“Django is not a framework, it’s a community.”
Mark Smith

Before covid I was deeply engaged with local developer communities, especially the Python developer community in Ghana. It was both fun and impactful 😊. It was such a joy to find people willing to share knowledge and opportunities for growth. I gave a few talks at DevFest, IndabaX Ghana, Pycon Africa, and Ashesi University. I was a Django Girls coach twice, and I actually spent a little time writing tutorials on some of the tech stacks I was using.

Then covid hit and everything changed 🥲.

In the midst of lockdowns and social distancing, in-person community events became a thing of the past. My focus switched drastically to trying to complete my master’s degree in another country and keeping my business venture afloat. I succeeded in one and failed in the other. (Lessons were learnt, I assure you.) The energy of being in a room with people gathered around the same technical interests became a old memory.

Enter DjangoCon Africa 2023

This past week at DjangoCon in Zanzibar, the first ever DjangoCon Africa, was a breath of fresh air. It was a reminder of the joys of community, and the Django community is a prime example of a dedicated community. Besides the sheer onslaught of knowledge, I also caught up with some old friends and made a lot of new ones.

Even more importantly, I was challenged by the commitment to open source initiatives that many people expressed at the conference. Apparently, not everyone community flame had been snuffed out like mine had during the pandemic. But that’s the nice thing about flames, you just need to touch wicks with someone and boom, you’re back on fire.

For the first time in 3 years, I became a Django Girls coach again. Boy, I did not know I had missed teaching that much!

I also gave my first talk in 3 years, which happened to be my first ever lightning talk on a trivial topic of “Augmenting Streamlit with Django Authentication”. I say ‘trivial’ because the use-case was a cat memes app 😸, but the deeper lesson is in how we can mix and match tech tools to maximize benefits in ways that the original tool authors might not have thought of. There’s a link to the slides at the bottom.

Since it happened in Zanzibar, you’re probably thinking I should say more about the beach and weather. It rained most of the time 😔. Not aaaaall the time, but enough to make you realise you should probably reserch the weather before you plan a trip to Zanzibar. Nevertheless, fun was had and I ate street food to my heart’s content. I’ll probably share more details in my other blog in due time.

Takeaways

Here’s what I learnt from Djangocon. It’s not all technical… in fact, the technical things are probably not the most important things here:

1. Take a leave of absence before going for a conference! This should be obvious, I know, but I did not take a leave and it hampered my enjoyment of a conference a bit… a little bit.
2. Participate in Open Source projects and initiatives. It’s amazing the doors that open when you actively contribute to the community. There are a thousand and one stories.
3. Debuggers will save you, not every coding problem can be debugged with print() and it’s actually not that hard.
4. Github Actions have some neat automation tools if you know what to do, and you can ask Joseph Sowah all about them.
5. Put yourself out there. Communities are made up of people, and you’re a person, aren’t you? Send in a talk proposal, write a blog post, like this one, moderate some event, make a PR to a project, do something! You won’t regret it. I promise.

This was not intended to be a long post. If anything, it’s a reminder to myself that Mark Smith was right, Django really isn’t [just] a framework, it’s a community!

Shoutouts

First of all, to my Ghana fam who showed up for this:

Also, a huge thanks to the organizers. Organizing conferences is hard work. You guys rock!
And to Alejandro, whose camera became our camera. 😂

Finally, I just had to write this cheesy line. What’s better than one Kwadwo at a conference?

A Kwadwo and a Kojo! 😝

Don’t come for me. 😅

Here are the slides.

Until the next one. 👋🏾