Marinho: hi Jacob, good afternoon

Jacob: Hey, how you doing today?

Marinho: fine :) a nice sunny day and no much work to do :)

let me know if you are available to start the talk :)

Jacob: Yeah, let's do it -- I might be a bit slow since I'm in the middle of a few other things, but I can multitask.

Marinho: ok so... if you need to break, let me know and we continue after, ok?

Jacob: Yup - thanks.

Marinho: well, as I said, I'm brazilian, and Brazil has already many djangonauts many people using for corporate solutions and some big companies starting to use in some startup projects... the community is growing and we very happy :) so, my questions are related to our reality

and first at all, I wish to let you know that my english is not the best, so, be patient with me :)

Jacob: Your English is fine, no worries!

It's so cool hearing about Django getting used around the world; makes me really happy.

Marinho: I see :) you replied to me with a nice availability, you seem to be a guy with good skills of leadership. Along the Django's lifetime, did you have some situation about people relations that dare you?

I mean: some situation when you lost the patience or bad discussion...

Jacob: Yeah, it's certainly happened!

Marinho: the recent suprises (for us) like DjangoCon and Django Foundation was some of those dares?

Jacob: We try really hard to maintain a friendly (or at least polite) tone, but... sometimes there are people who are just really difficult to deal with.

Marinho: I know a bit of this, and leading a great community is not an easy job

Jacob: There's a great talk that Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick give called "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645

Full of good advice -- the lessons they give there have saved by butt a few times.

Marinho: cool, I will spare some time to watch it

about the Django Foundation: What can we wait from it for the next years? What kind of acts?

Jacob: We haven't really thought all that far in advance, honestly. Our main goal is to have an "official" body that can represent Django and help out financially. Like most things around Django, we'll wait to see what the community wants us to do.

In the short term, we'll be sponsoring developer sprints and meetups to help get Django 1.0 out on time.

Marinho: Can we wait for certification or something like this?

Jacob: Do you mean some sort of official Django "developer certification"?

Marinho: yep

Jacob: We don't have any plans for that right now... it doesn't seem like something we'd want to get involved in, but as I said before if it's something the community really wants, we'd of course try to help out.

Marinho: Python community doesn't like certifications, but many companies like... is something that they feels more safe

understood

Jacob: Yeah, I understand... it's just something that's not very common in Open Source in general; not sure how it'd work.

Marinho: yes, I agree

and about the DjangoCon, what more details can we have about? have you already the date?

Jacob: We're just finalizing some details, and should be able to announce them maybe today, maybe Monday.

Marinho: great :)

about the ORM and new features... Have you some idea about when could we have support to OODBMS, especially BigTable, Amazon SimpleDB and ZoDB? How much hard could this to do?

Jacob: This is actually something I've been thinking a lot about lately -- there's all of a sudden a bunch of these non-relational databases coming out, it would be awesome to support them.

I think it's actually not all that hard, though you have to remember that none of these DBs really support joins or other relational features so you could never really just switch DATABASE_ENGINE on the fly and expect your app to work.

Marinho: yes, this is what I was thinking about

And about MySQL master/slave support and multiple database connections?

Jacob: I'm not all that familiar with MySQL, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask there. As for multiple connections, there's some good work being done in that area; it won't make it into 1.0 because of timing, but hopefully we'll get it in soon.

Marinho: I see... this question is because most of great sites, like Flickr, YouTube, Slashdot and others use to adopt storing data in many (and sometimes randomic) database servers

Now about the Django usage and the future...

One or two years ago, thought you about Django being used as framework to create corporate softwares like ERPs, BIs, CRMs, Billing and other software for use in companies, especially not related to content management?

Jacob: When we first released Django, we never expected it to be as widely-used as it is. We though that maybe a few other online publishers would be interested, and perhaps we'd get some traction within the Python web community. We never thought that Django would get used in so many places (social networking, corporate/enterprise software, online shopping...)

Marinho: and now how do you feel when see that day-by-day more people use it in totally different kinds of solutions? Surprised? :)

Jacob: Surprised, yeah, but mostly just happy. It's really great, and all the disparate uses ensure that Django really works well.

That is, having all these people with different needs ensures that we don't get stuck in some particular niche.

Marinho: yes, is true... I think you feel so proud when knows that great players like Google and Yandex are using it :)

Jacob: Exactly -- it's really nice.

Marinho: What do you consider will be the great challenges for the framework in the next years?

Jacob: I think our greatest challenge is dealing with our own success. We delayed far to long getting 1.0 out, mostly because we didn't realize quite how large we'd gotten -- with a small community, you can afford to be a lot more sloppy. Now that we're really a big-time project we need to formalize our workflow more: regular, scheduled releases, more explicit division and delegation of duties, etc.

We also need to be ready for the inevitable backlash when it comes. As a large project you're inevitably going to eventually have people who just hate you, and dealing with the downside of success can be nasty. I've watched carefully how the Rails community handled the "Rails doesn't scale!" and "Rails is insecure!" stuff over the last year; they really did a great job listening to the rational voices and ignoring the people there just for kicks.

We'll certainly have "controversies" like that in the future; we need to make sure we handle them professionally.

Marinho: I understand, now Django lives a new reallity, diferent than before

Jacob: Exactly. We have to pay attention to how our community evolves and evolve our leadership to meet them.

Marinho: yes, is a truth... well, now going to the end: what more could you say to us? Something hot? Some newness that we don't know? :)

Jacob: Hmm... we do most things out in public -- the foundation and the conference are really the only two exceptions -- so I don't think there's anything left that's "secret" now. The next big thing for us is that Django 1.0 Alpha will be coming out in just over a week -- that'll be a great milestone, and we'll need lots of help testing it so that the final 1.0 release can be as good as possible.

Marinho: o.O great, this is a great newness for the community :)

well, I thank you for all, and congratule you for the success and for this nice talk, I'm a proud and thankful djangonaut and want to help ever I can

Jacob: Thank you!

Let me know when you post this; I'd love to read it.

Marinho: I will publish this maybe monday or tuesday in my blog or in the DjangoBrasil blog, I'm not sure about this, but I will try to publish early I can :)

yes, I will

have a good afternoon

Jacob: Thanks; you too.