Djangonaut Log 5: Traveling amongst the stars!
Nov 15th, 2026
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.
Series:
- 3… 2… 1… becoming a Djangonaut
- Djangonaut Log 1: Lift-off and first week in Djangonaut Space
- Debugging a flaky test — how I methodologically tamed an annoying bug
- Assumptions are sneaky
- Djangonaut Log 2: Leaving the atmosphere and first merged contributions
- Djangonaut Log 3: Into the orbit!
- Djangonaut Log 4: Avoiding asteroids
- Designing a simple audit log
- Djangonaut Log 5: Traveling amongst the stars! (you are here)
After last week’s pondering and finding good balance, this week was all about getting back in to the saddle and get myself back into good rhythm of getting stuff done.
My main focus for this week was finishing the work on a bug fix for RSVP status and designing an audit log to accompany it. I wrote a separate blog post about it this Friday.
“When your Navigator asks how things are going on Monday team meeting” — comic by Heyheymomo!
Making code contributions to our projects is probably main reason why most of the Djangonauts initially join this program but it’s truly the community activities, learning from each other and helping each other out where the program truly shines.
DjangoCon Europe is coming soon and this week was the deadline for call for proposals so the community got together to brainstorm and provide feedback to each other for proposals. It was so great to see. I can’t join the conference myself this year so I didn’t have any proposals of my own to write but had a bunch of great discussions with those who did. We did this both in async Discord discussions but also during a group call on Friday.
Week after week, our team meetings and my 1:1s with our captain are getting more and more fun as we get to know each other. This week, we had a nice discussion about the darkness and winter here in Finland and learned more about the areas others live in.
Stories from fellow Djangonauts
Goodluck landed his first commit to Django by fixing documentation on ImageField’s validation. He wrote an insightful blog post about it too.
Wasif continued sharing the journey he’s having with his ticket.
Tim visited Real Python podcast to discuss mentoring. It’s a really good episode!
If something above resonated with you, let's start a discussion about it! Email me at juhis@hamatti.org and share your thoughts . This year, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I'd love if you'd be part of that.