Individual member of the Django Software Foundation

Last Saturday, somewhen late at night when we came back home from our trip to the city, I received an unexpected mail. I was nominated, seconded and approved to be an Individual Member of the Django Software Foundation. This came completely unexpected and honestly caught me a bit off guard. I let it sink in a bit and accepted the invitation on Sunday, with a nice glass of scotch next to me.

I have been using Django since 0.96-svn or so and I have been using it to ship production software for a decade. (Yes, I was actually crazy enough to bet on a pre 1.0 release framework instead of TurboGears which was a bit more established, had a nicer ORM and some really nice JavaScript integration.)

During all those years I experienced a warm, welcoming and inclusive community that is also able to talk tech. This is a very nice combination. I have seen communities which are also welcoming and inclusive but lacked the technical capabilities to drive a project forward. And I have seen technical capable communities I would not want to spent five minutes with in a room full of liquor. Django was and still is the first thing I suggest to someone asking how to get into web development. While there are tons of technical reasons other frameworks and stacks are better in certain situations, Django is more than well rounded enough to stand most of the tasks you throw at it. Combine this with the community and you have a perfect match for beginners as well as experts.

Now this might sound a bit promotional, so rest assured, not everything is great. There is an unhealthy fondness for emojis which completely eludes me. But maybe this is just the old man in me screaming "get off my lawn! :) is perfectly adequate to communicate one of the three emotions I want to express in written communication!".

One thing that stood out to me was the last part of the introduction, the reason for the nomination.

in recognition of your services and contribution to the Django community.

I actually had the chance to help out at DjangoCon Europe this year. It was an amazing experience and it showed me that I should get more engaged with the local community, as well as online. But overall it feels like my "services and contributions" are not that noteworthy compared to what other people do. Maybe this is just imposter syndrome kicking in. I will let others be the judge. The logical consequence for me is pretty simple - I have to step up my game to make sure I feel like I actually earn this. In the meantime I just keep the good feeling and joy this invitation brought me while trying to figure out how to extend my contributions.