2023 in review.
For the second year in a row 2023 ends with the dominant theme in life having been family ill-health.
I feel like 2023 actually began in Oct 2022, when, as I was travelling back from DjangoCon US, my daughter had an accident and was hospitalized. Since then it’s been all go. My son spent most of the year being diagnosed and (kind-of) treated for a mysterious post-Covid illness that we’re still not sure exactly what to make of.
He’s doing better, much better. But it’s been the longest year.
Nonetheless, we got a few things done…
In April I stepped down after 5 years as a Django Fellow. It was an honour. Time though for a change. To get back to building things with Django, rather than just working on it.
I gave a couple of conference talks:
These were both very well received, so that was nice at a time when things with my son were at about their worst.
Released a few new open source packages. Most notably Neapolitan, my take on quick CRUD views for Django, and django-template-partials which enables reusable named template fragments for the Django Templating Language.
Again, both of these were well received, and I’m using them daily. Neapolitan in particular is just so much fun.
I got updates out of almost all the packages I maintain. The exception there was the Channels packages, which have been updated for Django 5.0 and Python 3.12 etc, but have otherwise just been in stasis. That’s OK, I was still keeping an eye and there have been no real issues. I’ve managed to pick up work on them again recently, so back in motion for those in early 2024.
Will and I kept up the rhythm on Django Chat. We had our usual summer break but managed to keep going before that (just) and we’ve been back in action for a couple of months now. More on the way there.
I did a couple of guest appearances too:
On top of that I managed to bootstrap an application for a new business, and that’s going well so far.
In 2024, I’m just hoping for a bit of quiet. I’ve volunteered to help with DjangoCon Europe — hope to see you there! I want to flesh out Neapolitan, keep the work projects going, and — if life would just f-ing ease off a notch, seriously! — who knows what I might get done.