Django-NYC roundup - Meeting 1

For those of you who don't know, I co-founded a django meetup here in NYC. For those of you who do know, here's the long overdue django-nyc roundup from our inaugral meetup.

First things first - we filled the room(20 attendees)! So thanks to everyone who came out. Special thanks to Loren Davie (django-nyc co-founder) for getting us the space at Alexander Interactive.

We started out with everyone doing a personal introduction. What I found most interesting, beyond the varied industries we're all employing python/django in, was the open and honest passion everyone had for python. Each introduction seemed to reveal a deep love for python more than anything else. I find that very exciting really. Not sure if I've seen a community with that much enthusiasm about the language itself.

The two main presentations were given by Loren and myself. Loren tackled the crowd favorite Model Inheritance and the Queryset Refactor branch. You can view the slides for Loren's Model Inheritance presentation over on slideshare. It was quite obvious the group could have talked about Model Base Classes (inheritance) vs Model Table Inheritance (composition) the rest of the night. Maybe we'll strike up the conversation again at the next meetup!

During the discussion, a few people brought up a popular thread going on over in the django-dev google group debating what path/expectations we should have for Queryset Refactor (which is responsible for ABC and MTI). We also touched upon Eric Florenzano's posts Inheritance vs. Composition and Exploring Mixins with Django Model Inheritance. Like I said, this topic created a good discussion an Loren did an excellant job - kudos!

Next up was my presentation, which I attempted to get through quickly as we gave most of the time to Model Inheritance (which is deserved). The topic was "know your namespace - a peek inside a django namespace" and this month I chose django.middleware. The concept here is to review the various namespaces that exist in django so we better familiarize ourselves with the django code base versus just implementing its features... essentially getting your hands dirty by looking at source. Django is so good, one almost doesn't need to know what's going on under the hood in django itself or these various open source projects we implement, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

You can view the slides for Django - Know Your Namespace over on slideshare. I also tied together the topic with a recently created open source application that relies heavily on middleware for it's functionality — django-db-log. It's a simple example of a rather powerful solution created by David Cramer.

Other than that we really broke off into various conversations through out the 1hr and 20 minutes meetup and then even more conversations afterwards at the pub. Below is a list of stuff I heard mentioned during the meetup and at the pub, as well as links to each.

John posed a great question about getting started in django for a true noob (with minimal programmig background). Others have asked about some best practices in getting started. There are a few ways one can do this - getting your hands dirty (GYHD) by writing code is one suggested route. Another way is looking at other people's code. I've been thinking about an answer for this myself and will post on my blog shortly. Please offer suggestions in the comments below.

We also broke into a quick discussion about using the django source for non-web apps. Basically, leveraging the ORM.

I hope this is provides a good reference for those who attended and those thinking of attending. If I missed anything, please let me know. I had a great time meeting everyone myself. Thanks and see ya at the next meetup!

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Posted on: June 05, 08

django, django-nyc, meetup

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