Learning Hub
Curated guides and resources on software engineering, Django, and Python.
Featured
Connecting with Django contributors on Mastodon
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
Getting Started Contributing to Django
A collection of resources to help you get started contributing to Django.
December 25, 2024
Professional Djangonaut skills
A brief description of various skills, experiences and technologies I feel that a professional Djangonaut has.
August 18, 2023
Django migrations and your database
This is my attempt to help clear up confusion about Django migrations and your database.
June 03, 2023
Questions to ask a Django company
A discussion of questions to ask a Django company before accepting a job.
December 31, 2022
Developer Guides
Guides on the difficult bits of software engineering.
Career
Finding guidance, weighing advice, and the self-reflection that has to come first.
- The importance of self-reflection
-
Finding career guidance
Sections
- Determine where you want to go
- Finding career guidance from friends and family
- Finding career guidance from colleagues
- Finding career guidance from content
- Choosing where to find guidance
- Consider the source of advice
Feature Requests
Questions to ask before building anything, from who it affects to what it will cost.
-
Initial steps
Sections
- Understand the customer's need
- What is the current experience?
- What is the desired experience?
- Is this something that should be done morally and ethically?
- Who needs to be involved?
-
Understanding user impact
Sections
- What users would see this change?
- What is the user trying to do?
- Is it a reasonable user experience?
- How do users recover from errors?
- Do users need to be notified?
- Does the change include a deprecation?
-
Assess the risk
Sections
- Will this require changes across the project?
- How comfortable are you with the code?
- Does the code have tests?
- Is there a maintainer available for advice?
- Is there a power user available for advice?
-
Estimate the cost
Sections
- What does the maintenance look like?
- Does this impact other flows?
- What are the exception flows?
- What are the assumptions and what happens when those aren't true?
- What are the error states and their next steps?
- Does this require monitoring?
- Will this remove or add technical debt?
- Does this unlock future solutions?
-
Consider the data
Sections
- How much data is involved?
- How will you maintain backwards compatibility for database updates?
Code Review
How to review a pull request thoroughly and kindly, and how to check your own reactions.
-
Recheck the basics
Sections
- CI Passes - automated tests, linter, code coverage, etc
- Are the migrations/schema changes condensed?
- Are the code removals thorough?
- Are cross-cutting interface changes updated everywhere?
-
Review the tests
Sections
- Review testing and deployment procedures
- Do the tests cover the changes appropriately?
-
The tougher bits
Sections
- Are there changes that impact backwards compatibility?
- Are existing or current sessions impacted?
- Are hacks documented?
-
Check yourself
Sections
- Should you have a talk with the developer before reviewing the code?
- Should you have a talk with the developer before submitting the review?
- Are you leaving too many nitpicky comments?
- Are you trying to make the other developer write your code?
Testing
Where to start when a codebase has no tests, and why testing is more than asserts.
-
Where to begin?
Sections
- Is the logic truly being tested?
- Can different datasets cause different results?
- Are exception flows reasonably covered?
- Do the changes require permission tests?
-
It's more than asserts!
Sections
- What level of testing robustness is needed?
- Are mocks used reasonably?
- What manual tests are needed?
- What permutations of the UX can't be tested?
- Does the deployment need testing?
Deployment
Assessing risk, preparing the team, and the details that turn a routine deploy into an outage.
-
Assess the risk
Sections
- What's the reasonable worst case scenario?
- Where will the most likely errors occur?
- Does the change impact customers?
-
Organization and preparation
Sections
- What customers should be involved in the deployment?
- What's the rollback process?
- Does the change require monitoring?
- Do you need to notify customers of the change
- Should the deployment occur after hours?
-
Consider the details
Sections
- Does any data need to change before or after deployment?
- Does the change require any manual actions before or after deployment?
- Do the frontend changes need to be deployed before or after the backend changes?
- Are there service interface changes?
- Do the SQL changes require locks?
- What SQL objects are being locked and for how long?
- What are the sizes of the impacted SQL objects?
- How frequently are the impacted SQL objects used?
- Does the application need to be scaled down during the deployment?
Videos to Watch
Reviews of conference talks and videos worth watching. I share why you should watch them and what you'll take away.
Lunch Talk Series: What if you became an open source software contributor?
A review of Amanda Savluchinske's PyLadiesCon talk on how to start contributing to open source software.
July 13, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Swiss Army Django: Small Footprint ETL
A review of Noah Kantrowitz's DjangoCon US talk on doing more things within Django, avoiding external services.
June 26, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Cutting latency in half: What actually worked—and what didn’t
A review of Timothy McCurrach's DjangoCon US talk on tools and systems to improve performance of your application.
May 29, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Async Django: The practical guide you've been awaiting for
A review of Carlton Gibson's DjangoCon Europe talk on Django's async landscape back in 2022/2023
May 28, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Django Forms
A review of Josh Thomas' DjangoCon US talk on how to use Django forms to build modern web apps.
May 05, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: What Would the Django of Data Pipelines Look Like
A review of Lisa Dusseault's DjangoCon US talk on creating the data pipeline framework, Phaser.
April 10, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: How to Enjoy Debugging in Production
A review of Karen Tracey's DjangoCon US talk on better preparing for your next product launch.
April 02, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Building maintainable Django projects: the difficult teenage years
A review of Alex Henman's DjangoCon US talk on real-world techniques to make maintaining Django applications easier.
March 25, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: High Performance Django at Ten: Old Tricks & New Picks
A review of Peter Baumgartner's DjangoCon US talk on revisiting topics from the book "High Performance Django".
March 10, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Easy, Breezy, Beautiful... Django Unit Tests
A review of Colleen Dunlap's DjangoCon US talk on introducing unit testing and how to write tests with Django.
March 02, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Of Clouds and Crows
A review of Lynn Root's PyCon US keynote on the topic of playing more.
February 22, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Privilege Arbitrage
A review of Kojo Idrissa's PyDX talk on the topic of diversity and inclusion within technical communities.
February 11, 2026
Lunch Talk Series: Django needs you! (to do code review)
A review of Sarah Boyce's DjangoCon Europe 2025 keynote on the topic of code reviews for the Django framework.
February 01, 2026
Why generosity turns to rage, and what to do about it | Lunch Talk
A talk by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis and my review
March 29, 2024
