Weeknotes (2024 week 49)

Django Steering Council elections

I have been thinking long and hard about running for the Django Steering Council. I think there are a few things I could contribute since I’ve been using Django for 16 or more years, and have been working on, maintaining and publishing third-party apps almost all this time. I have also contributed a few small features to Django core itself, and contributed my fair share of tests and bugfixes. The reason why I haven’t been more involved was always that I feared the review process with what I perceive to be a too unrestrained perfectionism. Teaching people is good, but I fear that those who teach are self-selected survivors of the process, which come to appreciate the perfectionism a bit too much. It’s somewhat the same as with the Swiss naturalization process – the hurdles are very high, and some of those who weather the process maybe are or grow to be too fond of it.

An important point is that this has nothing to do with being nice (or not). Everybody has always been great, maybe with the exception of myself back when I didn’t understand that the problem wasn’t the individuals but the way everyone has agreed things should be done.

I’m not the only one who thinks that we should improve the process somewhat. So, I’m definitely going to look out for candidates who think this is important.

There are a few reasons why I’m not running myself at this time. A somewhat important reason is that my candidacy wouldn’t help diversity at all. This shouldn’t discourage anyone else with the same background from running – we cannot change the world all at once. More importantly, I have more personal reasons for being hesitant to accept new commitments. That being said, I’m looking forward to be more involved in the community in other ways. And also, it’s not now or never.

Releases

• feincms3-cookiecontrol 1.5.4: No functional changes, only code golfing. It’s nice to have a working cookie banner with a solution for embedding third party content only when people consent in less than 4KiB of minified (not compressed!) JavaScript.
• django-admin-ordering 0.20: Objects can now be reordered using arrow buttons instead of drag drop or manually changing the ordering field’s value. This should make the package more accessible. It’s always a joy when people contribute such useful improvements.
• django-prose-editor 0.10a?: See the recent blog post.