3… 2… 1… becoming a Djangonaut

Djangonaut Space

Djangonaut Space is a free, 8-week group mentoring program where individuals will work self-paced in a semi-structured learning environment. It seeks to help members of the community who wish to level up their current Django code contributions and potentially take on leadership roles in Django in the future.

I’m beyond excited. I was accepted to join the 7th cohort of Djangonaut Space starting next Monday.

I first learned about the program when Sarah Boyce talked about it in DjangoDay Copenhagen 2023 . I was immediately impressed by the work the team had put together to start this program. (If you want to hear about how it's going now, check out this great talk by Rachell Calhoun and Tim Schilling from this year's PyCon US.)

Oh how time flies. Over the years, a lot of people who I admire in our industry and community have been part of Djangonaut Space in various roles (like Marijke). Some of the talks that have been delivered as part of the program are regular references when I talk to people about programming, blogging, learning and community — especially this one from Carlton Gibson.

And when in late August, I saw a toot by them about upcoming cohort , I decided to finally apply myself. I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to get accepted (my impostor syndrome says hi ). You can only imagine how happy I was when in the middle of a night, an email reached my inbox telling me I was accepted and I would become one in the growing lineage of Djangonauts.

I’m looking forward to starting my journey to contribute to Django and related projects. For the Djangonaut project, I’m part of a team focusing on Django Girls+ Website project. It’s a project very close to my heart as a former Django Girls coach.

I will be blogging about my journey throughout these 8 weeks so if you’re interested in learning about what it’s like to participate in such program and becoming a contributor to open source projects, stick around! You can find my Djangonaut Space related posts from the aptly named Djangonaut Space category page.

If you’re not one who likes to wait, I’ve written quite a bit about Python in the past: two highlights have been my 2024 series Batteries included and 2026 series Python A to Z. Every December, I solve Advent of Code puzzles with Python and write educational explanations.

A quick introduction to who I am

I expect joining this program will lead new people to my blog through this post, I think it’s time for another round of introductions.

Hi, I’m Juhis! Nice to meet you. I wrote my first program somewhere in the early years of 2000s, copying a number guessing game in Delphi character by character from a computer magazine. Over the years, my path with software has crossed in various ways: I’ve worked as a full-stack web developer, I’ve built communities for developers (like our local Python community archipylago), I’ve spoken in meetups and conferences and I’ve taught programming in universities and various non-profits — including Django Girls.

My expertise areas are documentation and debugging and I hope I can bring some of those skills to the Djangonaut and larger Django community. I also want to bring in my contagious excitement and positive vibes and encouraging each other and a mindset of helping each other become better at what we do while having fun doing it.

I’m looking to learn more about how tools like Django are built and finally take the step to becoming an open source contributor for something more than just my own hobby projects.

I’ve been enjoying writing web backends in Django for quite a while. The first time I got paid to write Django was in 2014 but at that point I had been using it a bit on my hobby projects but that job gave me the confidence to really learn it. (Thanks Justin for being an awesome mentor during that job ❤️.)

Most recently, I’ve been building a private toolkit for all sorts of Pokémon TCG tools (card finder, inventory management, deck builder, etc) using Django and htmx and have been enjoying building it a lot.

During my latest talk Love letter to Django, I started with a quote by Napoleon:

Since I left you, I have been constantly depressed. My happiness is to be near you.

It’s originally from Napoleon Bonaparte’s love letter from 1796 but perfectly describes my feelings when working with other languages.

I’m also hoping that this program will help me relaunch myself into the industry after a few rocky years.