This post is part of my journey through Djangonaut Space, a program helping developers contribute to Django. Follow along as I navigate through this adventure!
More Ways to Contribute
Started off week 2 looking for other ways to contribute to Django beyond just code. Turns out there’s a ton!
I looked into the “Updates to Django” section in the Django newsletter. Found a detailed guide on how it works.
Basically:
- Once a week someone runs a short script using the GitHub CLI
- It finds all PRs merged into Django that week
- Points out first-time contributors 🎉
- Then the author adds anything else interesting in the Django world
Might help out with this in the future!
Also had an idea - there’s no good way to remind the weekly author it’s their turn. I suggested making a Discord bot that could send reminders. Could be a small but useful project.
PR Update
My PR from last week got reviewed by Sarah Boyce. Main feedback: we should really try to avoid API changes. Makes sense - Django is used by so many people that even small changes can cause problems.
Going to rethink my approach and see what can be done without changing the API.
What I Learned This Week 🧠
- How the weekly Django Updates newsletter section gets written 📝
- Contributing to open source is a slow and thorough process
- API stability is super important in mature frameworks
- You can attribute someone else in a commit using
Co-authored-by! GitHub will show their contribution
That last one is important for my PR since a lot of the code was originally created by buugaj. Raffaella pointed this out in Discord and wrote a blog post about how to do it in PyCharm. Definitely going to use this!
That’s it for week 2! Slower than I expected, but I’m learning that’s just how open source works - quality over speed.
Stay tuned for Week 3 of my Djangonaut Space adventure!
This post is part of my journey through Djangonaut Space, a program helping developers contribute to Django. Follow along as I navigate through this adventure!