We discussed the future of Django with the Django Meetup Cologne community. Here are the results and my notes.
This week, Sarah Abderemane and I got invited to join the 50th edition of the Django Meetup in Cologne 😌. We had a great time thanks to the meetup organizers and our hosts Ambient. We ran a “Future of Django” interactive session to gather feedback from our community. Here are the results.
Community questions
Starting with a few broad questions about Django and friends.
Have you ever been to a Django conference?
| Yes | No |
|---|---|
| 9 (56%) | 7 (44%) |
Would you be interested to have social events online as well?
| Yes | No |
|---|---|
| 8 (61%) | 5 (39%) |
Have you ever done a sprint?
| Statement | Count |
|---|---|
| Yes, physically and I would love to do another | 9 |
| Yes, virtually and I would love to do another | 0 |
| Yes, I don’t want to do another | 1 |
| No but I would love to do one physically | 0 |
| No but I would love to do one virtually | 0 |
| No and I don’t want to | 0 |
Django’s direction questions
Branching from community towards the core framework (but not just the core framework).
Should Django have a public roadmap?
| Yes | No |
|---|---|
| 14 | 1 |
Do you have any packages in mind you would like to see in Django core?
Participants could vote for as many options as they wanted.
| Package | Count |
|---|---|
| whitenoise, django-cors-headers | 7 |
| django-environ | 7 |
| django-csp | 7 |
| django-extensions | 6 |
| some stuff from django-extensions (show_urls, shell_plus) | 5 |
| django-pony-express | 4 |
| dj-database-url | 4 |
| django-ninja | 3 |
| django-cte | 3 |
My takeaway from this list is there are a number of packages that provide such fundamental capabilities to Django that people likely use them on all projects, and as such would be better served by the functionality being built-in.
I find it telling about the pace and inordinate complexity of Django core contributions that packages like django-csp aren’t already in core considering there’s been years of discussions about such a change (13 years to be precise).
It’s also interesting to me that django-environ sees so much demand, considering I don’t use it myself.
What else would you like to see in Django?
Participants could vote for as many options as they wanted.
| Idea | Count |
|---|---|
| Some kind of task runner | 11 |
| htmx in the admin | 11 |
| Less magic in the ORM (maybe more in the direction of a query builder) | 6 |
| Advanced tutorials on async, htmx | 5 |
| Serverless Django docs | 5 |
| Better way to build components for full-stack apps (i.e. django-components, slippers) | 5 |
| Advanced tutorial | 4 |
| Listing of possible ways to contribute (not only code, stuff like evangelist, community manager) | 4 |
| Docs for custom business logic | 4 |
Lots of interesting items here.
I’m unclear here if by “task runner” we’re talking about background tasks in the sense of RQ or Celery, or tasks in the sense of project-specific commands à la cargo / npm.
Do you have any ideas to improve the fundraising of the Django Software Foundation?
Participants could propose as many ideas as they wanted, and there was no voting for this round:
- Money for features via kickstarter
- Stay independent of big firms like Amazon, Microsoft
- Integrated hosting like laravel
- organize paid training courses
- Paid advertising for jobs on djangoproject.com
- Paid Certifications
- Merchandise with Django logo (Shirts, hoodies, cups, etc…)
- Paid support by django experts
- Paid-for features
- Find some government funding
- Make donations tax deductible
Tax-deductible donations are interesting because this is why the Django Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the US. Whether this is possible in other countries would warrant investigation. In addition, the DSF could also better document how in-kind contributions to Django could count as R&D with dedicated tax incentives.
What would you like to see in Django in terms of community?
Lots of good ideas here!
| Idea | Count |
|---|---|
| Django Under the Hood reboot | 9 |
| Roadmap ;) | 8 |
| Django community streams by contributers of just chatting / answering questions | 6 |
| Overview of meetups/conferences etc | 5 |
| A more encouraging ticket system | 5 |
| Retire google groups | 5 |
| Official Django Tutorial Series | 5 |
| Django ambassadors program | 5 |
| More in person sprints. | 4 |
| More examples in the documents | 4 |
| A community I’m building in Niger. I hope it will grow. | 3 |
| In person events | 2 |
| Local hubs | 2 |
| New people | 0 |
My takeway
My takeaway from running this session with Sarah is that there were lots of excellent ideas, and a non-zero amount of people willing to get involved with Django that I had never heard of before!
Beyond what we covered above during the session, here are my highlights of interesting ideas from just chatting with people:
- An advanced tutorial would be great in the official docs. For Wagtail, we took part in Google Season of Docs to do this, spending months of effort on it, so it’s a big undertaking but very high value in my opinion.
- We should get our new social media working group involved with fundraising.
- django startproject could have a call for donations?
- Could DSF donations be tax-deductible for European donors?