Djangonaut Log 3: Into the orbit!

This blog post is a weekly update of my journey in Djangonaut Space , an 8-week mentoring program for future open source developers in the Django ecosystem.

This week was a bit slower week for me. I caught a mild fever last weekend and decided to take it easy for the first few days: staying in bed, taking a few extra naps and watching cartoons.

On Tuesday, we had two shared sessions with Djangonauts.

For the first one, Annabelle Wiegart, a Djangonaut alumn herself, joined us to share her experience of finding her community in tech industry and how she transitioned from a librarian to an open source developer.

For the second one, Dan Shernicoff, the Navigator of team Corvus and maintainer of Render Engine hosted a session to show us and discuss the wonders of pytest, a test runner used in a lot of Python projects. I learned a few new tricks and was able to share a few myself too. It was a really lovely, chill session where in addition to learning new tech stuff, we also got to know each other better.

Tech & contributions

After last week’s dev environment setup session with a fellow Djangonaut, I started working on updating our documentation and that change got merged in this week. I also fixed another PR of mine from earlier that had broken due to updated libraries. That got merged in as well.

As I was working with documentation, I noticed we had a little bit inconsistent way of handling different boolean values from environment variables so I made a PR to streamline them and the PR exposed us to some implicit stuff from how the CI was set up and it’s waiting for all of those to get solved.

Rest of the week I was focused on a bug fix for a bug in how organisers can manage applicants’ RSVP status which continues into the next week as well. I’ve got the bug itself fixed and a few nice improvements along the way but am still working on an extra feature on top of the fix.

As a team, we continued fixing issues related to the updates with libraries and how the project is setup and I participated in those, doing experimentation and writing them down into other issues and pull requests.

Stories from fellow Djangonauts

Django Packages published a post of the work Djangonauts in their team contributed in summer of 2024 which was a great read.

Wasif continued sharing his experience on his journey to fixing an issue in Django Debug Toolbar.

Tim Schilling, one of admins and founders of Djangonaut Space, published a great blog post about why blogging is beneficial if you’re a developer looking for a job.