thoughts for Django fellowship applicants

[Tim Graham]

Hello,

If you haven't seen the post*, I'll be stepping down as a Django fellow at the end of March. Applications are open until this Friday if you're interested in joining Carlton in the position.

I wanted to give a brief retrospective on some aspects of my experience, with the hope that it'll be helpful for the future of the program.

There are a number of reasons for my decision, but mainly I've felt a need to disconnect for a while and take a break. I want to explore other things besides computers. I don't have the same excitement for the work as when I started. Django development was less structured back then. It was fun to set up continuous integration and a regular release schedule and bring order to chaos. Now with those things in place, I think Django will continue to plod along just fine without me.

It's been tough for me to take a guilt-free vacation because there's not much "excess capacity" in the fellowship staffing. Even with another fellow working part-time, there's a backlog of review work that accumulates when a fellow takes a break. It's easy to feel overwhelmed when you return. Maybe this is fine. If the fellowship were overstaffed, that wouldn't leave anything for volunteers to do which would be bad for new recruits. Even so, it's difficult to feel good when contributors are pinging you asking why their patch isn't reviewed in a couple days or weeks. I've tried to emphasis that *anyone* (except the patch author) can review patches and mark the ticket as "ready for checkin", but there are still many more code contributors than patch reviewers these days.

If I were starting as a new fellow, I would set up a separate email account for all my Django activity so that I don't see those notices in my personal mail on evenings and weekends.

I grew tiresome of teaching new contributors. Most regular contributors submit high quality patches that are generally easy to review but most new contributors don't take time to read our style guide and follow the patch review checklist. Only a very small number of contributors become regular contributors and sometimes I've thought that the effort to teach new contributors who don't stick around is very inefficient. I guess this is fine as long as fellows recognize that their job is partly educational.

I could write more but I want to put something out before Friday. If you're thinking of applying and have a question or doubt, please ask.

* https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2018/dec/21/django-fellow-applicants/

[Matthew Pava]

On behalf of myself and on behalf of everyone else I speak for, thank you, Tim, for doing such an outstanding job with Django!

 

I know that I only made one contribution, and you played such an important role in helping me understand what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.  And I appreciate that to this day.  I would love to become a more consistent contributor, but my own lack of time prevents it.

 

Thank you,

Matthew Pava

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[Adam Johnson]

Tim,

Without your hard work and dedication, I would probably have never had any momentum on my PR's, and I would not have become engaged with the Django code and community. You've been hard-working, dependable, methodic, knowledgable, an inspiration, and overall excellent. It will be hard for any new fellow to match you.

Thanks for all the work and enjoy your well-deserved guilt-free break,

Adam

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[Carlton Gibson]

On 10 Jan 2019, at 20:16, Adam Johnson <m...@adamj.eu> wrote:

It will be hard for any new fellow to match you.

I go for “aspire to…” 🙂

[Jamesie Pic]

Hello Tim,

Debugging over ip with non-natives is very hard indeed. Thank you for completing your mission with extremely high achievement. Your engagement is the most beautiful inspiration for any fellow. I hope to read other posts from you even long after.

I'm deeply sorry for the times when I have projected my frustration over internet on you, and the mailing list.

Please all accept my most sincere apology.

Best regards, friend

PS: if you travel, our hackerspace has OpenCouch and great reference ;) https://couchsurfing.com/jpic

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