CC BY 2.0 by Kevin Dooley CC BY 2.0 by Kevin Dooley CC BY 2.0 by Kevin Dooley
Misc • •
Django, Personal, Studium
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CC BY 2.0 by Kevin Dooley

A lot has happended!

It has been 5 months that I wrote something on my blog. I still remember the time writing the article. On my way to Django: Under The Hood 2014, my favorite conference in 2014 as an attendee. And shortly after that my time to write something here vanished. For various reasons.

December 2014

While getting 9 commits into Django’s code base throughout December, we (the server team at ubuntuusers.de) finally upgraded our infrastructure to new hardware. A few days before the holidays I decided to finally fill out the form and enrolled for my master thesis.

January 2015

2015 began quietly. Not many things happened. Until January 9th! Carl Meyer queried me on IRC:

We’d like to invite you to be part of the Django core team, if you’re interested.

I was super happy and excited (and still am). And according to the official announcement I was the most active non-core-team code contributor in 2014. Interesting, I wasn’t aware of that and haven’t even though about it :)

Later that month I got the confirmation for the topic of my Master Thesis. I won’t tell it here until I finished and got my grade for it. It’s about configuration and system management tools. But I’m working on my thesis ever since which is, together with my work as Django core developer, the reason why I don’t really have time to do anything else.

On 25th I was a coach at DjangoGirls Berlin. That’s the second time I’ve been coaching (first time was after Django: Under The Hood) and the second time DjangoGirls came to Berlin (first time was at EuroPython 2014).

February 2015

There are not many things worth mentioning for February. I gave a lightning talk at the Python Users Berlin meetup about how to integrate Sphinx and Elasticsearch.

A week later I gave a talk at the Django User Group Berlin meetup about Combining Django & Elasticsearch (Slides).

March 2015

Compared to February, March was really busy in terms of travelling. I went to the Django Sprint in Amsterdam. Thanks again to the organizers. It was a pleasure to be back in Amsterdam.

One week later a couple of friends and I finally went on a skiing vacation again. We had amazing weather. The view from the top of the mountains was breathtaking. I took a few photos! The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).

April 2015

On April 1st we released Django 1.8 as our next LTS (Long Term Support) version with a hole bunch of new features and improvements:

  • Native support for multiple template engines.
  • Support for complex SQL expressions via the ORM.
  • A formalized API for Model._meta.
  • New PostgreSQL specific functionality in contrib.postgres.

The features and changes I’m particularly happy about are the serialization of model managers in migrations (#23822) which I have worked on for quite a while and of course the performance improvements in migrations. It was some hard work but thanks to the amazing work Claude Paroz did on #23745 and Marten Kenbeek did on #24366 the migrations in 1.8 are noticeable faster. Of course thanks to all contributors who made the release the way it is :)