Reflections on Djangonaut Space Session 2
A few weeks ago I completed my second session as a Djangonaut.Space Navigator. The Djangonaut.Space program is an opportunity for people to be introduced to contributing to Django and Django adjacent projects.
In this most recent session I was a Navigator for Team Mars with a fantastic Captain Tobe. Our Djangonauts were Andy, Maryam, and Rosana.
Among the 3 of them they took on 7 tickets, pushed 7 PRs and closed 5 tickets.
As part of the program we would meet weekly to talk about any blockers and try and work through them. These meetings also provided a platform to encourage one another.
One week we spoke about being a professional software developer working with Django which was a great conversation.
I really like this program for what it offers both the Djangonauts, and the mentors. I learned so much as part of this program.
As we were coordinating our first meeting I realized that the rest of my team were in time zones that were 7 - 8 hours ahead of mine! I was a bit worried initially that we'd have a hard time finding a common time to meet, but we settled on Wednesdays at noon and this turned out to be pretty perfect for all of us.
Each of our team meetings was similar to a standup where we'd talk about what work had been done the previous week, and any struggles that we were having. The djangonauts on team Mars were absolute Rock Stars. They picked up some pretty gnarly 1 issues and worked them to completion each time.
Working on a project like Django can be daunting and scary and time consuming. However, the amount that you can learn from working on a large project and code base like this is immeasurable.
Working to form a consensus on an issue or idea, whether it's code or documentation, can be challenging! But as Maryam said in her blog post about her experience with picking up a documentation ticket
To start safely, I picked a documentation change ticket just to get myself familiar with the process. One of my tickets involved updating some wordings in the documentation to make it easier for people to differentiate when a pull request needed a Trac ticket or not. Initially, I thought this would be a simple wording change. However, I soon realised that making changes to Django documentation itself requires a lot of thought and consideration.
This experience reminded me of my early days as a Django user. I loved Django for its documentation - detailed, thoughtful, well-organised, and easy to follow. Now, working on documentation changes as a contributor has shown me how Django achieves such clarity. Significant thought and effort go into making it clear and readable, minimising confusion and maximising understanding for readers.
If you don't know this going in then you can be disappointed or disillusioned with how long something might take to be accepted, or whatever, but a program like Djangonaut Space does, I think, help to ease newcomers into contributing and setting realistic expectations and, in general, enjoying the process.
One thing I tried to really emphasize with my team was that it won't be easy, and it will take some time, but that the effort will pay off with a ticket that has been closed ... and in the worst case you've helped to move it forward.
Another point I tried to keep front and center was the idea that this is a volunteer role and that if you're not having fun it's OK to take a step back. I think we need to hear that more and more, especially given the stress that many developers can be under for their $dayJobs.
I hope that this advice helped them in navigating the tickets that they worked. I also hope it helped to put into perspective what they were doing from a time commitment perspective.
One thing that I really love about the Django community in general, and the Djangonaut.Space community in particular, is how welcoming they are. The community strives to welcome you to be part of it.
BUT even with the welcoming nature, it can still be very hard to pick that first ticket, submit that first PR, and receive that first bit of feedback.
A program like Djangonaut.Space really helps to get people more comfortable with the process of picking and working on a ticket. It also helps to develop long term contributors to the project ... which is amazing.
I'm looking forward to the next time I'll be able to participate and would encourage anyone to get involved, either as a participant, or as a mentor.