Virtual Django Meetup

We brought together over 100 of you in our last virtual Django meetup using a unique platform. We gave you talks by expert speakers and we gave you the ability to have sidebar conversations at our virtual tables. This time we're bumping it up another notch and using a new platform called SlingShow.

*** Visit here to attend the event: https://slingshow.co/e/FgSy8Pf_ ***

Your feedback included:

"In general I was surprised at how well the tables feature really felt like sitting down at a table during a meetup."

"...I liked the networking opportunity before the meeting."

"I am hard to impress and I was impressed. Good job."

So we're doing it again.

We're hosting a virtual meetup on November 10th, 5PM PST where we'll host expert Djangonauts for a night of deep discussion and discourse.

We'll cover:

• Lightning talks
• Deep technical talks
• Who's hiring

If you're interested in giving a talk or being involved in any way, please reach out to myself (arithmetic@gmail) or Rudy (rudy@yeti.co).

*** Visit here to attend the event: https://slingshow.co/e/FgSy8Pf_ ***

# Talks

(1) Data-Driven Development using Feature Flags

Often, while deliberating on a range of options for a new feature in an application, organizations tend to go towards options that offer better results in terms of usability metrics like CTRs, Conversions, etc. However, gathering such data in advance for experimental features is often not an empirical process. This is where feature flags come in; they allow one to explore the impact of new features on a target audience and judge its technical feasibility. Moreover, with the help of data analysis tools, meaningful insights such as impressions count, interaction, etc. become extremely meaningful and not just in relation to the current feature but also for understanding the audience mindset. In this talk, I would like to discuss upon some of the leading tools available in the market for implementing feature flags and discuss the approach to solving this problem at Co-Op Commerce with Waffle Feature Flags, Amplitude as an Event Store, and Snowflake and Tableau as Data Processing and Visualization Tools as a taste of what Feature Flags actually look like in a production-level system.

Karan Aggarwal is the lead backend engineer at Coop Commerce (https://www.coopcommerce.com/).

(2) Creating django-capture-on-commit-callbacks

Whilst solving a Django ticket for testing transaction.on_commit callbacks, I decided to create a version of the feature in a standalone package to better grasp the idea. This helped me iterate to a better design and acts as a back port since the feature will only be released in Django 3.2.

Adam is a Django technical board member since version 2.2, maintainer of several packages including Django-Cors-headers, and author of Speed Up Your Django Tests. He blogs regularly at https://adamj.eu

(3) A View from Outside the Bubble

Every programming "community" has its own norms and philosophies. This can be useful for beginners, as they can quickly adopt a practice of writing software that has worked, in some way, for others. However, it can also lead to a narrow view of what is possible or preferable in different circumstances. This talk will be a brief but hopefully eye-opening overview of topics where programmers outside of the Django community might strongly disagree, such as compiled vs interpreted languages, ORMs vs raw SQL, alternatives to object-oriented programming, and more.

Oz teaches foundational computer science to practicing software engineers at the Bradfield School of Computer Science (https://bradfieldcs.com/), which he started in 2015. Prior to that, he was the CTO and co-founder of Vida Health and has worked in a number of senior engineering positions.

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*** Visit here to attend the event: https://slingshow.co/e/FgSy8Pf_ ***