Haha, I promise you I am not! I can't prove it was me, but I did find some old tweets where I shared that blog post in 2011. At one of the Santa Clara PyCon's I ran a small Qtile BoF in the Open Spaces and ended up meeting one or two people I had only interacted with on IRC. It was a pretty great experience over all.
I'm also kinda mind blown that a 15-second interaction I had at PyCon 13 or 14 years ago got a mention on HN. I only saw this post because someone at my local hackerspace told me that Qtile was on the HN frontpage. (I'm the resident Python champion and have shown off my Qtile setup at our monthly Linux night before.)
Oh my god, that was me! I can't believe I just read this on HN. Whenever I'm at a conference (usually PyCon or DjangoCon) and meet someone whose work has benefited me, I try to make a point to thank them.
I ended up getting involved with Qtile for a few years and contributed to the docs, website, and various widgets.
I went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.
I first started using Django in 2006, v0.95, the "magic removal" release. I was 19 and doing PHP at a small startup. I'd heard the hype around Rails, and wanted to check it out. Several hours and many head-desk moments later, I still couldn't get everything set up properly on my laptop (running Ubuntu). In my research, I discovered Python and Django and decided to give it a whirl. Twenty minutes later, I had the Django Hello Word page on my screen, and I haven't looked back since.
It wasn't long before newforms became a thing, and the 1.0 release, lots of cool database features, migrations (I remember debating South vs. Nashvegas at work), class-based views (amazing!), Postgres-specific features (built-in JSONField, finally!), Py3k support, ASGI... It's been a long, cool, productive road.
I was at the first DjangoCon in 2008 (leaving my wife at home with our two month old!), and giving a conference talk for the first time a decade later at DjangoCon 2018.
I owe my career to Django. It has been my framework of choice for projects large and small, and I've always felt solid in that decision -- thanks in no small part to the community.
I'm so excited to find this out! I was a regular attendee of PyCon and DjangoCon for close to a decade, but haven't been to one since the pre-pandemic. times I now work at a nonprofit without much of a budget for extras and had basically written off attending for the foreseeable future -- but with PyCon only a four-hour drive away from Fresno, I might be able to pull this off on my own!
In my case, I've had multiple ophthalmologists recommend against getting IOLs until I'm much, much older, as the risk of side affects (specifically retinal detachment) outweighs the benefit I would get from having them.
I still dream of being able to see first thing when I wake up.
I was born with congenital bilateral cataracts and had the lenses in both eyes removed as an infant (a condition called Aphakia). I have been set up with monovision since I was very young -- that basically means I'm intentionally far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other so that I use one eye for reading and the other eye for distance.
I wear hard contact lenses most of the time, but I do have glasses. My glasses prescription is around +21/+23 (I would fit right in hanging out with Milhouse Van Houten or Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth), but I only wear them in emergencies because I get headaches and dizziness after 10/15 minutes of wearing them. I mostly keep 'em for the novelty of showing people just how thick my glasses are. 8)
My eyes do get tired after long screen days, resulting in blurry vision and watery eyes. I also get headaches on a somewhat frequent basis.
If that's useful at all, I'd be happy to chat more.
I don't have anything meaningful to add other than how bizarre to see this on HN. Laura Splotch, who was interviewed in the article, is a good friend, neighbor, and former coworker. Weird how things intersect sometimes.
This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code...
When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun.
I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.
Heh, I'm literally in the middle of optimizing some N+1 query endpoints in a Django application for work, made a bit more tricky because of DRF's serializer.
I think a setting for lazy queries would be a good solution, with it enabled by default to ease the transition. It would be nice to have a couple options, though – allow, warn, and error.
It would also be great to have a way to change the setting on the fly so that, e.g., the Django shell can automatically enable it for those quick debugging sessions.
Heh, I discovered your comment while googling to fix the same. I'm in the same boat as you; it's seriously annoying and distracting. Did you ever find a solution?
Years ago, Facebook maintained a Python SDK for their API. One day, with no warning, Facebook announced they would no longer support it because they didn't have the resources, and the repo was removed from their Github org, which caused a huge headache. IIRC, the community settled around someones fork.
A few months later, Facebook was a major sponsor of PyCon and they set up a recruitment booth. "We'll take your developers, but we won't support your ecosystem." Really rubbed me the wrong way.
My main focus this year has been – and continues to be – working ways to ensure the space survives the pandemic.
We started making PPE earlier in the pandemic, which resulted in a lot of donations from the community. This came in clutch, and helped us build awareness of the space locally.
We also have another grant-funded project, in collaboration with several other non-profits, to build a network of low-cost air quality monitors in disadvantaged communities across the San Joaquin Valley.
We were hoping to use the funds from SJVAir to build up the space, get some new equipment, and run some cool events, but so far it's all gone to paying rent on a building we haven't been able to use since March.
I run a hackerspace in Fresno, CA called Root Access. My side project is that we're making PPE and other things to help with various efforts -- face masks, face shields, scrub caps, ear savers, no-contact accessories, etc.
We're working with other local maker-y spaces on these efforts; we've picked up a few Ender 3's to help with the 3D printing and we have a small team of volunteers helping with sewing. So far we've distributed over 1,500 face masks to folks and healthcare workers in Fresno, San Diego, Idaho, and soon to a school in Uganda.
This is all on top of trying to keep our community engaged and hosting meetups and happy hours on Zoom. Also on top of my day job. I've never been so busy in my life, and I'm looking forward to a time when we can safely re-open and get back to building the community face-to-face.
I never got to meet JPB, but I was lucky enough to attend his keynote at PyCon 2014 in Montreal. It's a great talk, should you have a spare 45 minutes.
He is (indirectly) responsible for the existence of a hackerspace in Fresno, CA. Last year a few of us got together to talk about starting a chapter of the Electronic Frontier Alliance. That conversation morphed into, "fuck it, let's just start a hackerspace."
As a parent, I get the emotional reaction. You want to provide the absolute best for your child, and this feels like a total missed opportunity.
But as someone who had cataract surgery as a newborn, please don't fret about it too much. I don't know how old your son is or when his surgery was, but bilateral aphakia is something that has become more of an inconvenience than anything else. It certainly shouldn't limit his options in life. (Unless his heart is set on joining the military, like I was. But, as they say, I really dodged a bullet there.)
I'm also kinda mind blown that a 15-second interaction I had at PyCon 13 or 14 years ago got a mention on HN. I only saw this post because someone at my local hackerspace told me that Qtile was on the HN frontpage. (I'm the resident Python champion and have shown off my Qtile setup at our monthly Linux night before.)
Small world indeed!