Django Chat

Greening Django - Chris Adams

Episode Notes

Chris is a consultant and director of the Green Web Foundation. We discuss how he first become involved with Django, recent talks, and how to speed the transition of the web away from fossil fools.

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Episode Transcription

Carlton Gibson 0:05
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django chat fortnightly podcast on the Django web framework. I'm Carlton Gibson joined by Will Vincent Halliwell?

Will Vincent 0:12
Hi, Carlton

Carlton Gibson 0:14
Halliwell. And this week, we've got Chris Adams with us. So Chris, I don't know how to introduce you, Chris. But I first saw your a Django con where you gave an absolutely mind blowing talk about greening Django and environmental impact of tech and all of these things. So I'm hoping that's what we're going to talk about today.

Chris Adams 0:30
I think so but I'm, I'll be honest, I'm a fan of the show. And I'm quite happy to be on here. So I'm happy to follow your lead. But if we note about climate tech and stuff, I'm totally on board with that, that works, and is

Carlton Gibson 0:43
super good. Thank you for coming on. I guess we let's get into the climate stuff momentarily, because that is just an amazing topic. But we always ask, and we want to know, how did you get into Django and what's your backstory give us your sort of your origin story?

Chris Adams 0:57
Okay, um, my origin story. When I came into programming, I actually took a bit of a kind of like a artsy media route, actually. So I initially studied things like biology, chemistry, and maths. With the idea of maybe being a doctor or something, I totally got distracted by like photography, and like computer games, and all these other things in high school. And I ended up getting really intermediate instead, as a result, and I didn't realize you could even study that. So I did that for a couple of years. And then I ended up doing going to university to do a course called contemporary media practice, whatever that is brilliant. And we ended up doing, I learned all about how to you had to make films with an actual bolex camera that you wound, like you see people in World War Two style movies, we did like digital video. And we also did this thing called Digital because it's like, early 2001 2002. So playing around with flash and stuff that was my exposure to like computers and things like that. And that was kind of going to that. And I ended up working, I took a very kind of artsy route into this. And at the same time, I was kind of getting interested in the whole notion of people talking about blogging, the whole kind of whatever that kind of whatever the the closest thing that might have been to a scene, I suppose around this in London back in the early 2000s. And I got involved in things like digital civil liberties. And as a result, I ended up, a lot of the kind of artistic practice went into that. So I ended up working on a couple of wacky projects. So we would do things like make films, or do photography projects. But the thing that I did for my family a project was basically build what you might recognize as something that looks a bit like a Russian dashcam these days, but with an insurance process, they were into it. So it was it was designed as a kind of like comment about the whole kind of like startup tech scene, I suppose. Partly because we had a lecturer who was his name was Richard bobrick. And he taught us all about this, it was a particular course called media freedom. So we're talking about who owned media and things like that. And so you learn a little bit about what kind of privacy laws were and what laws are tied to things like say, copyright and stuff. And the thing I realized when you're looking through this was that there was a load of really interesting and an a quite a good like pressing now I suppose discourse about like the impact of tech on society and stuff. And we ended up building like this dash cam with the idea that we would create a kind of like photo mock startup around this with the idea that I was describing it. Yeah, I maybe I should step back to talk about where I lived at the time, because that might might help. So I used to live in a pretty rough part of town. And generally, when you were driving, you wouldn't want to like be for someone or something like that, because there was a lot of aggro around there. And we, we ended up at the time, I used to live with my mom because I was quite young. And I'd see her get really, really frustrated with this. So as I so I basically built the tool, which was literally like it was an Xbox, for this and for my art project, by the way, that run on the cigarette lighter in the car was hooked into a kind of cheap webcam. I know what a USB dongle and, and a big fat guitar pedal that you could you could like hit. And the idea was you'd be driving around and when someone cuts you off, instead of like screaming at them and endangering your life you pull over and just like mash this button, like, Oh, God, I can't believe I'm so angry. And then by the time you get home, it will take that video, upload it into the cloud, and then basically send a do some number plate recognition and then expose that as a fee to the person's insurance company. So they get priced off the road and we're driving like a typical person. And the idea behind this Was that okay, this is an idea around this is the direction we're gonna heading to be heading towards. And the we built this and we thought this was actually an awful thing to build because it's not as a kind of like artistic statement. So we after building this we figured well This idea called things like prior art, right? So what we did was we as because I was an art student, I basically opened this open source tool this. And then we showed it literally in an art gallery. So it's literally prior art to make it really, really lots of painting. And from there, I kind of got into like, I guess, like, artsy techie stuff from there, because it seemed like just a really interesting field to be working in. And that was kind of what I want to work in forms from. That's kind of what got me into tech, I suppose. Yeah,

Carlton Gibson 5:31
that's a great opener, because I didn't have you down as like a founding person.

Chris Adams 5:38
Well, I was the open the open rights group in the UK. They're a bit like the UK version of the E FF. And I was the first day of intern org. And I was like designing all their leaflets and things back in the early 2000s, as well. Partly, I mean, like, the purpose of the art project was deliberately to start a conversation around this kind of stuff. Because it feels like oh, yeah, there's all these words like surveillance, which is like bottom up surveillance, but at the same time, there's a whole discourse about, okay, who gets to be the people doing this? Anyway, this is a bit of a divergent. That's kind of how I got into tech and playing with stuff. Yeah.

Carlton Gibson 6:12
Okay. And so it's not the bones brilliant. It's exactly what we asked for. But so how did how did you find Jang, okay,

Chris Adams 6:18
so you know, where the tribal stuff happens. So when I was initially working with that, I was a, that was roughly around rails, so starting to become like this cool thing. And in my final years at university, I was like doing, we didn't really do much like the coding we did do is like Dreamweaver, and ActionScript, or stuff. And I kind of bought a book like agile web development with rails. And I was like, the guy who was working with me, he was a board cog science students come to science student who for Chris, the stuff you're doing self monitoring the stuff I'm doing, so I will help you win your digital project, because it sounds like love. Yeah. So he did all the kind of crunchy see stuff. And like learning we're service. And I tried to do some of the front end design bits. And that was Ruby on Rails. So I learned a bit from there. And then after graduation, I got on really well with this guy, his name is Fred fix, we set up a company together. And we said we're only only going to work on wacky open source, make the world a better place techie stuff. And he so I defaulted to doing, I get like front end stuff when he did a bit of like rails. And then the spacer in there was actually there's another agency who had been doing a bunch of Django work, I think it was like 0.96 back then. And like you share an office and what do you do? Well, that sounds cool. What do you think? Are we do this? Is there any chance you could help us out because I can see you guys can code. And like, my friend, Fred, he could code in Python. And I could do some front end. So I got my first exposure to Django, back in 2008, Django 0.96, only working in the front end, while I was working with other people who do the back end. And this was before we had like migration. So people would like screw, hey, we're going to kind of add, we're going to change databases. Can you like paste this SQL file to like your head, all that horrible stuff. So that was my way into Python and Django? So that was like, 2008. So Oh, my God, that does h me, doesn't it? Wow. Yeah.

Will Vincent 8:17
Was that templates? are you dealing with an API from Jango,

Chris Adams 8:20
I was mainly working at the template level, because the thing I really liked, as someone working with the two was that it felt very, very comfortable for me. Whereas when I was doing when I did the equivalent back then working in Rails, I had to learn all these other bits of it very much more kind of opinionated around Ruby. So I was doing front end stuff, really. And from there, I did a bit more kind of Python work. And then I think my first proper Python project was I went from there to working in twisted, which I found extremely difficult, because oh, yeah, there's asynchronous stuff, and all this event based stuff, which was, oh, God really hard for a media studies student to get their head around, or this or this, this media studies student to get their head around.

Carlton Gibson 9:04
Yeah.

Will Vincent 9:06
That's just yeah, I mean, Andrew Godwin says it's hard. So I believe him. So on that front, I love that project, though. Because that's that. So when people email me about my my books and stuff, and the projects they want to build, often it's it's something like that. It's like, well, I want to have a back end and an API and I want this and I want this and I want this and it's just sounds like impossibly complicated to me, but I'm thinking about how to actually build it as opposed to like, yeah, you could, you know, like, and you just step by step through it. So yeah, I love that. That's, it's like you're not constrained by like, that sounds hard. It's like, oh, like, it's tech like, it can be done. It was in it can be done, right. You just got to find the tools and work backwards to the end goal.

Chris Adams 9:52
Yeah, I was. In this case, I was extremely lucky to have someone who has both bought and read the Good computers, who kind of would help me? So I came up with like the name and like the general like, wacky concept. In the end, we call it grass roots as in like you'd grow someone up on route to somewhere. Like that was kind of the it was like a multi layered kind of artsy punk stuff.

Will Vincent 10:15
Explain it. Yeah,

Chris Adams 10:19
a bunch of stuff like that. Yeah, that was it was, you don't know what you don't know. So you kind of jump in. And when you're like, that young, you don't need to sleep as much as you might do now when I'm like closer to 14. So, yeah, it was a, it was a learning experience. And in some ways, so nice. Yeah,

Will Vincent 10:38
it's closer to 40. I gotta tell you, I just turned 40 this year, and Carlton can attest, it's all just picking up momentum.

Carlton Gibson 10:45
I'm just getting further away.

Will Vincent 10:48
Yeah, that's like my grandfather used to be 85. Because he lived in, you know,

Carlton Gibson 10:54
wow. Okay, right. So that's your start. But then that's still a long way. So you're, you've kind of got build building apps, we're building web web applications in the early 2000s. Okay, common common thing to happen. But then, many, many years, like not many years, probably 10 years later, I saw you. Eight years, he saw you giving a talk about environmentalism. So what's the transition? So

Chris Adams 11:20
the transition has largely been, I guess, I've been following the subject and having to pick up the tech along the way for most of the things. So I ended up after I mean, I, me and my friend, Fred, we set up a company did that. And then we didn't really know how to measure the expectations, the commercial side. All these other things in doing all these wacky projects, like another we did was access control for a co working space. So with a bunch of open source software written in Python, the twisted thing, so we built a door, a demon called door D, which would make the door to door and it would read like RFID cards. And the idea being that when you walk in, it would check against an LDAP directory, but also it could play your thing us It could play any kind of mp3.

Will Vincent 12:08
I had that very same idea. Like when I did my graduate study, we had all these rooms, and I was like, you know, people come in lakes, you they put you in groups, and I was like, wow, that, you know, we all need to have, you know, our theme music. Yeah.

Chris Adams 12:21
Well, you know what it was nicely, because you

Will Vincent 12:23
probably both of you haven't. But if you see the American baseball game, when they batters come out, they'll have the music. So like, that's sort of, like, a lot of times, it's just something generic, but often they have fun with it, especially here in Boston with the Red Sox. So they'll just play ridiculous things. So they actually have music every time they come out. It's like a 15 second little clip as a, you know, grab the crotch.

Chris Adams 12:45
That's, Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. I didn't know I didn't know that. So that was so Sue answered the question cards. And that was me doing a bit of Python stuff. And I learned basically why it's not a good idea to put a Linux box connected to a building onto the public Internet with SSH access. I we further than that, we have people saying, hey, why is your door sending me spam? Right? Because you had like, things like that, that we realized. But anyway, that's another story. So he went to bits of like Python. And then after doing that for a while, I mean, Fred, we kind of like decide to wind up that work. And then I took a job at an agency where I at an agency called head shift where I was working as an operations person. Because in all this stuff here, I gradually learned, basically all these difficult painful lessons on them on my own money, or how not to one service. And then but then I kind of had, you know, enough scar tissue to kind of work. And so I ended up working as a kind of like Junior operations analyst, system, administration, dogs for the person. And then, in about six months, I ended up being moved into, I think, like, consulting, basically. So I ended up being the person to lead on as a kind of solutions architect he kind of person logic, because I could talk to humans and talk about technology at the same time. And that was useful.

Carlton Gibson 14:07
That's a nice niche to her.

Chris Adams 14:09
Yeah, so we did that. And then ended up working on like, a number of projects in hantuchova. Hire teams to get that stuff done. So there's a bunch of like Drupal projects and WordPress projects. And then like bits of chef, or DevOps II stuff. And then I, I know there are some projects, which I didn't really like working on, partly because of technology choices. And I this is a look, if you put me in another one of these projects, I will quit and the pigment on another one of those projects, and I quit. And so I ended up moving to another company was called Amy that stood for avoid mass extinction engine, which is one of the companies I idolized when I was younger, and they were basically trying to work out the carbon footprint of everything. And I was working as a Rails developer for them. So my first workers like a Ruby coder, and then I worked with them for like a year and a half. And I saw what changes were in VC companies were When companies raise too much VC, and then realize, oh god, no, we're gonna have to monetize or figure out how to make back the returns inside three years or so. So we did that. And then after 18 months, I basically decided to go off on my own, again, as a kind of independent consultant. And at that same time, a friend of mine, who had been doing a bunch of Django work easily, he was like, Chris, this is one project. This is called domain logic, which is turning into a proper company. Now, can you help me out because I know that you've gone freelance recently. So I basically did that I started working with him. And then we did a kind of transition process. And that was me going back into working with Django, again, back after 2008. And it was really nice, because I had a background with rate of snap by that point. And then I really appreciated lots of the ideas that were also implemented in, in Django. And there was lots of things that I really liked that I didn't see like the whole kind of notion of forms in Django is really, really lovely. And I was something that wasn't so well developed in Rails for a long time. And then I ended up staying with Python, because I found the explicitness much easier for me to kind of keep inside my head, and then ended up working on that, and then ended up I think, proposing ideas to conference speakers, I figured we should probably should be talking about climate given they're in a climate emergency. And like, you know, you will listen to kind of fellow travelers or trusted messengers. So this seemed like a way to do that. And also, I really liked the kind of Django community back from like, the Python days back in 2008. So I ended up thinking like, what if I'm going to be if I'm going to join one community? Django seemed like the nicest and really nice community. And where did it Where do we speak? I was in Denmark, it was in Italy.

Carlton Gibson 16:42
It must have been Italy must have been France. I first saw Yeah. And they just blew me away. Cuz you were like, cuz obviously climate change, you come on the agenda. By didn't know anything about it, really. And, you know, okay, we got stopped using cars. And we've got, I don't know, we've got to stop. But you were like, no, look, you can choose to put your service, you can have a greener service. And you can spin down some servers when you're not using them. And you can massively reduce the comfort of your project. And actually, this is doable. And it's like, you know, it's doable for you on the projects that you work on to try and consultants. And I was just like, Wow, that is that is amazing. And then obviously, talk to you afterwards.

Will Vincent 17:23
And that was your first Django con Carlton, right.

Carlton Gibson 17:25
Yeah, that was my first that was an amazing thing, when I went to floor walk, because I'd been in the Django using Django forever, but just sort of, sort of, and I've been contributing to Django rest framework for ages. But I was kind of like, just goes to codes type thing. You know, I was on the mailing list, but that was about it. And I'd never been to Django con or pi con or any of these things. And then I went to Gen Con Europe's it was in Florence. Gardner that sounds amazing. And I was just blown away by, you know, the talks and the people and just everything. Why haven't I been coming to this for years? It's just absolutely the most foolish thing in the world to miss Django. Anyway, that's, that was my, that was how we met Carlton, right,

Will Vincent 18:05
you came to my talk, and you very politely after the talk pointed out a couple things I had wrong. You know, cuz me, I would have raised q&a? Probably, hopefully not now. But I was like, Wow, that was really, you know, and also, I was like, wow, this is like a maintainer. You know, this is like, you know, like in Tron, it's like a user, you know, he coming up and talking to me. It personalized everything I did want to solve, just, we can jump hang up, I was gonna jump around, go ahead, finish the thought,

Carlton Gibson 18:37
No, well, no, I just wanted to, before we move on and do it and go deeper into that stuff. I really do want you to, you know, educate us here, Chris. But I just wanted to ask switching back to Django from rails, what was the thing she missed? Like, you know, it's not things that Django does, right. But what is it, you know, rails has this, and that's really nice that we, you know, we don't have a job.

Chris Adams 18:58
This is going to sound quite strange. But the thing that I appreciated there being an abundance of in Rails was actually the tutorials, the really high quality videos and education, educational support material, so that you could be a few days ahead of being found out. Right. And the other thing that was actually quite nice, was that the I found the rails guides documentation, absolutely stellar. And when I mean, it was probably because I had 10 years difference between these two. But I found that when I was first coming to a lot of the kind of Django documentation, I wasn't able to make so much sensitive because I wasn't so confident in Python at the time. Whereas with the real stuff, I found it a bit easier for me to like copy and paste and kind of get to a sense of confidence, I suppose. So those are some of the things that I found. And I guess one other thing that was a really big thing, which I really appreciated in Ruby land was a CI tool. called pri, which is very, which was it made messing around on the command line like you would with or using ipython or rich, it made it really nice and and it gave you a really lovely experience that took a while for me to find some things like that. But I think those are the main things that end the testing. And back in, I guess, like, early 2000 10s was the confusion around what testing tools to use. There wasn't like rails and R spec in this. I mean, rails had r spec and a few, a few very, very clear things. Whereas in Python, I was like, doing a bit in nose doing a bit of pie tastes a bit in something else. I mean, that feels like it's bedded down a lot more now. But I found myself a bit confused. Yeah, they weren't at that stage. Yeah, I

Carlton Gibson 20:44
think I can bind to that last point. Certainly, like, should I be using knows what's what's so good about it? Like,

Chris Adams 20:51
yeah,

Carlton Gibson 20:52
how's it any different from what, you know, it's just no guidance there.

Will Vincent 20:56
I think that's true. What you said about rails with the beginner friendly is, that's certainly the case. I mean, in part because I think jingoes docks are really good. But in terms of official tutorials, there's Django girls polls is, I mean, it's an interesting thing, because I have my own stuff. And I would just assume, take, like the very beginner stuff and be like, Well, here's three, three, here's an official hello world, here's an official crud, you know, but the dachser I probably like someone should do that. And like, I could do that. But it's like, it's the poles tutorial, sort of this almost like original source. And no one's really written those things. So I feel like I feel like, which is to say, I think it would be stronger for Django if there were more than one official tutorial. And probably I'm positioned to make something happen on that front. But there's this like, hive mind of Django. I and someone else haven't. But I think having, you know, because right now people go to polls, and they sort of get the they probably get confused unless they've done something web before. And then they go to Django girls, or maybe they find my stuff. But in terms of Django itself would probably be stronger to have some. Yeah, more tutorials as opposed to just docs.

Chris Adams 22:13
Yeah, I think once you You're right, once you're in you that you appreciate the extensiveness of the of the Django, Doc's, when you're working your way in is a little bit more difficult. And like to finish, I really think that, okay, think about your typical Django developer gets paid to write. And then you think about how much it would cost to hire like an editor, like someone who's actually got specialist skills in this field. Like, I kind of feel like these are things that it's a case of us deciding to allocate some funds to have people with a protect with the correct expertise to do this stuff, and maybe with a different perspective than what we might have, because a lot of us are really, really, really comfortable with them. And we're coming from a different place of people who just come into this for the first time. So yeah, I think there's something that's

Will Vincent 22:58
probably I mean, Carlton, you've been working with someone on Google Summer of, of docs.

Carlton Gibson 23:03
Yes, we had the season. Last year, which went, which was good. And, you know, we restructured the beginning of the contributing guidance, a bit more work to go on there to make it more, but like, that was a nice thing. But I think there's there's room I think for, you know, a full time, not full time, but like a professional what they call the technical writer, professional technical writer to, you know, be funded to do, you know, a much more substantial amount of work on the Django Doc's, I think, is the introductory level, because, you know, the reference level, it's perfect, but those, those tutorials and how to levels they're not quite as, as rich for simple reason. It's really hard to write those and time consuming. Yeah,

Will Vincent 23:47
I can, I can, I can attest to that. I mean, on some level, it's just like, I mean, I already give away the first few chapters of all my books, like, this is me being incredibly biased, but like, you want something like that, like kind of just copy and paste it over. But I can't, I can't do that. Because I'm on the board. I'm, I'm conflicted. Someone else should come in and write something like that. But you know, Django, hello world. Django, crud, maybe Django auth. Something. And, yeah, the issue is, I mean, we've talked about this in the show is, you know, the dangle board is is volunteers. And it's small. And like already, just speaking, personally, I'm doing way too much right now. It's unsustainable, how much I'm doing for the board. And I think Anna's probably the president in the same boat. So there just needs to be a way to do that. But I think it would help Django and to have beyond just Django girls. Yeah, to have those. And we probably could even I mean, we had Eva from the Python Software Foundation. You know, there are grants available, probably to do something like this. But someone needs to, you know, do all that work to make it happen, is the thing, but maybe someone listening can have a suggestion because I think, you know, and even for me as an educator, I prefer teaching intermediate stuff then beginner stuff. I mean, I, I think it would be stronger for the very beginner stuff to be within Django itself as opposed to having to go to a third party, like me and the other author, you know, few authors out there, because even for us, like, someone yesterday was telling me he was like, yeah, you know, you content creators make all this money. And I was like, I was like, Are you being sarcastic? Because I can't, I can't tell very email. But it's, I love doing it. But like, you know, I take a discount over just being an entry level Django developer to do my stuff. So I think that's part of the part of the issue. So I have a long way of saying, Yeah, we should. Django we should. We should we Django should do that. And there's probably funding to have someone, a technical writer, write up those things to kind of match rails and friendliness for beginners. Anyways. Right, so I want to ask you, yes. Chris, the environment?

Carlton Gibson 25:53
Yeah. Before we go the environment.

Will Vincent 25:58
So from where you sit? What do you think like when you see Bitcoin? Is this just like a doomsday engine in terms of like, creating a virtual currency to like, use up insane resources, and not really do anything? Like what is what is your take on it? I think

Chris Adams 26:14
I, this is the thing I have really, like, whenever we talk about 10, what do you think you're talking about Bitcoin is like, you know, there's a phrase called rip your mentions. Because you know, how people you know, if you've ever seen that kind of that kind of meme, where people are, say, it's got approved from the Simpsons diving in front of someone like Elon Musk and valid criticism. You have the same thing with Bitcoin, people get really, really, really emotionally invested in it such that if you say anything against it, it's very difficult to have any kind of meaningful kind of informed discussion around it.

Will Vincent 26:58
But we can no one's gonna talk.

Carlton Gibson 27:00
Maybe we don't we don't this is true. We don't have live comments. So you know, you've got

Chris Adams 27:09
watch watch there was if we get comments, Oh, absolutely about Bitcoin if I start talking about, right. So genuinely, I think that there are much better uses of all the compute and the resources and everything like that. And I, I kind of feel like, if you really care about the decentralization aspect of it, then you should be able to decouple the notions of decentralization from proof of work, because the proof of work part, which basically creates state scarcity, when there needn't be scarcity, not just in compute, but also now in kind of bandwidth, because there's kind of tokenization of bandwidth and tokenization of storage with sheer, every single fundamental building block we use to create digital services to make the world better. There are tools and their various schemes, which essentially, create scarcity when there needn't be, and that pushes up the costs on to literally everyone else to enrich a small number of people, I find that problematic. But this is a i, if possible, it'd be really nice not to talk about Bitcoin for the for the podcast, because I think there are other you who do a much better job of talking about it. And there's this, you know, we could talk about, basically, I think it's really easy for me to get on a high horse and start talking about it. And then suddenly, the hours over. And another thing,

Will Vincent 28:25
I feel like, well, let's talk about climate, and Django tell us about climate and gencos history.

Carlton Gibson 28:30
Yeah. Tell us about the green web Foundation, the green new Django talk that you did, like, give us your give us your, your

Chris Adams 28:36
Yeah. Okay. So the one thing you mentioned, Carlton, when you said, when you saw that talk in 2017, was, you know, you felt like oh, wow, there is a way that this can speak to my, I guess, things I value as a professional, and as ideologue, irresponsible technologist, right, and I can see, the way I see it, like, if we're kind of, if you're over the age of like, say, 18. And you can see, you're considered an adult, you know, we're kind of heading into like, we're literally in a climate emergency, like we have, you know, more than half of all the kind of local councils in the UK and lots of places around Europe, and in the Americas, okay, we need to do something, you see all these things. And I kind of feel that we tend not to talk too much about this as technologists, because we don't really have the language for using this. And I feel that it's kind of what should be part of your, your thought that part of what you consider being a professional is to be aware of these changes, and avoiding and take steps to avoid needless harm if you are in a position of power, when you can make these decisions. And that's kind of how I framed it for the Jango talk specifically because I kind of feel having a sense of control of your own destiny is really important. And I and that's why I think lots of people respond nicely to the kind of climate Django talks because, oh, wow, there's things I can do. I'm no longer powerless. And I think this I think there was also something interesting conferences that later on, someone will say, Well, I'm just a developer, what can I do? And I kind of feel well, as I think someone, I'm just someone who gets paid multiples of the median salary in my place, where I'm able to pick and choose my jobs, and able to basically dictate the extent of how I work such that things like 20% time are a thing. Or if I get severance, it's six months of severance rather than being fired on the spot in many cases. And I feel that like, yeah, if we're professionals, then we should be able to, I guess, rather than just kind of like to feel bad about this weird kind of dissonance between what we do professionally, and what's happening around us, it makes more sense for to align these ways, and there are ways to align this stuff. And I think that's a more health healthy way of thinking about this. And also, I think, if you can frame the stuff that you do in these terms, then I guess it makes you like, more fulfilled as a technologist. But in many ways, the things that you might value, someone who cares about I guess, is moving to an advanced and humane future are the same things you'd value as an engineer, like, you know, avoiding needless waste, avoiding needless harm. Yeah, all this stuff here, right. And it often makes you look like a rock star, if you're able to, I don't know, half the bills or things you're out or something like that. I mean, Rockstar in a good way.

Carlton Gibson 31:18
But yeah, but exactly you'd like because as well, there is this thing that if you are more efficient, you do cut the bills. And so you can say, Well, you know, we can just keep these servers on full time, and you're going to be going full blast, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you know, 52 weeks a year, or, you know, just on the weekends, when we get no traffic, we could scale down to just have one of them going so that you know if someone turns up the site still up. But you know, we don't need four servers running full capacity on the weekend, because we don't get any traffic.

Chris Adams 31:44
And like this is actually I think this is why I talk a lot about the aesthetics of this. And like I worked with some friends to make a magazine called branch, like nerdy sustainability tech gag there, but it was exciting and interesting. And the thing that you want to aspire towards. And I kind of feel that as a meat when I didn't actually say this before, but one of the reasons I kind of got interested in Django was, I think, the in the early 2000s, you meet various people, and I think, a couple people where I met Simon Simon Willison, but I heard about Jenga for him. And like we bump into each other, I think somebody's open rights group style things. And from that, I met people like Tom Dyson, and read these people who I really looked up to. And they were very much like, I guess, they had a halo effect for the framework that made you want to go towards that, because I thought like the things that were being built, like every block and all these things here, which we're about, okay, let's talk about an agenda in terms of Okay, let's address some of these balances of power. These seems like really cool and important things to do. And I feel I that's kind of where some of this came from. And like, I think this is the reason why I end up speaking, that's not the Django stuff, in addition to be being enjoy, like, interested in like the framework and everything is that I feel like there's a kind of, there's something of a kind of climate tradition with Django. I know there are people who have worked on things like this. So the people who I kind of look up to, or have looked up to a very long period of time. So look at say, like I was mentioned, like, Simon Willis and Andrew Godwin, Tom Dyson, oh, Natalie, down, I think she's about on Twitter. These are the people who worked at, say, an organization called torch box when they worked on a thing called the carbon account, which was like Carver, people find a workout personal carbon footprint stuff back in 2008. And they were using Django to build with this stuff. And now you look at the say, some of the companies that are doing some really, really cool stuff. Like, in the UK, in particular, there's a company called octopus energy. They're one of the fastest growing energy companies. And they also have a really, really lovely Style Guide, which I can always always reference when I'm working on projects. And yeah, that's, you know, there's a climate angle there as well. And I kind of feel like, even when I was in Germany, where I work, I worked at a company called the Mondo and like, once we've realized that we need to get off fossil fuels for energy, what are the next problems is figuring out how to heat space heat things, or like configuring route heating as a problem. And like they were working on that which I worked briefly. And again, that's a big Django thing, Django team. And I kind of thought that like, it makes a Django is a really, really good tool for this, but also a lot of the aesthetics, or the people I look up to seem to be associated with this. So I figured, yeah, that's a threat. I should probably run with that. Because I figure like, it'd be awesome if Django just became the obvious choice to build any kind of client, the next kajillion dollar climate tech startup or something like that, you know, and it just feels like because there are you can reach into data science and because it's so ubiquitous, it feels like it's a really nice place to have leverage, I suppose. And there's a really nice scope for cross pollination as well. Like, there's loads of interesting stuff with like, say machine learning and people have figured out that Yeah, machine uses huge amounts of electricity for what it's doing. But there's also been responsible scientists and technologists and innovators there. And they're things like code carbon.io, which is basically a Python context manager that will basically run a process or run something, then tell you what they conduct the carbon footprint of that would be. And it's initially used for, like working out, say, if you to kind of think about how you might change your machine learning run, but this is exactly the kind of stuff you might use to kind of either put into like ci, or anything that come on the process like you could I can, I can imagine this being tied to say, anywhere that any way you kind of run a Django process, you can understand what the environmental impact of that might be, so that you can actually tune it and do things like

Carlton Gibson 35:40
this. Something I really worry about with the Django project itself is that we've got so many databases and so many supported versions of Python, and we, you know, we've got Mac and we've got windows. And so the, the big ci run, you know, we run the Selenium tests, we run the Oracle test, it's like 20, or 30, ci runs for every commit. It's like, Ah, that's,

Chris Adams 36:02
this sounds my idea. But this is like, there, there are ways you can address this problem. And you can look to what Firefox is doing. Because, okay, if Django is complicated imagine,

Carlton Gibson 36:12
yeah, okay.

Chris Adams 36:13
Yeah. There's a really good post, the Firefox team wrote about how they basically used the applied machine learning to look at the similarities between all these different kind of similarities in their test matrix their targets, right? And they basically, okay, I don't, I'm not a data scientist, or a machine learning specialist. They did like some AI magic to work out, which ones tend to be like meaningful failures compared to other ones. And they were able to like reduce the CI zero ones by more than 90%. Because like, if something because like, say, I think like, two versions of various 10, like if one's going to fail, and one that it's probably going to fail in the other one. So there's no point now that they're doing some stuff like that, basically. But they were to able to achieve really drastic reductions, and the use of ci there, and there's all this space for ingenuity and innovation here. And I kind of feel like these are the things that speak to our values, as like technologists and people who want to be building the future. And I feel like these are the things that would make sense to make consistent with how we feel as well what we want to do in our day job, really, I feel like if we kind of end up building Star Trek instead of Mad Max them the way, this is also a weird, right, like, yeah,

Will Vincent 37:27
I wonder I've got the post up. And we'll link to in the docs. there's a there's a great meme on the not sure not sure if flaky tests are broken code, which is very true. I mean, but I almost wonder if we had a list. Yeah. So if, if someone wants to tackle this for Django, like I almost feel like we should have a list of like, ope like Millennium problems that someone for Summer of Code or elsewhere, elsewise wanted to talk about? Because Yeah, maybe that's an interesting idea. I mean, certainly that, sorry, just to say like, yeah, that just how long it takes productivity hit as well as an environmental hit to take so much time to run tests?

Chris Adams 38:02
Well, this is the thing like there is, there is a lot of overlap between these things here, like you can talk about, like efficiency, all the time. But it's also important to think about the other things you kind of value, I suppose, because we can talk about how we and I, this is one of the things that kind of, I guess drew me very much to like the Django community was when I went to the conferences, you know, there was a sense of inclusion and sense of camaraderie, and community. And I find that I really found that a real plus. And when I ended up like helping some of the Django girls things, and I saw how generous people were, with their time and expertise. And I thought I definitely really want to be a part of that. And again, I think that there's a lot of ideas that I think, really, I think we don't celebrate so much, or really appreciate quite so much that we could celebrate more or really kind of make more of a thing of and I can't, I've got it under sunlight, just a fanboy of like, torch box and live like this online. But I kind of feel like we should celebrate when we celebrate other companies doing the big sale or like or home raising a bunch of money or VC or set or going to an IPO or something. Yeah, that's good and everything. But I think there's also things when we see people like that, okay, we're not going to sell my agency, but I'm going to send it back to the employees so they can focus on doing really, really meaningful work that are that that might not necessarily be as profitable as other work but is really vital work. Like I know that torch box did something like this recently where they the founders basically took a step back and I felt like this is the kind of classy move that I wish we would see more of and be celebrating more and be talking about because I feel like these tie into the ideas of community and things that we seem to like really value. When I when I speak to at conferences, and it feels like these are things are worth being aware of in the same way that when you look, I guess people work in things like 18 F in America, or GDS, these feel like things which are also things that we we do celebrate, but I feel that we could celebrate more. There you go. They are like vitally important services and things which improve the lives of so many people. So yeah, stuff like that.

Carlton Gibson 40:08
Yeah, no, I mean, and that ties into thoughts and discussions we've had on the DSF members lifts about, you know, celebrating contributors to Django that are beyond just the code, you know, beyond science, I did some commits, and did this feature on the other end, which, you know, we don't celebrate enough as it is. But, you know, there's so much more to Django than that, like all the contributors to, you know, putting on a Django con, you know, we don't call them out all the people who help a Django girls workshop, we don't call them out all the people who just are there on the mailing list, or the forum that we don't call out, and the Django community is so much more than just the repo. And yeah, I mean, to call out cool things in the ecosystem, too. That's Yeah, it's all part of the same. You know, we need to recognize that what a great community we have you, and

Will Vincent 40:57
well, there's doing the work and promoting the work, right, and most people who spend their time doing the work. But yeah, it's like, Who's going to promote it? I mean, one of the things I hope that comes out of this podcast is introducing people who do fill those roles and calling attention to it, because there isn't an official Django way to say, Hey, here's who organizes these conferences. Here's Who are the people who have done all these things. And this is what they're like. So that's partly, you know, you know, to get to your question of, you know, owner occupied, there isn't really like, certainly not a monetization, but there isn't a way for someone or some organization to to spend the time to promote things, because that is also a form of work beyond saying, Do come to a Django con, do get involved. And once you're in the community, you can experience it. But you sort of have to take that first step to, to have it but I think, but certainly, certainly everyone on this podcast, you know, is big on the Django community. So I think it is the case, once you take that first step, whatever, whatever it is. In any event, I did want to call out one thing just in we have links to your talks. For someone who I wasn't actually aware of where I wasn't thinking about this, but the fact that you have a slide saying the internet is the biggest machine in the world, it mostly runs on fossil fuels. Like, in the US, I don't even know how much the internet counts for energy consumption. But I think it's like other percentages out there for like, how much is the internet versus

Chris Adams 42:24
you can see percentages. And there's two things to remember for this. So first of all, the internet is roughly you can think of it in terms like the if you read all the academic literature, you'll find figures performed between one and 3% of co2 emissions and 1% and five or 10% of electricity. Now, generally speaking, it's I kind of feel that the amount of electricity users are not that worried in that, I mean, basically, it's it, I think it's more useful to think of it in terms of what is it comparable to, right? Because this helps us figure out like, is this a good use of that? You know, is it a good deal? Or is it not a good deal? So the internet and like technology, in general, is about 2% of global co2 emissions. So that's like roughly all of aviation or all of shipping, right? And it's also like the equivalent to like, I mean, if you want to compare it to other things, that's like Canada, or Germany or the UK a, the increase in emissions from us switching from mainly cars to mainly SUVs is around about the same kind of ballpark, right? So you think about, okay, if I want to have these things, I've considered all the kind of utility I get from this, I would say 2% of emissions, for all the things that digital does, and he is actually pretty good deal, especially in the middle of a pandemic, right? When I think about, okay, switching from cars to SUVs in that same time period, they've been the same kind of footprint, I feel that slightly less of a good deal, right. And I kind of feel like, this is why you need to think about what you're comparing it to. And the other thing to bear in mind is that we need to get this to zero, right? So even if it isn't a huge amount, the scale of the challenge ahead of us is that we need to get to zero emissions by Okay, the as soon as possible. But most governments are saying the 20 2050 the absolute latest and in in America is like half, you know, 50% by 2030. So we not we it's not the case of it just being level, it's having to get down to something like that. And the good news is that technology, assuming you're not going to be doing something silly with proof of work based currencies, right? You can actually it does feel like it's the you know, you're moving in the right direction. Like I'd say tech is actually pretty good for a bunch of this stuff. And if you're going to talk about you wouldn't necessarily be talking about the environment. The carbon footprint of tech so much is like what Who are we choosing to enable and what behavior are we which needs are we choosing to prioritize because these decisions are probably going to have much farther reaching implications. But at the same time, it's kind of a professional hygiene thing to like, not be running your, your all your infrastructure on fossil fuels, if you can help it because it's needlessly causing harm. Like, there's something in the order of like, one in five early deaths comes from burning fossil fuels. So even if you didn't talk about carbon emissions, there's still all these needless deaths, which happened, just because we've got this on this destructive default we can and should be fixing.

Carlton Gibson 45:27
Okay, so there's a good example, you pulled up running my infrastructure on fossil fuels, right? So but I go to I go to cloud provider.com, you know, forward slash vision, and I clicked my instance, there's no column for, you know, buy renewable passes here. I don't, how do I so how do I find how do I, as a developer say, right, I'm going to, I'm going to provision this cluster using so there's

Chris Adams 45:54
a few things, this data centers, you know, so I mentioned code carbon.io, is one example. They do some really cool stuff, where they'll basically look at the kind of job that you just did, and then say, Well, this is what the carbon footprint would have been all these other regions, which we can find on our list of cloud providers. And thoughtworks really does some have released a project called Cloud carbon footprint, which basically will plug into your AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft building tools, and will basically tell you this and say, Well, if you are running, and this is what the carbon footprint of your job is of like down to like service level. So you have these figures out there. But it's generally right now, only the huge companies provide these kinds of numbers right now. And it feels like there's a real need for other ones, because, you know, healthy ecosystems are diverse ecosystems. And we had the discussion before about Okay, well, there's also the idea that these are the club of a very, very efficient, but they're also the people who are the absolute leaders in accelerating the extraction of fossil fuels which be burned, which have these problems further down. And right now we have no way of decoupling the cool stuff from the bad stuff like accelerating fossil fuels are not paying taxes. And I kind of feel that this is something that we tend not to talk about too much. And I felt like there is something that we can actually address by by basically, I think the phrase I used was slacktivism, rather than activism, right? Thinking about, okay, well, if you're going to do this, what steps can you take, like Amazon have been on the record saying, if you care about this, please use the green regions more, and like they are moving, but they're only moving as fast as they really need to. And I also feel that like, it kind of feels like, wait, so suddenly, the cost of a migration is on me to move all my stuff, because you are a trillion dollar company on in a hurry to make these changes. And I feel like while we're stuck with no way of moving away from this, I kind of feel it's very difficult to have much leverage. And I feel like this is a thing about us being more strategically, where as professionals about what we, who, who were enabling when we do this kind of stuff, or at least be able to talk about and say, Well, this is a real priority for us, please do something to do this, because I'm not saying that we should disengage, but even engaging, I don't think there are that many devout people who are even engaging at this point. I don't know how to start these conversations. Yeah, well, I

Will Vincent 48:19
think it's gonna have to, I mean, as you said, it's gonna have to come from the consumers who say, you know, this is important to me. And that will feed back at least to the American companies, they're not, you know, they care about the bottom line. So if customers care, they'll add it. But

Chris Adams 48:34
so this is one thing that's kind of interesting for us. And there's loads of really useful research around this. So we often think in terms of this has to come from consumers first. But in many ways, it's much more of a kind of symbiotic thing, where in say the list of accessibility, for example, accessibility is another case where there's lots of people who are who have been previously shut out from services, which would improve their lives. And it wasn't necessarily consumers who were able to get this, it was a concerted effort by professionals saying no, accessibility is important, but also speaking to the people who procure. And so these are the things you need to ask for, like having something like the W mcag, the web content authoring guidelines, these make it easy for people who write checks to say, you need to make this accessible otherwise, we're not going to do this work. And like this was this was initially pioneered by public sector. So and then this has led down to trickle down to like even Domino's pizzas having to care about this and private sector companies needing to take this account into account where previously didn't have to have to have to. And there's really good examples of stuff in public sector where they are working for this and like, I mean, I speak as a European right where like 45 billion euros is spent on it each year, which is a pretty big carrot, right? But also in the UK, there is a load of really interesting work where the people who spend money there, like in the orders of 100 10s of millions are also saying we stand as a monopoly and we have our own target for We need to meet, we should be sneaking. So it's a case of consumers. But there's also, I think there's a wider that it's more complicated than that. And I kind of feel that. I mean, a really good example actually will be America right now. So, America, we've had this massive infrastructure announcement, right, where they're going to spend something like $2 trillion. Now, even Google themselves, Google about one of the leaders in this to fit in terms of greening their infrastructure, right. So they said, We want to be 24, seven matching power, so not on an annual basis, they want to have all the time or the infrastructure running all the time on renewable power. And they said, we were doing this and we are setting a target 2030 because even us a trillion dollar company by ourselves can't do this, we need to work with the government. And the US government has basically included the same language of 24, seven power into all their buildings from now on right now, the biggest buyer of renewable electricity of electricity has now said, we're gonna do what Google is doing. So that's going to change the market much more than just consumers in this. And I kind of feel like, as people who build systems and maintain systems, there's all these useful systems thinking we could draw upon. And I expand our understanding of this. And I feel like, as professionals, we could totally do this is like, it's like so much you could like, dive into if you're interested.

Carlton Gibson 51:18
But as well, and when you're in that next, that next meeting where it comes to be like, you know, we're going to spec up the architecture, what are we going to do? What are we going to do to raise your hand and mention those points is actually yeah, working on frontline? Yeah, it's, it's making a Chinese

Chris Adams 51:33
thing I was gonna mention this two things on this thing I was gonna mention. First of all, we've done some work with the Internet Society. And we've landed a bunch of funding to basically build an open syllabus syllabus aimed at technologists saying, These are the questions to ask these are how to think about it, we're going to be doing it over the next year, we'll be running a series of fellowships who we basically hire them to learn in the open with us to build this open syllabus that could be used for pretty much any kind of documentation. But the thing that I wanted to speak to you folks about is that we're considering doing something similar to have like a kind of green web Django for we basically pay, we think here seems like between 10 and 15k, for someone to basically write the guides and write information for this. And we can probably find, we can put up like 7k already, because some we had some funding land. So if we can find some other people to put in some of the other stuff, then we can absolutely pay for someone to say, these are the things to think about as especially as a responsible technology. So just like we have things like the defaults from Mike Hanna from Jacob Jacobson named General, g. COVID. On Twitter, I forget his he's the Jacob Kaplan monster. Yes. Yeah. So one of the places he worked there is like this, this document called the defaults, which is, this is what we use for our stack, right? All things being equal, right? Yeah, it'd be so nice to have something like like, these are the things to think about as a Django developer, because there's stuff out there. There's some work by a guy called azim Hussein, when I think that he's written something called principles creep, which is basically how to think about architecture as a developer in this field. And he is now the head of greencoat advocacy at Microsoft who doing some really good work. There's totally stuff out there. But it'd be really nice to have something specifically aimed at the communities because the, in the in the in the land of WordPress, there's a bunch of real trailblazers there. And I kind of feel like with Django, his background, and all the people I've mentioned before, there's absolutely space to have like if you're saying, This is how we do kind of green Django or the phrase of users go Django, because there was like, green, open, lean and distributed. That was like the stuff I using the talk to do this article. Because, hey,

Carlton Gibson 53:37
is that one of those artists?

Chris Adams 53:39
That was actually it was

Will Vincent 53:42
the nose

Chris Adams 53:45
based on the idea of poor day, because if you work with accessibility, there's perceivable, operable, understandable. I think it's understandable, I might be wrong. And I forgot was the last one resilient, right. So you have to report it makes it easy to speak to developers. It's a useful kind of memory a but it's also a thing that you can say this what I'm asking for, like, it'd be cool to have, I want to go on Django website where you can so people who commissioned right, so what's gold, green power? Yeah, the auxiliary inputs, which is basically basically running computers and making computers because computers are sand plus IP, remember, right, like sand with lots lots of energy. And then thinking about it, you know, with computers. So green, open, open, like open source, open culture, open data, these are really useful. Lean. So if you're going to emit carbon, and we kind of have to, because everything uses energy, at least make it count, and don't waste it so much, at least be able to respond and then distributed. Because once you because you don't want to be reliant on just one, one provider. And there's also once you understand a little bit more about electricity, and how like the underlying things that create a carbon footprint as a technologist, you realize that when things are distributed, you can basically scaling up demand in ways places where there's abundant abundance of green power, and not reliant on elsewhere. And so that's it green, open, lean distributed. Yeah. This is the that's what I spoke about in green in Django, the talk for Django days. And oh, yeah, I should probably talk about it. Now. I am the keynote for Django con Europe. Yeah. So we'll be speaking about this. And if there's interest, I could probably expand on that a bit more. Because Yeah, there is, um, that's the thing that we'll be talking about in a bit more detail.

Carlton Gibson 55:30
Yes, that I like the distributed on the end of that, because that's like one of the hardest things right, I've got to make my, I got to make my my project able to be deployed.

Chris Adams 55:41
I think that's so cool, though, deployed wherever it's really, really cool around distributed, right. So there's a company called Lance him. And what they do is they basically put a load of data with it, we used to think of data centers as big box things a little bit like a kind of big books out of town, Walmart, right? It's miles and when no one can see it, right. And it's the energy is really, really cheap. And they spend loads of money and loads of time, trying to get rid of the heat in the building, to the out to to tourists outside. And that has some unfortunate side effects. But there's also, this is like, the he is a really, really useful thing to actually have, you can do stuff with that. So like in, there's a whole movement to have much, much smaller data centers, in urban places where the heat that is generated ends up being used to kind of help with sake, greenhouses, for example, or something like that, when you take a systemic view. But there are also places where, because we're in a kind of world where renewable energy is increasingly common, and you have these kind of natural cycles, you have cases where if you can get the data centers near where say there are solar wind farms, or say, solar farms are wind farms, when there are places where they weren't able to sell electricity into the grid, where it otherwise be wasted, you can make use of that, which means that you can have much, much cheaper compute than what you might otherwise pay. So lawrencium use this, they take advantage of this. And they end up providing, essentially EC style compute for jobs at something like an something like an 80% discount compared to Amazon's own prices, because their entire economies are different to the economics of running a massive big box datacenter somewhere else. So there's all these things that we're not really aware of yet that we could take advantage of, if we think about the distributed part. And that's why I think it's kind of cool, because, yeah, all this work by people in ML, have basically made it easier to be aware of this stuff. So whenever there's anything that we could do, which isn't super time sensitive, you can show it to someone else can be way, way, way cheaper, and when we greener, and that will still be part of your process, but you need to design it from the very beginning, or at least have that and these are the kind of principles that I think we should be aware of as technologists, because it's just freaking cool. If nothing else, right? Yeah.

Will Vincent 57:54
Yeah. So that fellowship will there's something out on that, we'll put that in the notes. And certainly, the Django news newsletter, we'll we'll put it in there. Because I think there'll be a lot of interest in that, for sure.

Chris Adams 58:05
Yeah, it'd be really lovely to have that. Because I feel that we, if we value things, it makes sense to well, literally value things, allocate funding and time to this. And the only reason that it was possible was that the Internet Society foundation funding us, they basically said, we want to do something about the environmental footprint of the internet. And we said, Well, the problem is people don't quite know what to talk about it in terms of in terms of beyond just efficiency. So they said, Okay, well, we will fund you and pay $200,000 to fund a series of fellowships to build this kind of stuff. So there is funding out there to do this stuff. And there's absolutely funding in my, in my view, to kind of pay for like, say, people to like, you know, pay for content designers, or the people like that for the documentation for Django with this stuff. These are things we value. And I feel like that's worth doing. And I kind of when I look at how useful the Django framework has been in the community, and how valued valuable the community has been to us as well, I'm kind of amazed by just like, it wouldn't take that much to kind of double the the funding going to the Django Software Foundation, right. And there's so much you could do with that, right. And you think about like a day rate of a developer, right? Like it feels like this isn't that hard to do? Really, right. It's just a case of explicitly choosing what we decide to fund and support, I suppose.

Will Vincent 59:22
While we've Yeah, we had, actually through this podcast we had. So we had discussion with Eva from the Python Software Foundation. And I think one of the limiting factors for Django has been for historical reasons, the idea that we can't pay people into fellowships, but it's seems like that's actually not the case. And we actually had Karen Tracy, who was on the board and at cactus and written a great book reached out to Carleton and to me to give us the backstory because the current board wasn't around then. So I think he's I think these things are changing. To open things up. The issue for Django is always a kind of a management thing, right? We got to Find a working group or someone to lead these things to service the grants. But there are all these grants out there. And if we're able to do that we could have people, you know, beyond. So Carlton does a lot of work with the summer, Summer of Code season of docs, there's certainly level steps up in terms of money and features and things that could, it could be added. So so we're not limited by that anymore, which I guess is what I'm saying. More confirming. Seems to be the case.

Carlton Gibson 1:00:27
I think the thing to remember with season of doctrine, Summer of Code is it's very much students. And so, you know, that that's, there's a limit to what can be achieved within the scope of those programs. But, you know, it's always been the case with Django, we could go out and raise more money, perhaps we, you know, ask companies that usually come on to contribute, but what for, you know, the fellowship program runs, and then beyond that, we didn't have anything to raise the money for but if there's a super project to raise the money for, then, you know, we can all jump on the bandwagon. And you know, shout from the things I'm sure companies in

Chris Adams 1:01:01
this space for stuff like this, because I think I remember, was it the work with I think it was at the work on chat Jango channels, I remember this at least been once that one thing that's been kick started to actually get to create some rows of

Will Vincent 1:01:15
Postgres to

Chris Adams 1:01:16
Yeah, yeah, like, put you

Carlton Gibson 1:01:18
in Postgres, there was a rest framework, Kickstarter,

Chris Adams 1:01:20
I think it's a case of us as a community, learning to think in terms of public goods, and what things are useful another and how this stuff can be funded. Because there is now an appetite for people to talk about this. And even funders are looking to work out what language people use for this. And in some cases, it may be the case of learning to speak the language of these people that have a funder, or even how people think about governance of this stuff. So I've heard people talk about things like data, you know, there's critical infrastructure, which we're aware of like buildings and bridges, and things like that. But in the UK, people talk about data infrastructure, as we're talking about, like addresses or energy data, or things like this. And in some other places, I've heard people talk about code as like logical infrastructure, as in the stuff that we rely on. And I think it's a case of, that's what I think that came from the low risk project to use this term. And that's kind of nifty. And I think we need to be able to talk about these things that society is increasingly built upon. And once if we're able to use that language, it becomes possible to fund this kind of stuff, where it makes it much easier to think about this, it's just that we probably don't have, I mean, I guess there is an excuse of being open to figuring out how to frame or how to speak the language of people who are prepared to fund this stuff, or are looking to fund this stuff. Because right now, I'm not quite sure what to do in many cases. Now, but

Carlton Gibson 1:02:46
that's exactly the problem I have is a sort of interested, you know, join cotton, be efficient at home and all these kind of things, but I don't really know what to do.

Chris Adams 1:02:58
And like, that's the case of specialization. My people, there are people who had two really good specialists. So let's say if there's someone who specializes in growing in grant fundraising, I don't know, like, this is something we've been considering at the Greenwood Foundation, speaking someone because I've tried writing funding applications, and oh, my goodness, like pulling teeth, right? Like, sometimes it works. And like it worked this time, but it's taken so many other times, it's like, oh, my God, it's taken so much time that, you know, like, when you're back in developer and you do that CSS, you're like, this is not the most effective use of my time, right? I kind of feel like us to kind of realize there are all these other functions, which are absolutely deaf, you know, real deep domains. And being able to tap into people for that would be it would make so much sense. Like, we're going to try this because it it makes sense now that we for the first time we can afford to, but it'd be lovely to see this kind of like maturity, I suppose. Expanding? Because, yeah, I really, really am kind of quite emotionally invested in the Django community now. And like, also, technically, because a bunch of infrastructure now uses Django at the Greenwood foundation. And I, that's another podcast, right? That I kind of feel like, there is, you know, there is it urgency around this, and it'll be cool to have like, you know, a gold or something. Anyway, I wound up going a bit over time. So I'm going to wind up, because I'm just,

Will Vincent 1:04:21
I just thinking the This is why the conferences and in person things are so great is because you can have, you know, we could have this conversation over dinner, and then, you know, things could happen. And things are a bit limited. But yes, I mean, structurally, I think something. There's room for, you know, more groups within Django to work on these things, but it is there's a reason why there's professionals who do this stuff. But if we have, you know, because it's chicken and egg if we know, these are the problems we have on the one hand, and then these are the groups that are looking for ways to give money. It's just a matter of putting that together in any case, so we We'll have links to everything on here. This will come out in June. You're keynoting Django con Europe, which I think will happen before then. So we'll have a link to I think they'll have the videos up. So we'll put. We'll put your talk up. Cool when this comes out.

Carlton Gibson 1:05:14
Yeah, no, really?

Will Vincent 1:05:18
Yeah. Well, I love seeing your talk. It's so that's the privilege of having the podcast is, you know, people were like, wow, that person's really interesting. And then we get to, I get to meet virtually. So. Thank you for taking the time.

Chris Adams 1:05:29
Thank you. Oh, Carlton, you

Will Vincent 1:05:31
want to read us out?

Carlton Gibson 1:05:32
You know, yeah, I'm just blown away. I'm just like, you know, thinking about all these things that we've been talking about. So thank goodness, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for joining us.

chatDjango on Twitter, Djangochat.com. Join us next time.

Will Vincent 1:05:49
Bye.