pauloxnet

A personal retrospective on organizing a small, standalone Django contributor sprint.

This is a follow-up written three months later, reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and what kind of value emerged beyond pull requests and GitHub activity.

It’s about keeping things small, human-scale, and focused on being together, rather than optimizing for conference-style output.

Thanks for pointing this out and for sharing the link.

I’ve just updated the article with several clarifications and an additional section based on the feedback received yesterday. Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions!

Thanks for the comment. In the article I actually show both approaches: Python 3.14’s uuid.uuid7() first, mostly for completeness, and then the recommended one where PostgreSQL 18 generates the UUIDv7 itself using the native uuidv7() function. The DB-side version is already the default path I suggest for anything beyond a simple local setup.

Regarding the timestamp, a dedicated column generated by the database from uuid_extract_timestamp() can be very practical in Django. It is written at insert time by PostgreSQL, defined declaratively in the model with GeneratedField, and handled entirely by the ORM without relying on triggers. It also makes filtering, ordering or using the Django admin faster and simpler, since querying on a proper datetime field avoids extra annotations or computation on the UUID expression.

If you have a reference for UUIDv7 support in MSSQL I’d really appreciate it, ideally from the official documentation. I’m also curious to know from which version it is available and whether the current Django MSSQL backend exposes it already.

I’ve added a list of DjangoCon US 2025 recap articles at the end of my post — but I’m sure I’ve missed some! If you’ve written or seen other recaps, please share the links so I can add them.

I’d also love your feedback on my article

Other comments on https://lobste.rs/s/u0mrjp/from_where_i_left

This is the Git repo https://github.com/oleitersdorf/PyPIM

Only 2 messages?

Better discussion here https://lobste.rs/s/mgneu0/fedora_moves_towards_forgejo

This is an interesting question.

I missed the previous one. Also, the input field has a max length.

I think so. But of course it would require times to be selected, prioritized and deployed before that.

I agree with you. Someone already proposed it in the past but can be proposed again.

I've added four new ideas to my list of possible improvements for Django and its community. I'd like to know what you think. https://www.paulox.net/2024/01/19/my-django-roadmap-ideas/

Thanks for your feedback. I confirm Django is very stable but we're trying to constantly improve it too. See for example the Release Notes https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/releases/

In addition to the Newsletter and Feeds, it would be nice to have a Blog or News section where you can publish news every now and then, for example an article for the public domain day would have been very useful for making new publications known, simplifying sharing and attracting new volunteers or donors.

Hi Alex, I shared the SE link here to help with donations and I hope it's working.

Thank you for your beautiful project.

For a few years, every January 1st, for public domain day, I have been promoting SE on social media, the thread on Mastodon is the one with the most involvement. https://fosstodon.org/@paulox/111680544393923401

It would be nice to have an SE account on Mastodon that posts about every new book published, since IMHO it's the social network more aligned with the spirit of SE.

Good catch. Reported to the Gnome mastodon account.

Here you can read about their methodology https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-methodol...

Ok, thanks so it's a Pico.css issue , I'll try to reproduce and open an issue overt there.

Thanks for your feedback. I made the blog template for Pelican fro scratch using Pico.css that I think work very well on mobile device. Can you check if you have the same issue also on their website ? https://picocss.com/

Thanks for your feedback. Could you tell me on which mobile device and which browser did you notice these scrolling issues?

Non-English-speaking kids can also start to learn programming at any arbitrary age. What they need to learn for that is a programming language, not English.

I agree with that, but what I've explained in the article is that if you don't know English is harder to access English-only documentation, resources, etc...

This can be changed by the community to be more inclusive, especially for newcomers, kids, ...

I'm totally aware that the only way to become part of the community is to learn English, because it's exactly what I've done and I've written in the article, but I wrote also that this is not inclusive and the community can change this status quo.

Discussion is in another entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27163388

Thanks a lot for sharing this Canadian point of view, it's something that I didn't know., and I really appreciate the time you dedicate to send a feedback about this subject. I think it's also important to think to other billions of people that don't know English at all, don't live in a bilingual country where learning English is easy and maybe they don't use the same alphabet. I think start using a simpler English in every text and encourage translation of documentation, website, etc ... will improve language diversity in the whole world and not only in few countries.

Thanks for this great example of translation-related problem. I also agree that FLOSS usually have a better translations.

Thanks, I think this is a good idea. A starting point to increase linguistic diversity in FLOSS.

open source projects tend to actually have better translations, since they are more often than not done by developers and users of the software, who have far more context than the random translator with the lowest hourly rate that most companies go for.

Thanks for sharing this. I totally agree with you.

But in this way 4/5 of world population are not able to participate. I don't think this is inclusive and respectful for diversity.

If you want to get involved, learn English.

Thanks for summarizing this concept. It's sad but it's true.