This month has been dominated by PyCon, which together with preparation and travel has taken about 2 weeks out of our regular schedule.
PyCon this year was held in Portland, Oregon. This is the first time I’ve attended, and it’s been a whirlwind. We ran a REST framework booth, a poster session, gave a talk on API Star, and ran REST framework & API Star sprints.
You can catch up with the talk on YouTube - “Level up! Rethinking the Web API framework”
This is a slightly extended version of talk as given at DjangoCon Europe. It’s also been accepted at EuroPython, next month. I will probably be slightly revising the content for that talk, given the ongoing progress on API Star.
I’ve started work on an ASGI-based Gunicorn worker class which is opening up some interesting possibilities:
uvloop event loop policy and httptools HTTP parser, authored by the folks at MagicStack (https://github.com/magicStack) get some really impressive throughput and latencies. Both are Python bindings around established existing C implementations.There’s some thinking to do about the best way to present the interface if you want to write an asynchronous-style ASGI application, but this is clearly something that the Python community needs.
The asyncio frameworks that we currently have, including aiohttp and sanic currently present full-framework interfaces. What’s missing is the clear server/application separation that WSGI currently provides for synchronous HTTP frameworks.
For more information see this discussion thread on the django-dev mailing list, or the repository on GitHub.
The simplified URL routing proposal has now been accepted by the Django technical board.
This has been prompted by some great review work by Aymeric Augustin, and continuing work on the implementation by Sjoerd Job Postmus.
I’ll get involved again if it seems necessary to help keep progressing things, but things seem to be moving along nicely right now.
This month we’re up from 150 open tickets at the start of the month to 165 at the end. This is despite ~90 tickets closed over the month.
Due to conference travel, Anna was out of office for the majority of the month.
Anna managed all daily operations such as responding to emails, communicating with current and prospective sponsors, signing up new sponsors, monitoring the @restframework Twitter account, and keeping track of finances.
She handled last minute operations for the Django REST framework booth at PyCon US, which included making sure the volunteers, who kindly offered their time to help us staff the booth were well-prepared and informed, researching copy shops in Portland, and ordering business cards onsite for promotional and fundraising purposes. Anna also took time to chat with Django REST framework users, contributors, and sponsors that were present at PyCon US. After PyCon, Anna made sure to send thank you emails to all of our booth volunteers, and curated a list of ideas and improvements for running a Django REST framework at other conferences in the future.
Finally, Anna gathered ideas regarding branding, promoting, and community building for the API Star project.
It’s now been one full year since I started working on REST framework full-time. I’d like to say a huge thank you to Mozilla, given the our initial MOSS award was what gave us the initial runway to be able to give this a try. We’ll be writing up a fuller retrospective sometime over the coming month.
There will also be a financial transparency report coming, now that we’ve got a full year’s worth of figures to work against.
There’s plenty of work on the immediate horizon. It’s about time to start thinking about 3.7 functionality for REST framework. There’s plenty of triage to get on with. More work towards asyncio within ASGI, and continued development on API Star. Thankfully June will be conference-free!
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As ever, thanks to all our sponsors, contributors, and users for your ongoing support.
— Tom Christie, 2nd June, 2017.