Djangonaut Log 1: Lift-off and first week in Djangonaut Space

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.

I shared last week that I was accepted to Djangonaut Space and last week was the prep week before the lift-off: we got to know each other, had a lot of fun discussions and I even got myself into making my first contributions.

There’s a lot of wonders in the space to admire and any trip there is better with good company.

One of the first community experiences I got to join was last week’s Wednesday when I joined a fortnightly community Open Mic session. I gave a lightning talk about managing scripts and got to enjoy poetry and music by fellow community members. I’m looking forward to these sessions every other week. Another one was playing PlateUp! with a fellow Djangonaut and having a wonderful time cooking and serving customers while getting to know each other.

The community Discord was full of pre-flight chatter all week long as members introduced themselves. Turns out, in addition to wonderful people, we have quite a few cats and dogs joining our journey.

During our onboarding call on Sunday, we were asked to introduce ourselves and share what we’d bring with us to the space. My answer there was board games: they are a great way to make new friends and pass time. Whether that’s fellow Djangonauts or anyone we meet on our way to the stars.

My additional answer now is my rubber ducks. They are wonderful helpers when things go wrong and on a trip to the unknown, unexpected problems are going to arise.

Last week, I visited my lovely friends at Hive Helsinki, a peer-learning school for software developers, to talk about building a developer portfolio, blogging about their learning journey and how to get the best out of that when looking for jobs. It’s not part of this program but I got to also mention Djangonaut Space as an option for getting into open source.

This week started with a banger as my beautiful Djangonaut Space hoodies arrived from print. I can’t wait to bring these to my local meetups and conferences. I love flying the colours.

On Thursday of Week 1, I got an opportunity to talk to computer science students from all around the country about why I CS students should study and practice writing . It was a lovely event and after the talk, I ended up having great discussions with students in the campus pub over the next few hours. About 30 hours after my talk, the first new blog that was inspired by my talk saw daylight with Anders publishing his first post on artificial intelligence.

Tech & contributions

The pre-program week and this first week was mostly about getting set up and ready to contribute.

While waiting for things to start, I added a RSS autodiscovery link to Djangonaut Space’s blog. It’s no secret that I love blogs and RSS and this was a great way to get started.

I’m part of the Django Girls team and while I was setting up my development environment, I accidentally came across a bug (Patreon API’s response format had changed over the years), saw there was a ticket for it and made a fix.

The first hurdle of contributing to any project is to get the environment set up and despite the technological advancements we’ve gotten over the years, it’s still often a huge roadblock at the start. It often makes me question my technical ability when I spend days trying to get through all the errors and mishaps that happen when setting up something new.

As I started picking up speed, I noticed small things to fix. Some were small code clean up fixes, other fixing broken functionality.

My philosophy about onboarding myself and others to projects has always been focusing on small things that help people get through the entire flow quickly: setting up development environment, identifying issues, finding and implementing fixes, learning how the project does change requests and communication and what the expectations are.

With Djangonaut Space, one massive benefit is that I have direct line to the people maintaining the project which makes all of that so much easier. I’m so grateful for that opportunity.

My hopes and dreams

There’s certain amount of social anxiety I have with contributing to open source. Outside of publishing my own stuff as open source, I haven’t made contributions to other’s projects. One reason is that I’m hesitant to commit to technical challenges I’m not sure if I can figure out.

Another, related reason, is that it’s intimidating to submit your code to people who are as experienced and skilled as the contributors and maintainers in these projects are. My hope is that through Djangonaut Space program, I get to meet these people and talk with them about coding and cats and board games and that will lower my self-imposed worries and anxiety.

I feel like that’s the best a program like this can offer and I intend to take everything out of the opportunity.