Django Code Lab
Attendees: please read the instructions for submitting code, below.
Summary
Have your Django code analyzed by the best!
Bring your questions and code and receive expert guidance from three core members of Django's development community. We'll answer your questions, help solve your problems, and tell you how your code can be made faster, cleaner, and better.
Intended audience
Django developers with active projects. We'll be analyzing actual in-the-wild code from real sites, so those with active projects will find the most interest here. Developers just starting with Django might find the material interesting as well, but we'll assume everyone attending has a pretty solid grasp of Django's fundamentals.
We'll expect participants to submit code and/or questions a few weeks prior to the lab, and we'll actively encourage each and every attendee to submit something.
Requirements
Participants who've submitted code should have a way to test our suggestions. That probably should be in the form of a local copy of their site on a laptop.
Instructions for submitting code
Email your code as some sort of archive (zip, tar, tgz, whatever) to <jacob@jacobian.org>. Put "Code lab submission" in the subject line to help the message make its way through the spam filter.
In the body of the email, ask your questions about the code. We can probably find something to say about anything, but we'll be much more helpful if we know what specifically you'd like us to look at.
Please include your full name in the email (i.e not just a handle) so that we can find you during the lab.
Also, note that the code you send in will be shown to 40 or 50 folks in the lab, so please don't submit anything that's under NDA! Also, the lab may be recorded and distributed, so only submit code that you're willing to show the world. Assume that by submitting code you're giving us permission to distribute.
How much code can I send?
As much as you need to, but please try to make it as little as possible. We can't possibly read through everyone's entire codebase, so if you can trim the question down to a minimal example, that'll help quite a bit.
In other words, imagine you're making a post to django-users (or another technical users group). You'll need to give enough information that we can answer your question(s), but not so much that we're overwhelmed.
If you're excerpting code from a larger application, you should try to bring that application on a laptop to the lab. That way you can show us bits from the larger piece if you need to.
What can I send?
Anything, really. We'd prefer to talk about code from actual sites you're developing, but proof-of-concept is OK, too.
You can also submit general questions -- "How do I write a good unit test?" -- but we'll devote far less time to those types of questions overall. That is, questions containing actual code will be prioritized over general usage questions.
Don't feel limited to sending only broken or "bad" code, either: if you've got something you're particularly proud of, feel free to send that in for our comments as well.
Are you going to be mean?
Only if you ask us to :)
We'll mainly focus on constructive criticism -- how to make this bit faster; how to make that bit cleaner. Of course, if you'd like us to be brutal and tear your code to bits, we'd be happy to oblige -- just ask.
How many samples/questions can I send?
As many as you like, but we will structure things so that we're not spending too much time focusing on a single person. If you send in dozens of questions expect us to only deal with a couple-three of them.
Presenter bios
Adrian Holovaty, a Web developer/journalist, is one of the creators and core developers of Django. He is founder of EveryBlock, a local-news Web startup. When not working on Django improvements, Adrian hacks on side projects for the public good, such as chicagocrime.org, one of the original Google Maps mashups. He lives in Chicago and maintains a weblog at http://holovaty.com.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the core developers of Django. At his day job, he's the lead developer for the Lawrence Journal-World, a locally-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS where Django was developed. At the Journal-World, Jacob oversees development of Ellington, an online news publishing platforms for media companies.
James Bennett is a developer at the Lawrence Journal-World and the release manager for Django. He's the proprietor of http://djangosnippets.org, a site where Django users share useful snippets of reusable code, and the author of a growing number of Django add-ons. He blogs at http://b-list.org.
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