Django: Under The Hood Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands

by Anna Makarudze

Nov. 30, 2016, 10:47 p.m.

Django: Under The Hood was organised by the Dutch Association and brought together Django developers from all over the world to learn about Django internals as well as contribute to the development of Django. As a local Django Girls organiser, I applied for the diversity scholarship and I was accepted! I got full funding to travel to the Netherlands for the conference for 2 days of talks and 2 days of sprints.

I learnt a lot from the conference, especially as a Django newbie. I realised there is still so much to learn about the framework and a lot to discover. I also got a chance to contribute during the sprints. I chose to work on a Django Girls website ticket, which I am still working on now. I hope to be submitting a pull request soon, especially now that my biggest distraction, organising PyCon Zimbabwe 2016 is over.

I also got a chance to meet and dine with some of Django's core developer team and it was an awesome experience! I also met Django Girls founders, Ola and Ola, the Django Girls support team and many more cool developers from all over the world! I guess the greatest lesson for me from the conference was that anyone can contribute to open source, even beginners like me, and I am going to start contributing to open source projects now.

Of course, I have been making non-code contributions for now by organising Django Girls events, organising and speaking at PyCons here in Africa (and this has resulted in me being honored with Django Software Foundation membership by the way). I realise however, as a programmer, I can make even a greater impact by contributing through code and that is something that I will work on now and take some time off my own projects to contribute to open source projects.