I went to DjangoCon US a few weeks ago and hung around for the sprints. I was particularly interested in working on open tickets related to the ORM. It so happened that Simon Charette was at Django Con and was able to meet with several of us to talk through the inner working of the ORM.
With Simon helping to guide us, I took a stab at an open ticket and settled on 10070. After reviewing it on my own, and then with Simon, it looked like it wasn't really a bug anymore, and so we agreed that I could mark it as done.
Kind of anticlimactic given what I was hoping to achieve, but a closed ticket is a closed ticket! And so I tweeted out my accomplishment for all the world to see.
A few weeks later though, a comment was added that it actually was still a bug and it was reopened.
I was disappointed ... but I now had a chance to actually fix a real bug! I started in earnest.
A suggestion / pattern for working through learning new things that Simon Willison had mentioned was having a public-notes repo on GitHub. He's had some great stuff that he's worked through that you can see here.
Using this as a starting point, I decided to walk through what I learned while working on this open ticket.
Over the course of 10 days I had a 38 comment 'conversation with myself' and it was super helpful!
A couple of key takeaways from working on this issue:
- Carlton Gibson said essentially once you start working a ticket from Trac, you are the world's foremost export on that ticket ... and he's right!
- ... But, you're not working the ticket alone! During the course of my work on the issue I had help from Simon Charette, Mariusz Felisiak, Nick Pope, and Shai Berger
- The ORM can seem big and scary ... but remember, it's just Python
I think that each of these lesson learned is important for anyone thinking of contributing to Django (or other open source projects).
That being said, the last point is one that I think can't be emphasized enough.
The ORM has a reputation for being this big black box that only 'really smart people' can understand and contribute to. But, it really is just Python.
If you're using Django, you know (more likely than not) a little bit of Python. Also, if you're using Django, and have written any models, you have a conceptual understanding of what SQL is trying to do (well enough I would argue) that you can get in there AND make sense of what is happening.
And if you know a little bit of Python a great way to learn more is to get into a project like Django and try to fix a bug.
My initial solution isn't the final one that got merged ... it was a collaboration with 4 people, 2 of whom I've never met in real life, and the other 2 I only just met at DjangoCon US a few weeks before.
While working through this I learned just as much from the feedback on my code as I did from trying to solve the problem with my own code.
All of this is to say, contributing to open source can be hard, it can be scary, but honestly, I can't think of a better place to start than Django, and there are lots of places to start.
And for those of you feeling a bit adventurous, there are plenty of ORM tickets just waiting for you to try and fix them!