Learning Wagtail

Speaker 1: Hi y'all, um I'm Dawn Weegis and this is going to be a little interactive so I'd like some group participation. So when I say hello, can you say hello back? Hi guys, thanks So this is my first talk and I'm a lot less nervous than I thought I was gonna be. Um it's a friendly crowd, so I'm excited. Um so This is about learning wagtail and I did a species classification of the beginner learner and then in the context of learning wagtail and really like my goal of um At the end of this, I'd like to everyone to be reflective on what type of learner you are, what ways you can you've met and seen other types of learners, and then ways you can contribute to the Wagtail community to engage more people like me who want to

Speaker 1: to jump in and and learn some new things, right? So um a little bit about myself. I am my My background is in merchandising and e-commerce um and I am a self-taught programmer. However, I did just finish a boot camp And um so I'm also a ukulele dabbler. I'm not good, but this is one of my uh one of my uh goals to learn on without without pressure, right? And then um I'm also an expert. being a beginner. So so I want to give some shout-outs. My Django encoding journey and the reason why I'm in front of you guys is because of DjangoCon 2016 when it came to Philly. It was an awesome experience. Also Django Girls taught me a ton

Speaker 1: and was really my first foray into learning. learning in a really productive way that felt like I was I was building off the bat. And so I mean as as you guys may know there's a balance on how much effort you're gonna put in and then the results you you you yield immediately and beginners get a little disheartened. So trying to find that balance and and traverse that that fine line of how hard um how hard to work and when you're when you're coaching someone through that, um, helping them and ushering them through with constant feedback and and and little wins, right? Also, I wanted to give a shout out to Kurt Wall from the Atomic Wagtail presentation in that 2016 DjangoCon.

Speaker 1: very great presentation. It's not the only presentation, but one of the first ones that I had that really kind of articulated why Wagtail in a very um lay term late term. Philly Pug, Django Girls, and My Boot Camp. So who considers themselves particularly good at starting new projects or being a beginner? And yeah. Uh let's see, someone you were first. Why do you think you're particularly um good at being a beginner?

Speaker 2: I get excited about learning about something. about but I don't know enough to be discouraged yet.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Naivete, that's great. But you know, um and I don't sure if they can hear me, but um your answer was great. You uh be Very excited about learning new things, right? Um so I like to think that I'm really good at being a beginner because I've started a lot of new things before. Um and um Here are some insights more on that. So how do you code? It's a very vague question, but I like to say that I'm methodical and relentless almost methodical to a fault sometimes that gets in the way of me being productive. So being able to be reflective on how you learn will also inform certain approaches and what you can ask from your community So I'd like to take this back to one of my favorite uh favorite movies.

Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you're all familiar. If you haven't seen it, it's a great cartoon. Uh Land Before Time from 1998. Uh or excuse me, 1988. So each of these characters are going to display a certain species in the learning community, and we're going to talk about archetypes and then how they may apply to Wagtail. So first we have Littlefoot. This is the Apprentice Rex. So Littlefoot uh with their band of friends really used and leveraged his friends to make sure he was you could traverse this journey. So some strengths that Littleford had is he learns all the tips and tricks of the trade and being able to have that community, you get that quickly. Or you can you can get that from someone who's

Speaker 1: continually practicing, right? Um a few other things, but Little Fitz at the mercy of luck. If he can't stumble upon a good a good group of people to help him, uh, no, you may not be able to leverage all of those all of those skills So Apprentice Rex with uh with Wagtail, look around you. So anyone who's new with Wagtail, can you raise your hand? Yeah? Anyone who feels like they can consider consider themselves old heads or intermediates, can you guys raise your hands? Match up. Pair up, try to find some time. I mean I think there's an active process of uh being able to articulate things that you know which helps solidify that and maybe can give you new ideas and then also the giving back to your community.

Speaker 1: I have not had this experience in Wagtail in particular, but I learned really well from the apprentice, the apprentice rex. Uh bang your head against a wall of saurus. Now this one, I'm trying to get out of being this one, but this is really how I um how I work. Um, I see a problem, I'm like, I can do it, and I'm just gonna like just kind of hack away. It's not pretty code, but by the 15th, 16th, 20th time of refactoring, it's gorgeous. Okay. But who knows that code and how to do that function better than than me. Uh no one. I got it. Because I did it ten times. Um but I'm a I'm a little bit of a bull in a China shop. You know, I might break a couple things while I'm trying to fix something else, right? So here's how we are

Speaker 1: with Wagtail. So we only look at the docs, but Wagtail's new. We're we've all in previous presentations said that we're gonna continue to add some things to um Wagtail docs. So sometimes there's a few expletives. And um I heard I someone can do this, so I know I can. So that confidence, refilling that into our um into ourselves, that's that's Gonna be how we have to move forward, right? Um next we have Ducky. Uh the talk about it off talk about it of us. Right. Um talks chatty people who like to engage in these philosophical discussions so you can get into the deeper levels of what you're doing and why. Um this one's kind of fundamental, especially with um

Speaker 1: the way that Wagtail um ha uh kind of circumvents the need for view um for views and other really cool tools, the stream fields and things like that, um being able to theoretically understand what it's doing and what it's navigating um may help certain people. This this one's not so much me. Sometimes when we're talking about it, we gotta be about it, right? But this is also this is it's just different skill sets and different strengths of different folks, right? Um so if you're staying Friday and Saturday, sprints. This is a good way way to talk to people. co-workspaces, buddy system and projects. This is very sim similar to the apprenticesaurus, I think is what it was called. Apprentice Rex.

Speaker 1: Right? Um they buddying up, having a partner, some of these skill sets and and tools and proficiencies overlap. And so as I'm going through this, stuff like Who are you? How do you learn? What type of dinosaur are you? The Scarilododon. So this is a misnomer. They're not actually scared. They're just meticulous. Uh as a scared a lot of dawn, uh I am nervous I'm gonna break my code sometimes. Well I'll I'll teeter back. and forth between the bull in a china shop and scared a lot of gun. And um I'll uh have to research everything and I want to look at all of the pages all the times and my PC freezes because I have so many tabs open

Speaker 1: So um yes uh the scared eladodon is uh is a is a fierce uh fierce member of the community. Yeah. But we live in the docks Tutorials are great. Stack Overflow, we visit, but we visit everything. We just really just scalp in that. Ask anyone, ask everything. The watch and listen asaurus. So tutorials. These are very quiet and uh unassuming predators. Uh they will be in talks and actually in real time learn what's going on and talks. That's n I gotta re watch it at home. Thank goodness we record these things. I can't

Speaker 1: But taking notes and re um going back, that's my thing, but learning real time, understanding these um these videos and and and um and learning in that way. But one of the things we would love is your insights if you're sitting quiet and back and just watching, um how are you going to be able to give your value and your thoughts to the community, right? And so the way that they interact with uh Wagtail conferences You're here, good. You're feeding your learning your learning dinosaur into tutorial videos, things like that. We have Chomper, uh, the pterotython partiodactyl, right? So these are the people who are the social, um, I guess in the personality scales, they are the yellows, they bring people in, and this

Speaker 1: This is frankly not me, but why I'm in Django in the first place. Um we have lots of like warm, just loving it might just really feels like love in the community. Um and they can bring people in and kind of and welcome them into um just a a great framework, a community with a great framework attached and and and Wagtail in as well. So the ways that uh they interact um is the local user groups. I started with Philly Pug , meetups, co-works, and case studies. work as well. Um excuse me. Um yes.

Speaker 1: So there we are here we have the ever so um elusive uh race to the finish eraptor. So maybe many times these um these race to the finish eraptors know other languages. They feel like they can have a s uh a quicker learning curve On adopting new frameworks. And so here they're able to apply other theories and concepts and be able to invest back into the Wagtail community. But are a lot of people or some of us newbies are like whoa how'd you do that can you slow down so putting things in lay terms could be um an opportunity area for the race to finish a raptor So similar to the watch

Speaker 1: Alyssinosaurus, talks are gold. Uh demo slides, excuse me, demo sites with and without open source. So you can see just where where the bounds of this framework go. And Wagtail definitely has that. And it's great to see a lot of the presentations we had today because it really I see the wheels and the cogs turning and people And it's been doing the same in my own as well. So I'm just gonna take a lot of these things home and try them out, right? So why I stuck with Wagtail. Um all of these things above, I mean each of the points in my on on getting acclimated and learning. Wagtail has, and some of them are in the beginning stages and some are um advanced and um and and and well documented but these are opportunity areas where we can continue to explore

Speaker 1: land community and and be a more inviting area. So as a species hybrid between bending your head against the wallasaurus and skeletoladodon, I stay I stay because I can tell the docks are written with love. Um it sounds silly, but the conversational nature and friendly resources I've been lucky to enough to encounter really are invaluable to me. And although I'm not a ptero python partiodactyl I thrive around people who thrive around people and feel encouraged to join and stay active myself. So some things I'd like personally I'd like to do with Wagtail, my background So a little bit more about my first project. I built I started building a CMS before I knew I was building a CMS.

Speaker 1: And then I tried to go to mezzanine and I was just so new in Django altogether and Python. I tried to go to mezzanine. I tried to go to Django CMS and really landed on Wagto because I uh was lucky enough to uh find a tutorial with uh Tom and I met Tom and he if you're going plug 9 a. m. tomorrow there is a beginner's tutorial and if it's anything like the one I already did it It was incredibly invaluable. We got a site all the way to deploy with Heroku. And I'm excited to try Divio next. So this was it was very exciting and um to continue with that in my e-commerce background um I'd like to learn um how I could do that with Oscar, Stripe, Wagtail. I'd also like to try the

Speaker 1: headless uh wagtail with view um and then customized dashboards um and automated report generization um generate excuse me generation Things like that. So if you have any projects, I'm a partner of source, one of those. So reach out, right? Uh so um my journey with my uh my project, so I am in a relatively dysfunctional department. Um hopefully they're not looking. And for an personal exercise, I really challenged myself to try to connect a lot of our uh departure So we would have merchandising assets and marketing assets along with um

Speaker 1: uh stock number or excuse me on um inventory reports, things that need to be automatically generated. We want alerts to when things reach to a certain threshold. We want to be able to have FAQs. We also want to be able to have personal profiles so we can interact on a friendly basis with our uh with our coworkers as well. Skype wasn't cutting it Right. So that was one of the things that I took on. I'm still in the very fledgling stages, but hopefully next time I see you guys I can tell you a little bit more advanced story on how that was a success. doing through that it was a long day so I

Speaker 1: if you guys have any questions about Renosaurus it was a pleasure speaking with you guys

Speaker 3: Are you spotted somewhere?

Speaker 1: They can be, yeah. Wherever you want, yeah.

Speaker 3: Do you do you see equal numbers of these different kinds of personas that you described? Or do you see more of one kind than another typically?

Speaker 1: And I'm It's a surprising amount of um tarot party Python talk a lotosaurus, something it's the the party one the ones that really engage with the community are surprising in surprising numbers with Python. And I think that was that's what I'm drawn to as compatible matches. But I do see, yes, in Python and particular.

Speaker 3: And which ones do you think are typically worst served by the documentation and other resources that are available for learners?

Speaker 1: Uh I'd like to the chic the the watch and listen to I think videos are underrepresented. Good, really nice tutorial videos. I know take a look takes a lot of time and a lot of video editing. Sometimes you don't have the resources available um but I know as somebody who tries to dabble in all of them and just learn best about my learning styles um it's hard to find those. But I've seen a I've seen a few Few really good ones with Wagtail. And I leverage conference talks a lot as well. Um when they do get in the weeds and they just kind of zoom through, I can slow it down, pause it, try it out, things like that. Yeah

Speaker 1: Um

Speaker 4: have you experimented with any micrail e-commerce solutions?

Speaker 1: Not yet. I'm excited. Anyone else doing it? Let me know No, yeah.

Speaker 4: I 'm gonna try to do it.

Speaker 1: Okay, great. We'll we'll connect. Yeah.

Speaker 5: There are also some people in the uh Wag Kettle Slack who we're talking about. with getting uh Django Oscar Wagtail upgraded for Wagtail 2 and Django 2. May have happened over the past couple weeks, but there there is some And then around that some problems like that.

Speaker 4: There's an e-commerce package, I think you mentioned at some point, or was I

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 6: There's Django Oscar, which is a separate package for e-commerce. really well establishing quite a few people doing combinations with with web tech uh

Speaker 7: if you use both would do you think some advantages uh are are there Uh Wagnell has over WordPress.

Speaker 1: Over WordPress? I'm not familiar with WordPress now. I mean I b uh beginning stages like I mean like a decade ago. T touching with it, but not much. Thank you.