Posts tagged: DJANGO

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or “trunk” in svn-speak). There’s an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I’m making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick’s blog doesn’t allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project “was in no way a solo effort”, there’s no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.

I just wanted to make a quick post to say thank-you to the 20+ people who showed up for Django.June yesterday. As I said in the morning, without you I just would have been one crazy guy with a wiki and an empty room.

The MEF meeting room worked great. They had some last-minute projector trouble so I brought a replacement borrowed from work. (Thanks to the crack projector troubleshooting team for helping me figure out how to focus. Analog controls, who would have thought!)

My employer has generously agreed to send me off to OSCON this year and I’m very excited. I’m doing the whole shebang, tutorial days and all. (Current tutorial picks: Learning Ruby, Django Master Class, Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI, and Time Management for System Administrators.)

I had a blast and learned a ton attending OSCON in 2005 and I expect this round to be even better. For one thing, my involvement in open source projects, notably Django, means I know more people. And the whole open source world – dare I say movement? – has only gotten more powerful and impressive. I get to become better at my job while learning cool stuff and meeting smart people. I’m a lucky guy.

Back in January I posted about the idea of having a get-together of Django programmers here in Northampton in June, playing on the Django (Reinhardt) in June music festival happening at the same time.

I finally found time to put a page together, and people are beginning to sign up. So if you’re a Django person and you’re within range of Northampton, check it out!

This week is so busy that I don’t have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects. Tom Insam went and did something that I’ve had on my “someday” list for a long time. It’s very much a 0.0.1 project right now, but I think it has great potential as an application testbed and as a platform for hybrid apps.