Karen Tracey discusses how she became involved in the Django community in 2006 and encourages others to get involved as well. She was initially hesitant to participate due to being a woman in a male-dominated field. However, the Django community was very welcoming and helped her with her first ticket and patch. Through her contributions on mailing lists and as a core committer, she gained skills that helped her get a job working with Django. She urges others in the community to participate in any way they can, from answering questions to coding improvements, to strengthen Django and help each other.

1. Fostering Community
Karen Tracey
DjangoCon Europe 2012

2. Why?
• Django's community is one of its greatest assets
• Everyone can contribute
• Everyone can benefit

3. Who am I?

4. Programmer since forever

5. Crossword puzzle constructor since 2001

6. Cat rescuer since 2009

7. My Django story begins in 2006
• Django open-sourced a year earlier
• 0.95 just released, "dozens of contributors"
• Five core developers

8. Puzzle database
• Aid in constructing puzzles, accessible from construction tool
• Amassed over ~5 years
• ~5,000 puzzles, ~100,000 unique entries, ~500,000 clues

9. Problem: limited access to data

10. Project: web front-end for database
• Primary goal: better ability to "see" data
• Secondary goal: learn Python

11. Survey: Python web frameworks
• Django?
• Turbogears?
• Pylons?

13. Snag: my weird database
1 class Entrie(models.Model):
2 Entry ID = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)
3 Entry = models.CharField(blank=True, unique=True, maxlength=150)
4 class Meta:
5 db_table = 'Entries'

14. Concern

15. django-users to the rescue!

16. My first ticket and patch
• Ticket #2517 opened 9:53:14AM
• 4-line patch
• Patch, 50% modified, committed by Adrian at 9:58:27AM
• Name added to AUTHORS

18. Sadness
• Probably never happens today
• Needs test!
• Balance stability with wow-factor

19. Github to the rescue?

20. Back to the mailing list post
• Hesitant to sign my name
• Open source has bad rep w.r.t treatment of women
• Confident of technical ability
• ...but conscious I didn't know much about web programming
• Would I get more respect if I didn't reveal my name?

21. Plea: encourage women
• Women actively discouraged from participating in open source communities
• Please don't join in bad behavior
• Speak out against it when you see it

22. Yes, we need more women

23. Back to my story...

24. My mailing list participation

25. Why did I become so active?
• Learn more about Django
• Improve communication skills
• Help people
• Puzzles!
• Long-range goal: get a job

26. What did Django community gain?
• Lots of triage/bugfixes prior to 1.0
• Some features/bugfixes since 1.0
• Helped many people learn Django

27. What did I gain?
• Became core committer in 2008
• Asked to write a book in 2009 (published 2010)
• Got a great job in 2010

28. Get involved!
(You already are)
• Community events, big or small
• Mailing lists
• IRC
• Stack overflow
• Ticket triage
• Bug fixes
• Feature development
• Patch review
• Blogs

29. Image credits
• Venn Diagram: "User" and "Community", from The Noun Project collection
• IBM PC: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_PC_5150.jpg
• Helicopter rescue: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rescue.jpg
• Fireworks: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OperaSydney-Fuegos2006-342289398.jpg
• Mask: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doctor-0001.jpg
• Superman Octocat: http://octodex.github.com/images/okal-eltocat.jpg, by Cameron Mcefee
• Coffee cups #1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discrimination-Diversity-01.jpg
• Coffee cups #2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discrimination-Diversity-02.jpg
• Story book: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chatterwell_Stories_3.jpg
• Sprout, from The Noun Project
• Liftoff: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1994_s64_Liftoff.jpg
• Teaching: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Hamilton_in_an_anatomy_class.jpg
• Others my own