Week 3: Diving Deeper into Django's Internals

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!

Quieter Week

Week 3 was definitely quieter. Just had less time to put into Django stuff this week… that happens sometimes I guess.

Still working on PR #19191 for adding custom expiry to signed cookies.

Going Deep into the Code

After our Tuesday meet, Ryan suggested using git blame to see why the code is written how it is. Super helpful tip!

So I did that - been trying to understand what’s up with the signing.loads() function. Is it just a shortcut to TimestampSigner or is there some bigger design thing going on? 🤔

Hailey thinks it might be about how Python turns data into JSON (like for JavaScript). Makes sense why we’d be careful about changing it then.

Code History Stuff

Found out most of the signing module was written 14 years ago in one commit by some one named Jannis Leidel. Wild that it’s barely changed since!

Oh and I noticed something interesting - when they added rotating keys support, they did change the signing module signature in PR #15198. So there’s at least some history of carefully extending the API.

The Problem I’m Stuck On

Basically I have two options:

Add a new parameter to loads()
Make the signed cookies backend skip loads() and use TimestampSigner directly

Neither feels perfect. New parameters change the API which might break stuff. But skipping loads() might mess with how serialization works, according to what Hailey was saying.

Might just ask Jannis Leidel directly about what loads() was supposed to do originally. Would be cool to hear from the person who wrote it!

What I Learned This Week 🧠

Open source moves slow sometimes
git blame is actually super useful
Even tiny API changes need careful thinking
Original authors can have useful insights even years later

Still pumped about this PR even if it’s taking longer than I thought. Real coding isn’t like the tutorials where everything works right away lol.

That’s it for week 3! See ya next week!