LLM library and GPT for

Speaker 2: all. Part of the demo actually gives you the ability to run a large language model locally on your own laptop. If you've got at least you know, 8 gig, 16 gig of RAM on your local machine, you should actually be able to run the demo in there. We're using the Orca 7B. But we wanted to have a simple UI because this was just a proof of concept to start with. But the challenges are cataloging the information as language and how do you index all this kind of stuff. So one of the nice things where Langchain really came into play was the fact that you've got ChromaDB as a vector database built into it. For this demo, we actually have data from a site where I presented this this summer. That site didn't exist until probably May or April of this year. So obviously that data didn't exist when ChatGPT indexed all of its data of the

Speaker 2: web. So using those kind of embeddings, we're actually able to scrape the data off their site, scrape the speaker information, scrape the scrape the talk information, and then We actually, for this project, you can see the Django admin here, obviously, we created personalities. So you could actually create different tunings that you can adjust through the web, at least in this case in the Django Admin. and play with you know how creative it is or how by the book it is and how many documents the the vector database may send up there when it's doing the embedding. So it gives the end user the ability to actually play with tuning the AI chatbot experience on their own. And so you can see it's just kind of all the different like knobs you can tune and turn as you're playing with the various LLM tunables. And then in the end it was just a simple HTMX app, one single page web app where you put in a prompt, you type in some information, and you get information back.

Speaker 2: I wanted to get the reason I sped through that so quick is because I actually want to get to the demo if I have a couple moments, which I think I will. All right, uh Twego. So uh the make file inside of the project has a couple different targets. of interest are going to be these ones here, just doing like ask openAI, Ask Orca Mini. Those will just use the API and talk to OpenAI or the Orca Mini one will download the Orca Mini 7B model to your laptop. So if you're ever curious how I could run a large language model locally, here's how. There's an example of using LLM in code. But the one I want to show off right now is the Langchain example. So this is actually taking that vector database. We scraped their speakers and sessions, extracted the text, and then put it into that vector database.

Speaker 2: And so now I can ask it questions like who is Calvin? And cross fingers. This is actually using uh embeddings that it sent to OpenAI. Is he a speaker? And using the data from their conference web type to hopefully say yes, I was a speaker. Oh yeah, I was a speaker. What did he talk about? Is it gonna work? Nice. So it did work. And then you can say like list all the AI talks. This is just off that schedule from that one conference. So this is a really good example of how you use those embeddings, how you can use things like vector databases to actually do really cool stuff. Check it out. The Mech file. You should be able to run it with even like code spaces on GitHub. So if you don't have a computer powerful enough

Speaker 2: There's a profile in there that launches a large enough code space to make this happen. Thank you very much

Speaker 3: All right, so you're gonna see a bunch of photos. These photos were taken yesterday at the first ever gathering of members from the Black Python devs community. So I'm super excited because this is like the coming out party for us. So this has been fun. But I do want to start with a little bit of context of why do I think we need an organization that focuses on black developers globally. A lot of this work took place in the keynote presentation that I gave last year at DjangoCon in San Diego. And we talked about the historical representation of where we meet at conferences. What you saw on the screen is the first 10 years of PyCon US were in very Like

Speaker 3: racially diverse communities, places like Santa Clara, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, well, maybe not Dallas. Um I have beef with their airport still. Um But the last 10 years, as Python has grown, things have become more complex. It's really hard to find a large enough venue in some of these gear like racially diverse communities. It's hard. It's not impossible, but it it is hard. And I I want to respect that. I looked at Django Con last year. I think they were close. Like maybe just missed it. I'm happy to announce that This year in Durham, they actually are in a community that is, by my weird metrics, what I would call racially diverse, where there is no one

Speaker 3: community that makes up more than 65 %. of the population. So first of all, big good job to the Django Con organizers for that. Okay, stop clapping. I've only got like four more minutes. There is power when you see people that look like you. Um in that photo was uh a child um who Hadn't spent a lot of time around many other black developers and got to learn Django with other black developers, got to eat ice cream as we see here with other black developers. And Carol Willing at her keynote in PyCon this earlier year said, you know, building communities is hard, but we should do them. And the best way to do it is to start small and scale.

Speaker 3: So about five minutes after that I created a Discord channel called Black Python Doves and it was designed to be a space where Black developers could come together and learn Python together and not have to code switch and not have to think about how they present or what they present and be open about their culture and how they reach out to one another. And I had this imaginative idea of like it's going to be like 15 people and it's not going to go anywhere. I'm happy to announce that In the six months of doing this, we have 166 members still growing today, representing most of the continents on the planet, which is fantastic. So

Speaker 3: we're still starting small and scaling. This was our first meetup that we did yesterday with ice cream. We hope to improve that in the future. Um we're gonna do more. We have plans for a virtual conference eventually. We would love to do more in-person conferences. We were actually partnering with people who have done this in their own communities. So we're Working with organizers from DjangoCon Africa, we're working with people who have done who've worked on AfroPython in Brazil and other places like that. We've learned that we can't be the solution to All of the cultural differences in the world. And so for that, we're letting them help us, and we're just sitting in the back and providing the support that we can. Now that I'm four minutes in, I want to talk about equal footing really quick.

Speaker 3: The one of the ways that we do this we make everybody feel as if they are equal When we started doing internationalization, we didn't just stop at Spanish. We got Spanish done really quickly. We then decided we wanted to do Yoroba. We wanted to do Cosa, we wanted to do Ibo , we wanted to do Swahili And we also wanted to get French and Portuguese to speak to the people in the languages that they would like to be spoken in, not just in English. And I know that I'm talking to not the most monoculture of cultures, but yeah, everybody 's like, this is great, I'm not black, what can I do? Well, there's a few things that you can do. You can support and encourage. You can listen when their conversations happening.

Speaker 3: You can support us, you know, with emotion and even financially behind the scenes, and you can speak in the rooms that we can't get into just yet. And if you know any Black Python devs that you think would benefit from this, share this QR code with them or email me. And I'm glad Kojo came up. Next to me to tell me that my time is up because Kojo is actually what I would consider the co-founder of this community who does a lot of work uh keeping me in line, um, but also inspiring me in the process. So thank you.

Speaker 4: Thank you, Jay.

Speaker 5: So what is Django Girls? Django Girls is a one-day event uh where we talk about Django code. There is a very established and lovely uh tutorial that exists online that is at the top of the the screen. There's also the installation party, which is a few hours um on the previous day. It is international. It's huge. Here are some of the assets that we created. It's a very decentralized group, but there is a really strong core uh governing body. Rachel Calhoun is one of my favorite people on the planet who does a lot with Django girls. We have a lot of people here. Our keynote speaker spoke a bunch about Django girls. So go watch the keynote if you did not have a chance to watch it And here's some videos or some pictures that we took from this Sunday

Speaker 5: on Django Girls. So Django Girls was at Cactus. I did cover up their Wi-Fi so no one uses their Wi-Fi. But it was a lovely event. Um another picture that you've seen from the previous presentation of our previous Django. them. Um we have all sorts of representation of creeds and colors and backgrounds and ages and I'm so Proud of that. I started my Django experience in Django Girls in 2016 when Django Khan came to Philadelphia. And I was too scared to be part of the conference. So many people don't remember me there, but you're definitely gonna remember me from 2017 because I showed up with my dog. So I was just very, very excited to participate and I've never left

Speaker 5: And I'm just uh here are pictures, enjoy the good vibes. Um, yeah. Anyone want to say anything? Okay, we just got pictures for you. This is what a programmer looks like. If you see that on the interwebs, that's what from the Django Girls. Um, it's like a badge of honor. It's my favorite t-shirt ever Um oh calls to action. Invited Django Girl to be a Django Girl. We're doing Django Girls 2024 in Durham next year. uh be a Django girl. If you're not familiar with Django and you really want to get involved, not all of the attendees here uh program. So if you would like to start programming in Django You're welcome to do so, and this is a really great way to start. Um, and sponsor Django Girls. They need funds to be able to continue to run this

Speaker 5: magnificent organization. Um, so go to DjangoGirls. org and you can find more information about that. That's it.

Speaker 4: Begin.

Speaker 1: Excellent. I'm gonna start. This domain doesn't work at the moment. The site has been taken down, really badly timed. Um But it's being rebuilt. Uh there's some sprints happening in the UK this week from a group of Django social people from Cambridge and they're going to rebuild it for us. I don't know what's going on here. Um, just a quick if I can ask for a quick show of hands. Um, did anyone in the room attend the social last night? Well Excellent. Thank you for coming. Um the little sort of idea for those who who weren't there, um, what is Django Social it is um essentially uh an easy to run social event for the Django community. Um it's just a chance for in-person interaction with no sort of

Speaker 1: knowledge barrier to entry um and Django being the common interest, the conversation starter, the um reason to be there. Um right, so I'm gonna stop saying I'm in a minute as well. Uh Django Social. The idea for this came, I attended um in 2022. uh the Django Day event in Copenhagen. Those of you don't know it, it's a small um one-day mini Django conference. Uh it was held again last week. We had 10 live talks throughout the day, back to back to back 10 times, um, with lightning talks as well. It was a really good thing, it's all online if you want to go and check out. But

Speaker 1: The key of this one was in 2022 the date um it was the first time I'd been out in and amongst the Python community for two or three years or a couple of years And it just gave that bug of being out and chatting to people and being around people again. So the idea came to start Django Social in London. At that point, the regular meetup hadn't started again. And we kicked off with a simple walk in the park, which is the sort of main photo there. You may recognise a couple of faces. This was one of the learnings from it was actually I hadn't put on there that it was specifically a Django developer walk. We had a couple of international students come along just for a stroll. Um we had a guy turn up because he liked the film.

Speaker 1: We've we've developed from there. It's been great. We've done really in one of the big successes is our co-working day. We've no run that twice in London. Somebody's offered us some office space and we've brought people in for the day, bring your laptop, crack on with what you're doing, but with people doing the same thing. Um The group has sort of grown through that time. Um Torchbox in the UK have now asked to run one in Bristol so they can get the Bristol community back together. I said there's a group in Cambridge. Um We've got New York, obviously last night Raleigh. This was a snapshot a couple of minutes ago. The community has risen to nearly 600 people, eight groups, four countries,

Speaker 1: and it's growing. The reason it's quite so simple is I think we've spoken about it, organiser fatigue is real, running meetups is hard work. We're lucky in London there is still regular meetups, but the socials just fill in that sort of gap. A lot of meetups haven't restarted since the pandemic. And I think this is the nice way to get people back out and about. without really having any commitment of doing anything. You can do it outside if you need to. You can do it in, it can be anything that you want that you enjoy doing. Board gaming nights, that sort of thing as well. The new site, as I said, should be up soon, but this would take you to the meetup page where the communities are growing, where you can find your local group.

Speaker 1: If you want to Start your own group in your city if your city hasn't got a Django meetup actively happening. Um just the simple steps get in touch with me, I will set you up with the community page and then uh help you plan the first event and then just plan another do it again do it again afterwards and hopefully it will become regular and you'll get people turning up. Thank you. Um that's back on there. We're around all week if you want to come and chat further about it. Um

Speaker 4: 30 more seconds.

Speaker 1: Yeah, or you can just connect with me on these. There we go. I won't use it all.

Speaker 4: No problem. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome.

Speaker 6: I'm so excited to be here. Thank you all. So, as I'm any knight on the automation panda, I'm known for software testing, and when I'm not testing my code, I'm testing my patience with my cars. This is my car, it is a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. Wow, it's older than me. So um I bought this car. Uh it was a pandemic purchase. We all bought puppies or cars or something to keep us occupied. And when I bought this car, if you notice, what what is that thing there? That's a stick shift. I did not know how to drive a manual transmission. That's okay. I'm an engineer. I'll figure it out. I bought it from some some guy out in the country in Greensboro and um He was telling me, mash the clutch! That was a fun way trying to figure out how to get that thing home.

Speaker 6: But we figured it out and we got there and it was great. And so then I'm driving around for about a week or two, and then I find a gasoline leak. Um, if you didn't know, in the Volkswagen Beetle, the engine is in the back, the gasoline tank is in the front, and it was leaking out by the wheels. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's leaking gas. This is really bad. That's okay. I'm an engineer. I'll figure it out. So I looked up the parts. I got in the manual. Apparently there are tons of stores online where you can buy aftermarket parts for these very old classic cars. And so I bought the kit. It cost me, I don't know, twenty, thirty, forty bucks. And then I opened up the the hood and I fixed it and the gas leak was done. Yes, no more leaking. No more cars gonna blow up, right? Wonderful. Two weeks. Oh, and so then I go out, I'm like, yay, I can drive my car. I drive it around Carrie because I'm local here in North Carolina.

Speaker 6: I get some bubble tea. Bubble tea is the same color as my car. I realize that it's really cool. Celebrations, everything's happy, right? Wrong. Two more weeks later, the whole engine blows up on the highway. I'm driving down I-40 on the way home from church and I just see smoke billowing out the back. I'm like, oh. My gosh, I call up AAA, they haul my car away. Um apparently there this this car was not good. Well the car was good, the engine was bad. And so I'm like, well, that whole engine is literally toast and fried and warped, and I've had people tell me just the rebuilding is not worth it. So what do I do? I go get a whole new engine. And I tell myself, ah, you know, swapping an engine that seems really hard. I've never done car stuff before. That's okay. I'm an engineer. I'll figure it out.

Speaker 6: And so sure enough, there are entire companies these days that will build new old Volkswagen engines and ship it to your house or your car shop. And then I figured, okay, well I'll jack it up. I'll drop the engine out. You actually drop the engine out of the bottom of the Volkswagen. And I swapped the engines and I got it back on the road. Awesome. I also noticed that the interior was kind of icky in my car because this thing is, like I said, older than I am. That's okay. I'm an engineer. I'll figure it out. So I got a whole interior kit. You can see I tore off the old door panel. It's all water staining. I put hush mad and vapor barriers and look how nice that is. Is that nice? I think it's pretty nice. Oh, thank you, thank you. I also gutted the entire interior straight down to the bare metal and did all the everything.

Speaker 6: And so this is what it looks like now. That's me. Putting in the headline. Doesn't that look a lot better? I think it looks like yeah, woo man. So here's another view of the front seat. Look at that new steering wheel. Oh, it's so nice. And there's the back bench and you'll notice those are six by nine speakers there. Underneath that bench is an eight-inch subwoofer In a car that small. Yes, I did it. My beetle goes boom, boom. It's amazing. So it's all well and good, right? Well not exactly. I still have engine trouble all the time. This car is Oh, it is a thorn in my side. I woke up one morning, I see this little puddle of oil. I'm trying to tune it. It's there's all sorts of trouble. So what do I do when this happens? I bust out my manual. I say, that's okay. I'm an engineer. I'll figure it out. I've even done like a full carburetor swap, you know, the fuel mix, air, all that stuff.

Speaker 6: I have another car. I I just could not take enough punishment. I bought another old Volkswagen. That's a Carmen Ghia convertible there. 1974. It's a little bit younger Almost 50 years old. But all this to say is um when I got into this, I didn't really know how to do cars. Uh and a couple years ago when I got into Django, this was like 2016 or so, I didn't know web development. But I didn't let that that inhibition stop me. I was like, you know what? I can figure this out. I'm an engineer. I've got this. So if I can do these kinds of things. . Then you can do whatever kinds of projects you're working on. So be encouraged. That's okay. Y'all are engineers. You can figure it out. Amen? Yes. Thank you very much for the time. My name is Andy Knight. And um come talk to me about cars.

Speaker 4: Thank you, Andy.

Speaker 6: It's not a bug, it's a feature. Ha ha ha ha ha ha Hi everybody, I am Adam.

Speaker 7: And I am Snakita. And we work together at the Motley Fool. And one day we are chatting about how hard it is to find good Django stickers.

Speaker 8: And we thought we can help. So we decided to do our own spin on the Django Pony.

Speaker 7: So Sangeita watched a lot of YouTube tutorials. And she bought a stylus pen and she set up Canva and she bought Procreate.

Speaker 8: And Adam created DjangoStickers. com to showcase all of the stickers we designed. Fun fact, he actually built the site using some of his own open source projects.

Speaker 7: And since we are both going to this Django Con, we thought it would be fun to print out the stickers and bring them here. So this is our way to give back to the community that has helped us so much over the years.

Speaker 8: So please come find us to get your sticker packs to show off your Django awesomeness. They look like these, so yeah, come find us.

Speaker 7: And we'll be sitting right over there, so you can come right over there after our talk if you want to find us.

Speaker 8: Yes Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 6: So um I'm Drew, as n uh you just said I'm the program chair here, and I'm gonna talk to you about a new software development methodology. So you've heard about many of these before. There's BDD behavior-driven development. Um Pat Viafor, one of our speakers, is going to be talking about that tomorrow. There's DDD, domain-driven development. Uh Pavel Svieradov is giving one on that tomorrow afternoon as well. There's test-driven development, feature-driven design, iterative incremental development, uh acceptance test-driven development. Uh wait, that's got out order, sorry. uh object-oriented advanced analysis and design, and my personal favorite, resume-driven development. But none of them captures how software really gets developed, right? I mean, yeah, you have all these fancy things, but in the end there's something that just drives you as a programmer.

Speaker 6: And for me, that's rage.

Speaker 7: I've written so many features and bug fixes for a very simple reason. The status quo just pisses me off to the point that I say to myself, hell with it, I'm just gonna fix it. But that's not really enough though, is it? Plus, RDD is already taken by resume-driven development. I can't use that. So, what's another good word for rage? How about spite?

Speaker 6: Spite-driven development. It works, but even that's not quite enough. There's more to it. You gotta think about just how sudden that it is, how spontaneous it is. And so I'm gonna present this spite score and a spontaneity score. We'll start with a spontaneity

Speaker 7: score, it's a little bit easier to explain.

Speaker 6: If it's a one, it's something you kind of expected might happen, but if you go higher, the constant can just get worse and worse and even worse. The spite score, a little bit harder to quantify, but it's a measure of just how much rage a particular bit of breakage causes in you. Just like the spontaneity score, one is super mild stuff, just like, hey, that's not cool. Uh but as it increases, you get more towards um uh getting upset to getting to figuring out how I can best destroy my laptop. To even worse, I'm gonna go in a cat go buy an off-the-grid cabin and take up woodworking and never touch a computer again. So putting it together

Speaker 7: You multiply the spite score by the spontaneity score, and that gives just about she gives uh gives you a measure of how much joy fixing the bug will give you. So sort them in descending order and start working from there. So what does that give us? Spontaneous spike-driven development. And just remember, when things break, SSDD. Thank you.