Jozi.JS May - Code Sidekick

Join us this May 25 2025
Agenda:
• 18:00 - Drinks and network.
• 18:30 - Talks
• 19:30 - Food and more networking

Join us for a night of code, drinks, and good conversation.
From designing API interfaces to understanding the effects of an Effects, we have it all this Thursday 🎨.

Talk: Powering up Django development with Claude Code
Kernighan's law, stated by the legendary programmer Brian Kernighan, observes that: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

The original intention of that statement was to argue for simple code. If you write fancy, clever code, then you are going to need to be extra clever when you need to fix it.

Now imagine debugging someone else's fancy, clever code. Even harder, right?

Despite all the hype and promise of LLM-based coding tools, the code they produce is often questionable. It's bad enough that a whole new profession has sprung up - The Vibe Code Cleanup Specialist. If Kernighan's law holds true then what does it mean for these specialists? Vibed code is full of technical debt - puzzling architectural choices, convoluted algorithms, absurd tests (or no tests at all), badly repeated, highly coupled code... technical debt as far as the eye can see.

All that being said, I kinda love working with LLMs when writing code. And there are ways to guide these tools to get them to be very helpful. A lot comes down to careful prompting, strategic guardrails and healthy skepticism. A lot comes down to using the right tool at the right time and building up capabilities in a structured, intentional way.

I'm happy to report that I've been doing a lot of Django work lately. And that Claude Code is my (mostly) trusty sidekick.

In this talk, I'll be giving you a peak into how I use it and what I watch out for. This is a zero-hype talk, I'll share techniques I actually rely on and pitfalls I watch out for.

Speaker: Sheena O'Connell
Python Software Foundation Director and Founder of Prelude.tech

My early career was 100% dedicated to software engineering - I worked as an individual contributor and team lead over multiple projects, mostly startups.
I've always had a passion for education and, roughly 6 years ago, made that my primary focus. I built up a very successful non-profit bootcamp focused on launching careers.

I then took everything I learned and used it to found Prelude.tech - Prelude focuses on professional training: We offer advanced Python and LLM training, and provide "soft skills" training to teams who are struggling to work together.
I am quite involved in the global Python community and was recently elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation

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Important Notes:
Parking is available at The Zone, Rosebank. Parking will be validated so you do not need to pay for it.
The meetup will be streamed on JoziJS's YouTube account.