Django Chat - Episode 187

Will: Welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I’m Will Vincent here with Carlton Gibson, and we’re very pleased to have on our friend, Paolo Melchiorre.

Carlton: Hello, Will.

Paolo: Hi everyone, and thanks for having me. As usual, it’s a pleasure to speak with you all.

Will: Let me give you a quick bio for those who don’t know, so you don’t have to. You are Django Software Foundation board member, Python Software Foundation fellow, prolific contributor to the Django code base, and to the Django website. Prolific selfie taker at conferences where you speak. You and Carlton got back from Django on the Med, which is the topic of discussion for today. I’m super happy about this episode because hopefully I won’t have to speak as much, but let me start with a question, which is: How did Django on the Med come about? Because it was originally in your head, Paolo.

Paolo: I remember sharing this idea with you (Will) and Carlton in San Diego for the first time. We had this great conference in San Diego after a long period without in-person conferences, due to the pandemic. It was great to meet you all for the first time in DjangoCon US. But at the same time, it was a long trip for me from Pescara to San Diego, and it was very tiring. We met the first day of sprints and I remember Simon, Mariusz, and you on the beach that morning when we took some time for ourselves. I realized that we needed more of this time as a team, as a small group of people to hang out together, to network a bit, to chat about our life and at the same time to sprint. Based on the history I found in the past other Python communities used to organize small sprints, and to have half-time working on something specific and half-time to be together. I remember I proposed this idea and from that moment I tried to push it in every opportunity. Then Carlton did the move and forced me in some way to transform this idea in reality, with the help of course of other people. It took us three years, but at the end we did it.

Carlton: The thing was that it had already been suggested. You wrote a blog post and started a forum discussion, and everyone said it was a great idea. But then nothing happened for another year. We kept talking about it until DjangoCon Europe this year, during the sprints in Dublin, when we finally decided to make it real. You even posted a picture of the notebook I had at the conference while taking notes, and we agreed we would organize the event in Palafrugell.

Paolo: Being together in Dublin made us realize we needed to make this event happen, and realizing that we need to create this event. Carlton say, okay, let’s find a moment in the year and a place where we can meet at least the two of us, we say. If other people will join, good. Otherwise, we spent together a few days and enjoy the time together. But at the end there were more than two of us.

Carlton: The danger was it was just you and me at a table. We sat in a café, the two of us, but we had, in the end, had 14 people come, which was wonderful for like a first go. It could have been just us, and it could have been said four or five or six people, we could have got just one house group. But then by the time we got 14, we had like three tables worth, that were sprinting together.

Will: I have to mention, Paolo, you wrote up a very detailed blog post that we’ll link to with all the photos of everyone together all the days. We will link to that, but it was well documented.

Paolo: The trick was to everyday took some picture and post on Mastodon. Also, Carlton did a lot of them and the other. I tried to aggregate all these posts together and with some automatic script to create the blog post.

Carlton: This is the Django On The Med hashtag that you can follow along, folks.

Will: While we’re showing stuff, I’ll show it all. This was the website that went up about the event and then the forum to subscribe.

Carlton: And my post Django On The Med homework is to, flesh out the site, move some Palafrugell details to a separate page. We’ve got a value map of some of the things that were achieved, that we can demonstrate the value of this. Let me phrase it as a question, Paolo, for me, we’ve really demonstrated the value of it. There are some amazing things we’re done in the short amount of time by the small group of people. And I think now we can go from, look, isn’t this a nice idea to look, and we did it, and it’s valuable and can we now get behind it as a community.

Will: We’ll also put it in the notes, but there were five different PRs opened, one closed, it wasn’t all just drinking in the sun.

Paolo: More than that, some people contributed in some documentation. I was working on a script to create the matrix of the future flags for the ORM. We are putting together a document that I think we’ll share in the next weeks. Not only the issue on GitHub, but we discussed more things than that. We created more value than what you can only see in GitHub. The better part, I think, is the connection that we created each other. We came back to having more connection because new people show up and people that you met only online for long time, you spent quality time together, and it was very interesting to do.

Will: I was jealous. I was on the Mediterranean as well, in Cyprus for a company event, but I was following it every day. We can mention Mark Smith, one of the people who was there, just joined JetBrains. I don’t know if it’s I don’t think PyCharm, but now he’s a colleague of mine.

Carlton: The two of you can organize an edition of Django on the Med in Cyprus.

Will: I’m open to it. We were in Paphos. The entire PyCharm team. Same thing you were saying, like a lot of these people I work with, but I hadn’t met in person. And there’s a similar mix of some fun stuff, some work, but nothing replaces in-person. It’s important to have.

Carlton: I think as well, was one thing that worked really well was that we did sprinting in the morning from 8am, which was early, had breakfast, coffee, croissants, stuff to get us going. And then till two o’clock when we broke for lunch, and then people had the afternoon to explore, could walk in the woods or go to the beach or walk along the “Camí de Ronda”, which is the coastal paths we have here. I think people seem to like it.

Paolo: I went swimming in the sea, which was great. I didn’t do a long swim, but I saw a lot of the coast, the fish. Other people like Mariusz. But for multiple runs around, people have a drink, people enjoy the beach or the Palafrugell town. Everyone did what they wanted to do to relax and to decompress after the to work in the morning.

Will: There was someone, I think it was on Fosstodon. Mariusz documented his runs and one of them was with Simon, but someone called him the “Paolo” of runs at Django events. That’s high praise.

Paolo: I saw Eric posted that Mariusz is the official selfie runner.

Will: I want to ask, Django On The Med, the idea was that this is what, twice a year? It’s been in Spain, but then it’ll also be in Pescara. Is that still?

Carlton: We’re going to move it to Pescara next year.

Will: That mug comes from when you went to PyCon Italia, Carlton, right?

Carlton: No, Paolo, brought for me as a gift for this time.

Paolo: I was specifically thinking of this moment when Carlton was able to show the Pescara mug in front of the camera. I’m joking. Yes, this is the plan to organize twice a year and in a period that is not high season. This year, weather has been marvelous in Palafrugell. We were able to run, to swim in the sea, but it was not so crowded. At the same time was sunny, but the prices of everything were not high, the flights and the hotel rooms. And we want to try to do the same things in Pescara. More or less, the weather is similar. We are still in the Mediterranean, specifically in the Adriatic Sea. The original idea was to organize in April, but we’ll see if we organize in the beginning of May. We’ll let you update on that. The goal is the same, to organize in an area not so touristic, but still a great area to explore in a period that is not so high season. To let everyone not spend a lot of money to reach us and to be there together and try to explore different area in the Mediterranean. But we are open also to other locations like Cyprus or other special edition.

Carlton: Like Malta. Joe’s based in Malta. There’s plenty of people around the Mediterranean, the theme is very simple. If you’re in the Django community, and you can see the Mediterranean not too far from your house, then let us know.

Will: France would be nice if somebody in France wants to. Paolo, I remember back three years ago when you first were talking about this. You mentioned that the Plone community that you worked in had something similar, I think it even, said, Plone had these events I think you even asked me, has Django ever had them? And I don’t think so. Is that the initial, or one of the inspirations is?

Paolo: The Plone community has been the first Python community I’ve ever been. And they used to organize a conference, but also sprinted in this way. If I remember correctly, the first one was in Sorrento. Because after organizing a conference in Naples, organized nearby in Sorrento, in a hotel, in a very similar way we did in Palafrugell. Off-season, but still good weather and the sea. But they also organize another one in Innsbruck during the winter. They go skiing after. But other communities organize very similar events like that. And then there is also the core Python developer that organize. The last time they organize, think, in September in Cambridge.

Carlton: It was in Cambridge, at the Arm offices.

Paolo: Exactly. They do very similar things. I asked a lot of people, but nobody remembers something like that. Of course, we had sprints after conference, but these types of sprints are totally different.

Will: That’s a question for, or to expand upon. There are typically there are sprints for two days after DjangoCons, but it feels to me again, not having been at Django On The Med, like those are, people are a bit tired, and it’s not quite long enough. And people sometimes come for, they stay for one day, but not two. Does that match your experiences? I know Carlton, you usually were, you were fellowing, you were running around helping everyone.

Carlton: When I was following, I tried to run the getting started contributing thing because you DjangoCon you would have a number of new contributors turn up each time, and they all require some guidance. Otherwise, they come they’re giving their time, but they were they’d be wasting it. In Django On The Med we had, I think, five people who were new contributors. They had some awareness they had some they weren’t totally new contributors, but they self-identified as new contributors. We managed to get all of them going on good projects, which was super, including an 18-year-old ticket on the cache framework, which I would dearly love to see resolved. There’s an open PR for that, which we hope to get in. And some things about speeding up. We were working on that over a couple of days. To see a new contributor come in and pick up an 18-year-old ticket, it’s got a ticket number of something like 5,000, five and half down. That’s really low. Know, anything under 10,000 is rare these days. And then there was work on speeding up the static files, the collection, and things that will make huge differences. And these are from new contributors. These are from people that aren’t established, that aren’t known within the community already. And that was phenomenal for me. But I think you’re right. In the end of a DjangoCon, typically you stay for the first day and then people start flying out. It’s not enough time to sit down and get a dedicated piece of work done. Whereas in three days, we had perfect amount of time. Mariusz has taken on implementing native DB cascade. When you’ve got on the on delete clause, instead of having it done in Python, it collects all the objects and walks the tree backwards. You’ll be able to use the database constraints there, which for years has been one of those performance gotchas when you start scaling up your project. You have to delete a whole tree of objects, and you’ve got thousands of objects being deleted all in memory. That’s going to be a massive optimization for a lot of people, and Mariusz said quite openly, there’s no way he could have got that done without being at Django on the Med: Simon Charette was there, Lily was there, Jacob Walls, the new fellow, was there, and the four of them together working on the ORM. They’re all ORM specialists, and to have the four of them in the room, four of them there with a whiteboard doing work that literally isn’t possible to get done online.

Paolo: I remember for the first time being in the sprint of DjangoCon Europe in 2017 in Florence has been my first time. At that time was very great for me because I only was an attendant of the conference. I had no responsibility or talk to deliver. For me, it was great. I went there full of energy, and it was great to speak with everyone. In every of my talk there’s this image with me, Marcus and Marc Tamlyn, working on my first issue. Then I realized after conference by conference how different can be the same event, the sprint. When I went to other conferences where I was to deliver a talk, I found myself at the end of the conference very tired. I tried to join the sprints, I tried to share what I learned, but I realized also that I had few energies to share with others. And the worse is when I helped to organize some conference. I usually try to help to organize PyCon Italia and other conferences. In the case, it’s less energy you have at the end of it. It depends on from what role you have in the conference. Having the sprint at the end can be something that you can enjoy, or you can put a lot of energy or not. The idea for this type of event is to don’t have to have a lot of responsibility, create a talk or other things, maintain the event, the less structure that’s possible. That you can enjoy. Carlton did a lot of job finding for breakfast and other things he worked there, but I hope it was not too much for him to do, and he was able to enjoy the three days.

Carlton: It was stunning. There’s a lot of work organizing things. And what was interesting was because it was you and I doing it at small scale, there are lots of things we couldn’t do we knew we couldn’t do them beforehand. That took the pressure off in a way it’s like, give yourself permission to do it in a small scale, and then prove that it works. And then we can get more people on board to try to do more in the future. I was working on what I’ve nicknamed the fast Django project. It’s a bent about benchmarking Django is coming up in the roadmap. In the first morning, we had held a road mapping session where we went through various things. We’ll do a write-up of that and the findings that we had, but it was a really great session. That the conversations again in the room, which don’t work the same on the forum or on the GitHub issues. There’s an understanding that you can reach between people that sometimes gets missed in those, those written online environments. But coming out of that, there was this talk about can we benchmark Django? Can we profile it? Can we improve the forms? Okay. I didn’t manage to get much actual coding done for that, but I did manage to get a Google doc worked out with an outline of things that I’m and then come back to and work on. More, can open up to contribute. I can say, look, here’s an outline of work that needs to be done. Can we, know, anyone fancy putting this bit together? Anyone fancy putting that bit together? And hopefully then we can get some speed momentum for that, but I did have enough time and energy to get that.

Will: There were some interesting, not benchmarks, there’s the NanoDjango project, but then I’m blanking on the name of it, the person you worked with on template Google Summer Code, he’s got a project. Maybe he two projects. What is it?

Carlton: We’ve got two projects. The first one, I think it’s called Django Rapid, which is an example of a REST view layer. We’re using what’s called ‘msgspec’ serializers. And then he profiled that against FastAPI and showed that, within, you’re getting comparable performance already with Django using modern serialization techniques, but compared to say FastAPI. And that’s a nice benchmark because we always hear this story that Django is slow. No, Django is not slow. A lot of the benchmarks are comparing async to sync, and they’re not running enough workers to really exercise the CPUs on sync because you’ve got blocking operations, that thread is sat there idle. You have multiple workers in order to get good throughput on a sync deployment and things like that. And also a lot of this is from a few years ago. That’s Django Bolt, second one. Lots of it from a few years ago, where Django wasn’t as fast. And what we need to show is, look, this is what Django was doing. This is what it’s doing now. This is what you’re capable of. That Django Bolt project there is a whole other exciting thing again. That is using a Rust front end in front of Django. Why has Python historically gone slow when you’ve got this GIL and the whole excitement? One of the exciting things about Python 3.14 coming out is the free threaded Python core, which will remove the GIL that you have to have proper concurrency with threads. Whereas previously we haven’t had that. Now, what the Django Bolt project there is using Rust threads, which are proper OS threads not bound by the GIL to run each separate Python handler. And he’s getting results like, what does he say, they’re achieving 60,000 plus requests per second. Which is lightning fast.

Will: That’s faster than other frameworks that we know and love, too, I think.

Carlton: Absolutely. And there’s no reason why they couldn’t do the same trick. Rust is much faster than Python. Why is Rust much faster than Python? A slower level code, it’s compiled down code, but also you haven’t got these GIL problems. If you use Rust to take the GIL issue out of it, you can make Python go quickly. You’ve always been able to do that, but what Farhan is doing is demonstrating this. And hopefully with that and with some nice benchmarks and some blog posts and other such things, put pulling all of this work together, we can help change this narrative that we have in the community that somehow Django goes slow. When really it’s not.

Will: Benchmarks, if it’s not measured, it doesn’t count in a way. There’s the same thing going on with LLMs. We were discussing with Jeff Triplett (I think that episode comes out after this one) 42% or something of the SWE verified is Django tests. It’s like, we all love a number, but where did that number come from? Jacob Walls was joking about when we were discussing this about doing a blog post about: “Oh, Django is so slow” and then getting some ORM stuff, which might be costly, and then tweaking and going, if I did this, then it comes out of this. What it comes out as, it is lightning fast and more than fast enough for any service level requirement you might have in the real world.

Paolo: In the web field, speaking about this benchmark, sometimes it’s not correct at all. I remember a very great talk by Antonio Cuni, a core Python developer, at EuroPython. It was demonstrating how Python is slow for central things, but in a way that it doesn’t matter, for example, in the web context. When you have to interact with other services, services like your cache, your database, the things that matter is not how the language is fast or not, because more the time you were waiting for others to give you contents. The great things we saw during the Django On The Med was to see two great gurus of the ORM, like Simon and Mariusz, on trying to find a way to improve. Mariusz was working to improve and speed up the delete on the DB. The more we work on that topic, I think the more the whole system will be faster. Another interesting thing is the asynchronous database connector. There is another great pull request that is still waiting to be completed and merged. And the more we know about this topic, the more we can improve. What I tried to explain in an article I wrote before the Django on the Med to explain that we need to measure what features we have and what numbers we can improve. The more features we have for all the database, the better will be the experience for everyone with Django and the feeling that Django per se is not slow. And the language is not something that impacts much in the speeds of Django.

Carlton: On that point, it’s like what really frustrates me about benchmarks is people do these synthetic benchmarks and rarely do they talk about, how many requests per second do you need? What is your service level requirement? What is the throughput you require? Most websites, if it did a hundred requests a minute, that would be like amazing, but you can do thousands of requests a minute without even breaking a sweat on the smallest of instance. And yet, people are like, I can’t use Django, it’s slow. How fast does your service really need to go? And it, it doesn’t. The second thing though, is on that DB grid, Paolo and Jacob were able to sit there in the first morning. They were able to get like the proof of concept for putting together the real data for your grid. You had, within a couple of hours, you had proof of concept for the output.

Paolo: With the help of Jacob, we created a table for the feature flag we already have in the database drivers for the database we had internally. And also we found a way to improve this documentation, but the proof of concept has been made the first morning together with Jacob.

Will: It hurt me that I couldn’t be there. You did have at least one sponsor: Python España.

Carlton: We had three, yes. Python España very nicely sponsored the breakfast. Thank you, Python España. And the DSF gave us some sponsorship as well. Thank you, DSF. And also Buttondown sponsored the newsletter, which it was perhaps nothing, but it all counts. And it was something that if I hadn’t had that, I’d been like, how am I going to do this? Thank you again, Buttondown there. And the “Ajuntament de Palafrugell”, which are the council in Palafrugell, they provided the venue and lots of help there. I wanted to thank them.

Will: Should we switch to books, other things we wanted to mention?

Carlton: You got any leftovers?

Paolo: I want to say thanks to Daniele that help us to track everything we did during the sprint. It was very effective in helping us, we learned how to track everything, how to provide the value of what we did. Sometimes we want to solve an issue, and then we start thinking to the next one because is what we do, what we like. And Daniele did a great job in helping us to tracking everything, and maybe we’ll share something after the event. He’s a lot of knowledge on this field, it’s been very effective in doing that. I think also, Carlton appreciates that.

Carlton: I think this event was successful that if we can’t show that beyond us saying, it was excellent. If we can really point to something that you know, that these concrete things were achieved, then not only can we get the community on board for the future editions, not only can we help it to grow into a bigger event, but we can say to sponsors, look, and you really should be backing this because look what comes out of it. There was this line on the Python blog about the core developer sprints there that the sprints are the best bit of a conference. And the great thing about the core developer sprints, they’re the sprints without the conference, but was the same on Django On The Med. It’s where it’s where the work’s going to get done ultimately. To be able to demonstrate that is great. To Daniele to bring his expertise there is something that we don’t have, it’s a set of tools that we’re not equipped with otherwise.

Will: If anyone is interested in the next one, they should absolutely sign up for the newsletter on the Django On The Med site. We’ll feature it in the Django News newsletter, but that’ll be the announcements.

Carlton: It’s going to take me a couple of weeks to refresh the site and get power onboard contributing to it so we can get it moving forward. But yes, basically keep your eyes peeled. We will be pushing it forward for May next year in Pescara.

Will: I think we’re at the book section of the show. Carlton, do you want to go first?

Carlton: I’ve been reading this book, which is “How infrastructure Works” by Deb Chachra. It’s a wonderful book. It talks about water supplies and other such infrastructure things, but how they form systems and how we fit into those systems. And it’s perspective changing. It’s like everyone likes to think that they’re this freestanding thing, but we’re very much not. We’re very many nodes in a much bigger thing. And I find I’m really enjoying it, I recommend.

Will: How did you find out about it? How do these things cross your attention?

Carlton: I think this one came flying past on Mastodon one day, and I was like, okay, I’ll check that out. And then I Googled it, and then I was like, okay, wow, that looks great. And then I ordered it, and it arrived, and it’s like, oh yes, this is a lovely perspective changing way of looking at it. She’s some engineer, or maybe she does teach it. The way she places the human being in their built environment, in their social environment, not much social, but in their physical environment, the built physical environment that we depend on much. She is able to talk through the interconnectedness of it all. It’s eye-opening, really, I think.

Will: She’s a professor here near Boston.

Carlton: She talks a lot about Boston in the water supply and whatnot. Was going to bring it up to you when we were.

Will: There are a few professors around here. Paolo, did you have one you wanted to mention?

Paolo: Yes, of course. I have more time these days, I’m trying to reread something I already read.

Will: This was not planned, by the way. This was not planned. I’m working on the update. He’s showing, “Django for professionals”. I’m working on the update. Paolo, you’ve long talked about a book you might want to do. Is there anything you want to say around that? Is that, can we say that publicly, a book that you might write since you’ve written a lot around search, databases?

Paolo: I was thinking, I did a lot of job in the past as a consultant and in consultancy. We, a lot of time, we tried to help customer to improve the performance of the project or start using best practices. It’s something that I try to write down and to have a lot of, a list of things to do or things I experienced. Perhaps it’s something I can share in the future. If I have enough time to be there and write down on the things. We’ll see.

Will: It’s a bit like, in my experience, like a sprint. You need a chunk of time to commit to it because you can’t 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there. Maybe some people can, but you really need. Ideally a couple of hours, ideally a couple of days because there isn’t a one-to-one time to words on the page process, like code. It all counts, but you need these blocks, blocks of focus. I would read it, of course, if it comes out. And for me, I’ve got this “More everything forever” yet another book about AI overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley control. I still haven’t quite gotten enough of this. I know you’re a bit bored with the topic, Carlton, but I’m finding new ways to be enraged by what’s happening.

Carlton: I’m impressed by your stamina on how many AI books you can read.

Will: I’m not that knowledgeable about it. I’m starting to see some repeats and patterns. Everything comes down to people, even though it’s code. It all comes down to people. And if you, like in any organization, I find if you, you look at the background of the top person in an organization, and you can tell the DNA of it. If it’s a sales person, it’s a sales B2B organization. If it’s an engineer, like JetBrains, PyCharm, that’s a different thing. Both have strengths and weaknesses, but it all. People are endlessly interesting. I think that’s what it is for me, Carlton. The tech but the people and the motivations. And also, and I’m sorry I’m forgetting who someone that, maybe it was, was it Mario, Someone at DjangoCon US mentioned this book in particular in one of the talks. That’s how it popped on my radar. I was like, another one? And these are fun too, because I can read them fast. Know, they’re not, it’s not deep literature. I can blast through it in a couple of sessions and pick something up, take some notes.

Carlton: I’ve got a project that I wanted to speak, Adam Johnson, he released a new package called “django-http-compression”. It’s like a middleware type thing, which will apply modern compression. We’ve got the GZipMiddleware. But there are much better compression algorithms now. There’s Zstandard, which is now in the Python 3.14 standard library, Brotli and Gzip as well. And if you swap and use one of the modern ones, you’re to get better compression and better performance. It’s like wonderful. And you can configure this at say the engine next level or whatever your web server is. But a lot of times your Django project is stacked with generic platform as a service. And you want to use one of these middleware yourself. I think this is a super project. It wraps it up. It demonstrates it gives the proof of concept. And I think this should be on the path for being, for inclusion in Django core. It’s precisely the thing that Django package itself. It’s not it’s generally useful. Something that we can recommend to everybody. Things you don’t really want to be implementing yourself. I’d like to see this gain some pick up and once the bugs have been worked out, there’s no reason why this can’t be added into Django.

Will: I’ll mention one, which is “basedpyright” which one of my colleagues at PyCharm is a co-maintainer on. This is the “pyright” fork with type checking. Type checking is an area I need to learn a bit more about it. Obviously, I’ve done basic stuff, but there’s all these new things coming out. Astral has “ty”, there’s Pyrefly, that Facebook meta put out. Typing is big. And specifically on PyCharm, we’ve long had our own built-in type checker. We hired Morgan, to figure out what the next generation looks like. I’m playing around with that.

Carlton: It seems an exciting time for type checkers. Once upon a time, there was MyPy, and then there was the Microsoft one, which was good, but then it was closed source, and it didn’t have plugins. Or was it, or maybe the type check a bit was open source, but then the VScode extension was closed source.

Will: The same thing with the debugger. There’s a history of open source things and then Microsoft hiring people.

Carlton: But then there’s, now it seems like there’s three or four different options out there that I’m not entirely convinced or not entirely sure which one I should be using, but it’s nice that there are options.

Will: Python tooling in general, if we can lump that in, there’s a lot of change. No one’s quite sure. Morgan, my colleague, he’s got opinions, and he’s tasked with sorting out exactly what the next generation looks like within PyCharm.

Paolo: I haven’t prepared a project myself, but this is a feature I find very interesting. I think I’ll work on that with an article, maybe. It was the new release for Python 3.14 that added the support for the UUID version 7, also it was released few days ago. And also Postgres 18 released the last month added this new feature. In theory, we are already able to use that directly in Django and I want to experiment on that. We had a chat about that with Simon and Lily at Django On The Med. It’s been exciting to see that in Django you can already use this new feature that is very interesting in the context of databases. I want to experiment with that feature and share what I find.

Will: Awesome. As we wrap up, Paolo, is there anything you want to share about what comes next for you? Professionally or otherwise?

Paolo: I’m searching for a new job opportunity right now. It’s been a year of consultancy and I want to find something new, of course. If I can, working with Python and Django, the things I’m more experienced in it. And if someone is searching for an engineer, I’m open to.

Will: Super engineer.

Paolo: Other than that, we’ll start working on the next edition of Django on the Med for the sprints. We’ll see.

Will: We’ll put a link. If anyone doesn’t already know how to contact you, LinkedIn is the best way. We’ll put a link to your LinkedIn profile. But I would hire you if I could.

Paolo: All my contacts on the website, other than LinkedIn, if other people are more comfortable using, don’t know, Mastodon, or an email, my email is on my website.

Carlton: I’m desperate to get my company to the next level. It’s still me and Mark. Still going, I want to get us to the point where we’ve got a little pool to hire people because every six months or somebody some superstar from the Django ecosystem is on comes up. You’re like, I need to grab them and I can’t keep slipping through my fingers.

Will: Maybe next year. I’ll end with, this is, even though I wasn’t there, I was there three years ago when you first were mentioning this, Paolo, and I think I’ve been there through many of the steps. I’m very, pleased that the two of you took the initiative and did the hard work to make it happen, because it needed to happen, for the Django Community.

Carlton: It was amazing. There were things we couldn’t do because it was the first time and just the two of us organizing, but that was fine because it was the first time, and it was the two of us and what. Okay, those things are totally fine. But of all the things we wanted, it was a brilliant event. And the next ones are going to be even better.

Paolo: The thing that made me very happy to read some posts that people shared, like Mariusz and Daniele and others. They appreciated the fact that being there and meeting for real new people, speaking with them, and for them was able to achieve something that they waited for long to achieve. In other contexts it was not possible. Seeing that people get something useful from that, and they joined was very great, and I hope that in the future will be more initiative like that. Not only maybe Django On The Med, they can organize also in that place in the world.

Will: . There’s DjangoCon India this year. DjangoCons are spreading, hopefully DjangoCon Africa. But you don’t have to do all the work Carlton and Paolo, that would be the goal. Paolo, thank you for taking the time. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing this. Again, I wanted to hear from Carlton and you how it went and hopefully this shares the story with other people as well who weren’t able to attend.

Paolo: Thanks for having me to be able to share this, which you all have been incredible to do after a long time we spoke for the first time together, and now we are talking in the past tense.

Will: We’re at DjangoChat.com. Thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time. Bye bye.

Carlton: Bye.

Paolo: Bye.