mailwal

How about that, it's the 30th and the next "monthly" edition is going out.

Tim Schilling

If you have thoughts about anything in this email, let me know! Seriously, I want to hear from you.

This is attempt number four five at this edition. It's been a struggle to come up with what to say here. But now I've got something, so let's see how it goes!

The questions I used to ask my direct reports in our monthly 1:1's were:

  1. What's gone well?

  2. What's challenged you?

  3. What's frustrated you?

I'm pretty sure I stole these questions from Camille Fournier or Sarah Drasner. I liked them because the shared notes helps a person build their portfolio over time. It also gave me a vantage point into what they think is praiseworthy, where they want my consideration and where can I make things better.

What has gone well?

  • I recorded an overview video about what my mentorship offers people. If you're on the fence, give it a watch and let me know what you think. It only took ~60 takes.

  • djangoprobe.org continues to see projects sign up and share data! If you build Django projects, consider sharing how you use Django to help the community improve!

  • I felt good about my appearance on the RealPython podcast. It hasn't aired yet. Christopher is an excellent host and I highly recommend people chat with him.

  • The Milwaukee Brewers won the World Series!

What has been challenging?

  • Django Commons is seeing dozens of projects migrate over from Jazzband. The biggest challenge here is mainly being available when others are active. Open Source is driven by people's scheduling syncing up and being available at the same time, but it's a lot.
    It's good to see the other admins volunteer to help out with the process as most transfers require something slightly different than the others. It takes a strong sense of ownership and accountability to see these through. I'm extremely encouraged to see that our admin team is standing up to that challenge.

  • My IndyPy talk about the changes to how Django gets developed has been evolving. I originally wanted to go in with the point of, "Build on Django because it's so robust and thriving". But when I looked at the data, that's not exactly the truth. Until this past year, the increase in new contributors (the velocity) has gone down (negative acceleration). This past year, we saw a significant bump for the first time since the pandemic. We're still talking about 100 new contributors each year and something like 500 new contributors in the ecosystem. The plan is to publish these findings, but there's only so much time in the day.
    The other point I wanted to make was that Django's ecosystem is better than everyone else's. And while yes, we have 150+ significant third-party packages compared to 80 for Laravel and Rails, and 30 for FastAPI, about 76% of our packages support Django 6.1. The others are all 90+%.
    At the end of the day, I want to talk about all the things the Django community has been doing, which those numbers don't take anything away from. Open source is a Rube Goldberg machine. We put good energy in and it comes out... somewhere.

What has been frustrating?

  • Clanker text. What makes it worse is that my opinions on it haven't changed. Using a clanker to write your messages obfuscates your personality and your understanding, which causes communication to break down.

  • The cacophonous void that is social media. It's simultaneously isolating and intimidating. It's a real challenge to base your business on organic growth with the main marketing platform being social media. But, that's why this year's theme is "obstinate rigor".

What's upcoming

I've been hosting events on the Django Discord server. You can find out more on my site here. There's even a calendar you can subscribe to. The various types are:

  • Contributor drop-in time

  • Learn to contribute to Django

  • Debugging tutorial labs

I'd like to add a skills sharpening event type eventually too. Think, everyone builds a view that needs to enforce a unique constraint in a highly concurrent environment, then we compare and discuss. But I need to do some more thinking on it. Or just a few people to tell me they'd want to attend.

Oh! And if you're in Indianapolis on November 24th, come to IndyPy and say hi! I'm giving a talk that night.

Recent posts:

  • 28 October 2026 - Looking for a job? Start a blog.
    It's the return of the blog! If job hunting, writing may be your best way to stand out.

  • 26 October 2026 - Why use open source at all with AI?
    I've been anxiously asking myself a question lately. Why use open source at all with AI? You can generate your own "good enough" solutions pretty quickly.

  • 18 October 2026 - Django's Brightest Timeline
    Did you know that we're in Django's brightest timeline? One reason is that the process to add new features to Django is in a wonderful state.

  • 17 October 2026 - Thank-you's from DjangoCon US 2022
    I wrote a bunch of thank-you's four years ago and finally published them!