Will kicked us off early, so time for a look back at the year.
Nice and quiet, which is just what I said I wanted.
Most of my time was focused on my work project Paths. We’re 18 months in and going well. The product is maturing nicely, we’re reaching towards what we imagined when we set out, and more, and we still have a wee bit of runway left. So all in all we’re pleased. This year will tell if we can pick up the extra clients we need to make it truly sustainable, so that’ll be the focus going into 2025 as well.
I’m still massively enjoying being back building things with Django, rather than just working on it. I’m having the time of my life if I’m honest. Lots of good discoveries almost every week, and time keeping me from extracting them from the work project into (most likely) Neapolitan, which along with django-template-partials, has become/remained my go-to hammer.
I signed up to help on the content team for DjangoCon Europe in Vigo this year. That was my first real glance behind the curtain. It’s a lot of work. Fun but work.
Looking back at the diary, DCEU tasks feature every week until almost right up until the event in June, and it eases off slightly for the content team once the talks are decided. Kind of: Visa issues were a revelation to me, that I’d not seem first hand before.
I gave my talk there: API Maybe about bootstrapping a web application (our web application) in 2024, and it was a lot of fun.
Vigo itself was great. I got the train, stopping over in Madrid, meeting up with Rachel Calhoun and Chris Adams on the way. It was a long week (as always) but I wouldn’t miss it. Starting to plan for DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin already now.
Later in the year, I made it out to Durham NC for DjangoCon US. It’s always a long journey, over 20hrs door to door, but it’s always worth it. For reasons, I missed last year, so to catch up with everybody was amazing.
Secret trick, I gave the same talk as at DCEU, so only needed to rewrite the whole middle section to fit it into the tighter DCUS time slots. My talk was last on the final day, just before the closing panel, so I got to reference a whole load of talks that gone earlier in the week, which was fun.
In April I gave a talk to the second batch of DjangoNauts:
Know Your Limits: On Surviving Open Source
This was a take on my Old man avoids burnout rant, and it was a great session. I really enjoyed the format.
For the next batch of Djangonauts I stepped in at the last-minute as a Navigator, together with my great Captain Moe. The team did really well, taking on hard issues in Django itself, which I think even experienced contributors would have had to work hard on.
I continue to be amazed and inspired by the Djangonaut.space program.
Will and I continue to do the podcast, and it continues to be rewarding. We took our usual summer break, and might try mixing it up a little (only a little mind) as we roll forward.
It seems like everyone we have on now mentions how Django really needs multi-factor auth in core by now, so we might have to brush off some of the ideas for that during 2025.
In April I launched The Stack Report. A monthly longer form piece on application development, operations, and the process (and business) of making software.
This has been really well received, and I’m really pleased how that’s gone. I’ve tried to capture some comments on Mastodon with #TheStackReport hashtag.
I did The Stack Report as a paid newsletter, with some free issues. It’s €5/month or €50/year, so two issues free that way. Everyone was always saying to me about doing GitHub Sponsors, but I wanted to do something that you at least get something for.
The longer form gives me a chance to go a bit deeper, and having subscribers means that I’m committed to doing it.
If you subscribed already, thanks again for being involved. If not, you can check out some of the free issues from the archive, and you’re welcome to sign up if it’s your cup of tea.
That’s about it. I’m looking forward to a quiet Christmas and New Year. I’m going to see how 2025 unrolls. Work is the main target. Beyond that, there’s lots of good stuff brewing, but I’m not minded yet to commit on shipping any of it on any fixed timeline. It’ll come when it does, and that’s just fine.
Keep safe. Enjoy your year end, and happy 2025! 🥳