Djangonaut Log 4: Avoiding asteroids

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.

Honestly, this week wasn’t a great one for me. I tend to be the type of person who gets very excited about things I’m passionate about and Djangonaut Space — as you may have noticed through my blog posts — is definitely one of those. What I sometimes fail to balance properly though is how to make sure that my enthusiasm and desire to participate and share doesn’t drain the oxygen out of the room for others.

When I eventually realise that, I tend to overcorrect which leads to anxiety and not doing much of anything and that’s what happened this week. I got a couple of small things done at the start of the week but had a hard time finishing one of the fixes I’ve been working on and my creative juices dried up quite a bit so I also didn’t find my enthusiasm to write about what I’ve been working on during the week. I also decided to tone down my activity in Discord towards the end of the week to give more room to others.

One wonderful benefit of being part of a program like Djangonaut Space is the access to the community and specifically having an assigned Captain with whom I could discuss these topics and feelings in a constructive way.

One of the cool things being part of communities like these is that interesting opportunities to do fun things and meet new people pop up. A fellow Djangonaut, Alex, was going to deliver a talk in a meetup and I got to see the talk over video call earlier that day and we ended up having a great chat about public speaking and meetups.

My note taking habits have also come up in various discussions with people in the community so I promised to do a fireside chat with the community later this month. I’m planning to showcase a few types of notes that I take and share some tips on how to document your work. It’s gonna be built around my habit of writing running notes.