Blog

I was laughing to myself about how my Dad would tell us boys to 'Let them know you're there!' and it turned into a full post. Thanks for the content Dad!

September 24, 2026

A review of the book "How To Say A Few Words - Effectively" by David Guy Powers.

September 21, 2026

Django Probe is a low effort, high impact way to support the community. By sharing how you use Django, the community can make better decisions.

September 17, 2026

Django's Q() objects allow you to do some fancy filtering!

September 09, 2026

A meandering post into my thoughts about recognition, stepping down from empowered positions and how it factors it into sustainability.

September 07, 2026

You can hack Django's Index class to define custom migration operations on your model.

September 02, 2026

A recap of my fantastic DjangoCon US 2026 experience in Chicago. It's still my favorite conference and I will look forward to it every year.

August 31, 2026

The documentation now includes mentions of third-party packages and community maintained solutions, go check them out!

August 26, 2026

The Count expression only works on a single column, but you can use Subquery to count on multiple columns!

August 19, 2026

A hidden Django admin feature for passing values between windows.

August 12, 2026

DjangoCon US is coming up, and I'm pretty dang excited for several reasons. I hope to see you there!

August 07, 2026

There will come a time when your nested QuerySet performs poorly, when that happens, reach for Exists!

August 05, 2026

Speed up your tests by using the setUpTestData method.

July 29, 2026

A recap of my wonderful PyOhio 2026 experience. I absolutely loved the midwest vibes, the people and conference as a whole!

July 28, 2026

Form templates allow you to contain your form's customization to just the form, keeping your views nice and clean!

July 22, 2026

Not sure if it's the right time to hire a mentor? A few honest questions to help you figure out where you stand.

July 16, 2026

Model._meta.get_fields() lets you walk your related models and build custom cascading deletes.

July 15, 2026

A review of Amanda Savluchinske's PyLadiesCon talk on how to start contributing to open source software.

July 13, 2026

See how Django's resolve function can turn your existing logs into an analytics tool.

July 08, 2026

A review of the book "The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change" by Camille Fournier.

July 06, 2026

Learn how F expressions reference model fields in queries, useful for filters, ordering, and race conditions.

July 02, 2026

A review of Noah Kantrowitz's DjangoCon US talk on doing more things within Django, avoiding external services.

June 26, 2026

An 'Emeritus' honor made me feel very fancy, and got me thinking about DEFNA's lasting impact on DjangoCon US and the Django community.

June 17, 2026

Want to contribute to Django but don't know where to start? I'm hosting weekly events on the Django Discord to help.

June 09, 2026

A review of Timothy McCurrach's DjangoCon US talk on tools and systems to improve performance of your application.

May 29, 2026

A review of Carlton Gibson's DjangoCon Europe talk on Django's async landscape back in 2022/2023

May 28, 2026

Projects hosting documentation on Read the Docs can earn money through EthicalAds. And now, you can route that directly to the DSF!

May 24, 2026

A recap of a PyCon US 2026 open space, what brought people to the session and what they had to say about contributing in a world where AI is changing how we write software.

May 20, 2026

Three months in, seven clients, and a few things I'd do differently. What's working, what's challenging, and what's just plain frustrating in my Django mentorship business.

May 12, 2026

Have you been wondering if you should use Django Tasks for your next project? See how Djangonaut Space is using it today.

May 06, 2026

A review of Josh Thomas' DjangoCon US talk on how to use Django forms to build modern web apps.

May 05, 2026

I recently took on a project that involves FastAPI and hosting it on Railway. The official guide wasn't to my liking, so I decided to tweak it and share what I ended up doing here.

April 27, 2026

A review of the book "Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits" by Debbie Millman

April 22, 2026

I officially started accepting clients for a Django mentoring business. If you, your colleagues, or company are wanting help in being a better Django developer or software engineer, please reach out.

April 21, 2026

A review of Lisa Dusseault's DjangoCon US talk on creating the data pipeline framework, Phaser.

April 10, 2026

Not sure how to get involved in the Django community? This guide covers everything from triaging tickets to organizing conferences, and even how to choose where to start.

April 06, 2026

A review of Karen Tracey's DjangoCon US talk on better preparing for your next product launch.

April 02, 2026

A review of Alex Henman's DjangoCon US talk on real-world techniques to make maintaining Django applications easier.

March 25, 2026

Django Security Label is a Django third-party package to help you define rules to dynamically anonymize/mask your data for PostgreSQL databases. It makes use of the PostgreSQL Anonymizer extension and supports creating any type of SECURITY LABEL.

March 18, 2026

The Django community wants to collaborate with you, not a facade of you.

March 16, 2026

A review of the book "The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board" by Keith J. Cunningham.

March 11, 2026

A review of Peter Baumgartner's DjangoCon US talk on revisiting topics from the book "High Performance Django".

March 10, 2026

One thing I struggled with during my career is a lack of mentorship. I learned how to take kernels of wisdom from a variety of sources, mash them all together to replace a formal mentor.

March 03, 2026

A review of the book "Purple Cow: Transform your business by being remarkable" by Seth Godin

March 02, 2026

A review of Colleen Dunlap's DjangoCon US talk on introducing unit testing and how to write tests with Django.

March 02, 2026

A review of Lynn Root's PyCon US keynote on the topic of playing more.

February 22, 2026

A few thoughts on my experience learning the violin. Be warned, there's some cursing!

February 16, 2026

A review of Kojo Idrissa's PyDX talk on the topic of diversity and inclusion within technical communities.

February 11, 2026

A review of the book "Accelerate: the science behind DevOps: building and scaling high performing technology organizations" by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

February 09, 2026

Ever wonder why you need to use safe=False to return arrays of JSON object in JsonResponse? Welp, it's because of ECMAScript 4 and you don't have to worry these days.

February 06, 2026

A review of Sarah Boyce's DjangoCon Europe 2025 keynote on the topic of code reviews for the Django framework.

February 01, 2026

Sprints are a valuable event at conferences, for you, the project, and the broader community. This post helps you prepare to get the most out of them.

January 14, 2026

A look back at my efforts in 2025, the year of try something new.

December 30, 2025

It's easier to contribute to open-source if you connect with people. This post dives into where to do that to connect with the Django community.

November 26, 2025

A friend asked me, what are some habits or other devices, experiences, knowledge, etc. that you feel have contributed to your overall success and well-being?

November 12, 2025

I've updated my debugging tutorial. It's a self-guided tutorial to learn about a Djangonaut's debugging toolkit.

November 03, 2025

I express my gratitude and appreciation for the prize, as well as including some links and quotes from Malcolm's talks and others' memorials to him.

October 13, 2025

Give it a read! Maybe these six techniques will bring you joy too. You can't go wrong with being able to write better tests, faster.

September 17, 2025

2025 is the year of trying new things. To end the year, I'll be looking for my next adventure.

September 03, 2025

A recap of my fantastic DjangoCon Africa, UbuCon Africa 2025 experience. It was the first time I travelled to Africa, keynoted a conference and went on a safari.

August 25, 2025

A quick post on why we should include references to third-party packages in Django's documentation. Mainly, we've already solved curation and developers are doing to develop!

July 09, 2025

In this post, I explore how open-source communities can motivate their membership by utilizing recognition as a currency.

June 11, 2025

Revisiting the state of Django Commons a year after I published a call for help.

May 21, 2025

A discussion about how small meetups could help us bridge the mentorship gap and how we can put them into practice today.

May 17, 2025

How Djangonaut Space has expanded my worldview and created meaningful global connections.

April 30, 2025

A list of talks that I'm personally interested in seeing at DjangoCon US 2025.

April 02, 2025

When removing multi-table inheritance in Django, you need to remove your Model's bases from the migration's model state. This post goes into detail on when this comes up and how to resolve it.

March 19, 2025

I talk about the similarities between internships and contributor mentorship programs. Specifically through my own internship and my perspective of Djangonaut Space.

February 24, 2025

Exploring some new hotness from Django 5.2 that makes HTMX integrations more robust.

January 29, 2025

I discovered that the release process for the Django Debug Toolbar wasn't as robust as I thought.

January 15, 2025

An overview on how to do complex filtering in Django with Subquery.

January 01, 2025

A look back at my efforts in 2024.

December 30, 2024

A collection of resources to help you get started contributing to Django.

December 25, 2024

Inside are ideas on things the Steering Council I would like to attempt if elected next term.

November 20, 2024

Maintaining a package beyond the software. A post that covers a talk I was meant to give at the Black Python Devs Leadership Summit.

November 06, 2024

Following Sarah Boyce's lead, here's my list of DSF initiatives I'd like to see for 2024.

October 13, 2024

A deeper dive into why DjangoCons are important to the Django community and how it could be more accurately reflected.

October 04, 2024

A quick and fun review of my effort to install a new OS.

October 03, 2024

A revisit on Community and Reliability within Django

September 26, 2024

An explanation of how to use django-tables2, HTMX, Alpine and Bootstrap to render a table with a form to create new rows.

August 17, 2024

A thorough description of why downtime occurs during Django deployments and how to reduce it with django-safemigrate.

July 22, 2024

An walk-through of how to breakdown a project to understand the size and scope.

June 19, 2024

A community run GitHub organization to support community-maintained third-party Django packages.

May 22, 2024

An emotional dive into the blurred lines of reality and perception.

April 24, 2024

A talk by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis and my review

March 29, 2024

A brief breakdown of what a typical workday is for me.

March 27, 2024

My recap of my experiences during the first half of Djangonaut Space Session 1.

February 15, 2024

My ideas for what Django could attempt in 2024 and beyond.

January 25, 2024

An explanation of how to replace 300 redirects with a POST requests.

January 22, 2024

A look back at my efforts in 2023.

December 30, 2023

A brief overview of the fanout pattern that's commonly used in Celery.

December 06, 2023

A guided deep dive into Django's source code to understand why your application is failing CSRF validation.

November 04, 2023

A collection of occurrences in which I've benefited from good luck.

October 26, 2023

An explanation of a Django model field that returns an instance of a class depending on a key.

October 03, 2023

If you have people using the Django admin without knowing the code you can make their life easier by showing the fields that are actually being searched.

August 18, 2023

A brief description of various skills, experiences and technologies I feel that a professional Djangonaut has.

August 18, 2023

I've added some thoughts on testing to my Unsung Developer Thoughts. Check it out!

July 12, 2023

I've added a new section to my site called Unsung Developer Thoughts. Check it out!

June 25, 2023

This is my attempt to help clear up confusion about Django migrations and your database.

June 03, 2023

Short answer, trust.

June 02, 2023

One Djangonaut's opinion on why companies should send their employees to DjangoCon.

April 21, 2023

An explanation on how to filter data with a periodic date in Django.

April 05, 2023

A reflection on Django and our community in the context of the book 'Built to Last' by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras.

March 30, 2023

An explanation of how I break down the work needed for a Django project.

February 28, 2023

An idea to create a place for Django developers find helpful knowledge.

January 26, 2023

A discussion of questions to ask a Django company before accepting a job.

December 31, 2022

A look back at my efforts in 2022.

December 14, 2022

An overview of the tools and methodologies used to debug Django applications.

November 18, 2022

A code snippet to annotated a page within Django.

November 12, 2022

A brief overview on a first time DjangoCon attendee's experience and recommendations.

October 23, 2022

October 05, 2022

April 30, 2014

April 18, 2014

April 18, 2014

April 15, 2014

October 24, 2013

September 21, 2013

September 19, 2013