Community Update with Peter Grandstaff

Speaker 1: All right, so now we have a community update from DEFNA. My name is Peter Granstaff. I'm the president of the board of directors of DEFNA. And we are the organization that puts on this conference. Thank you This organization is really about the community and the people. This is our focus, is the events, the people bringing everyone together in in real space and online uh to our online attendees making connections, sharing knowledge, experience, and lifting each other up. DEFNA was founded 10 years ago now. So it's Django's birthday this year, 20, but DEFNA's as well at a big milestone of 10 years.

Speaker 1: Uh it was founded by Jeff Triplett, Craig Bruce, and Stacey Hasler. It was uh the original No, I do not have slides. Thank you. The original purpose of DEFNA was to create a shield for Django. Because running a conference like this is hugely expensive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for this whole thing. And if you happen to run a conference under the DSF, for instance, and you had a big flop. And you went bankrupt. There could be a scenario where the IP of Django went up for auction. And that would be a nightmare

Speaker 1: situation for all of us. So we just run the events. DSF does its own thing, maintaining Django. Um and we both need sponsorship. DEFNA is run by a board of directors who all work extremely hard. We have some board members here in the first row, and I'm sure elsewhere out here. Can I get y'all to put your hand up? Thank you. Uh these people are are such a pleasure to work with. I've never seen uh a group that's so focused and and hard working together.

Speaker 1: I we all went out for dinner last night and I asked the board members to share with me what what drives them here, uh what keeps them going, keeps them coming back to put so much effort into running this conference. And what I heard from every single one of us was it's the people. It's it's all of you here. And it's especially seeing the evolution of these people who come to this conference and get involved. and seeing how they grow and expand and make the world a better place by helping others, reinvesting in the community. So I wanna ask everybody here

Speaker 1: to consider how you're reinvesting in the community community. Uh We need volunteers at events like this. We need organizers for next year's event. We need people to suggest venues to host this event at for future years. We need sponsors. Thank you, six feet up, Rev Sys, MongoDB, and all the others, but we need more. I'd love to get enough sponsors that we could lower the ticket price instead of raising it like we did a little bit on the corporate ticket this year. And it's up to us. Nobody else is just gonna do this. It's it's the Django community here in this room that's gonna make all this happen.

Speaker 1: We're gonna put in the effort. And anybody here right now listening to me can help. You can email us at helloatefna. org to get involved. To become an organizer for next year. You can talk to your boss about sponsoring. And if your boss says, no, that didn't make sense for us, you can come talk to me. And tell me why your boss doesn't want to, and maybe we can figure out a way to make it more appealing to them. You can also stick around Thursday and Friday this week for sprints where we're gonna contribute back to Django itself. And there's so many ways you can do that. There's

Speaker 1: there's code, there's documentation, there's community. I'm partial to community. A lot of people would like to maybe contribute code, but contributing to Django is hard and scary. So we have uh somebody to talk a little bit about getting started as a contributor. Lillian is involved with Django Space. Which has been an organization that's been a tremendous help in getting people started contributing to Django. And Lillian, if you'll come uh talk a little bit about that process for us. Okay, Lillian Tran.

Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm Lillian and I don't have the notes here, so I can't read off of them, but I'll share them on Slack later. So if you're interested in contributing to the sprints, they'll be on Thursday and Friday. And like Peter mentioned, there's the code, there's code contributions and then there's non-code contributions, and there's more information on the I'm gonna focus on the code contribution side Like Peter mentioned, it's, you know, it can be scary, but it doesn't have to be. Um so we want to make sure that you're going to be prepared.

Speaker 2: And what you can do is go to this site here. It's the contributing page for the Django project And you can go do the documentation. There's a ton of pages, so it can be overwhelming. There are many different sections. There's a section for how to run the tests, how to work with Git. Um so go do those. It'll be really helpful because when you go into sprints, you don't want to go in without setting up your environment and everything. So, the two basic things we emphasize is you want to go into Sprints with your environment set up and make sure you know how to run tests. Those are the very two important things to get through And then some other optional things are

Speaker 2: you want to be able to set up a debugger. Some people do this, some people don't. It's kind of optional, but it can be very helpful. And you want to learn how to use git and the rebase command. And then once you get through those basics, when you're ready to check out some tickets to work on, um The page for the tickets is at code. jangleproject. com, and then the repository is github. com/slash Django slash Django. And then there's a video by Sarah Boyce. She created a video with the voucher method. She describes the voucher method for picking out videos that explains like her technique for picking out videos if you're a first-time contributor.

Speaker 2: It's really helpful. There's also Django DockerBox and that's a Project where there are a lot of containers for working with the databases. So there's, you know, if you're testing against or Go MySQL, um, or if you're testing against front end with Selenium. It helps you get that set up quickly. So those are really helpful to check out and be prepared before you go to the Sprint State. I'll post these slides and I'll see you at Sprints.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Lillian.