Oh my god, that was me! I can't believe I just read this on HN. Whenever I'm at a conference (usually PyCon or DjangoCon) and meet someone whose work has benefited me, I try to make a point to thank them.
I ended up getting involved with Qtile for a few years and contributed to the docs, website, and various widgets.
Haha, I promise you I am not! I can't prove it was me, but I did find some old tweets where I shared that blog post in 2011. At one of the Santa Clara PyCon's I ran a small Qtile BoF in the Open Spaces and ended up meeting one or two people I had only interacted with on IRC. It was a pretty great experience over all.
I'm also kinda mind blown that a 15-second interaction I had at PyCon 13 or 14 years ago got a mention on HN. I only saw this post because someone at my local hackerspace told me that Qtile was on the HN frontpage. (I'm the resident Python champion and have shown off my Qtile setup at our monthly Linux night before.)
I went through the "Install Windows" option just to hear the Windows XP installation music again. That track is such a vibe, I have loved it since I was a 14 year-old installing a pirated copy of XP in 2001.
I first started using Django in 2006, v0.95, the "magic removal" release. I was 19 and doing PHP at a small startup. I'd heard the hype around Rails, and wanted to check it out. Several hours and many head-desk moments later, I still couldn't get everything set up properly on my laptop (running Ubuntu). In my research, I discovered Python and Django and decided to give it a whirl. Twenty minutes later, I had the Django Hello Word page on my screen, and I haven't looked back since.
It wasn't long before newforms became a thing, and the 1.0 release, lots of cool database features, migrations (I remember debating South vs. Nashvegas at work), class-based views (amazing!), Postgres-specific features (built-in JSONField, finally!), Py3k support, ASGI... It's been a long, cool, productive road.
I was at the first DjangoCon in 2008 (leaving my wife at home with our two month old!), and giving a conference talk for the first time a decade later at DjangoCon 2018.
I owe my career to Django. It has been my framework of choice for projects large and small, and I've always felt solid in that decision -- thanks in no small part to the community.
I'm so excited to find this out! I was a regular attendee of PyCon and DjangoCon for close to a decade, but haven't been to one since the pre-pandemic. times I now work at a nonprofit without much of a budget for extras and had basically written off attending for the foreseeable future -- but with PyCon only a four-hour drive away from Fresno, I might be able to pull this off on my own!
In my case, I've had multiple ophthalmologists recommend against getting IOLs until I'm much, much older, as the risk of side affects (specifically retinal detachment) outweighs the benefit I would get from having them.
I still dream of being able to see first thing when I wake up.
I was born with congenital bilateral cataracts and had the lenses in both eyes removed as an infant (a condition called Aphakia). I have been set up with monovision since I was very young -- that basically means I'm intentionally far-sighted in one eye and near-sighted in the other so that I use one eye for reading and the other eye for distance.
I wear hard contact lenses most of the time, but I do have glasses. My glasses prescription is around +21/+23 (I would fit right in hanging out with Milhouse Van Houten or Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth), but I only wear them in emergencies because I get headaches and dizziness after 10/15 minutes of wearing them. I mostly keep 'em for the novelty of showing people just how thick my glasses are. 8)
My eyes do get tired after long screen days, resulting in blurry vision and watery eyes. I also get headaches on a somewhat frequent basis.
If that's useful at all, I'd be happy to chat more.
The cold bottle glasses. You get those because they're cheaper these days. You can get the same prescription on a much thinner lens. I did that for my kid. He has a pretty strong prescription in one eye, but his lens is no thicker than mine.
It adds a lot to the cost of the glasses, though. Easily $75 to just get half of the thickness.
Where? Even thick ones are super expensive here. Over $250 a lens. I'd gladly pay $75 more for a significantly thinner lens. Point me in the right direction please.
I don't have anything meaningful to add other than how bizarre to see this on HN. Laura Splotch, who was interviewed in the article, is a good friend, neighbor, and former coworker. Weird how things intersect sometimes.
This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code...
When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun.
I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.
> XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
My memory says that it was first implemented in IE 5.5, which was released in 2000. Wikipedia says [0] that it first appeared in IE 5.0 but with a different syntax.
Heh, I'm literally in the middle of optimizing some N+1 query endpoints in a Django application for work, made a bit more tricky because of DRF's serializer.
I think a setting for lazy queries would be a good solution, with it enabled by default to ease the transition. It would be nice to have a couple options, though – allow, warn, and error.
It would also be great to have a way to change the setting on the fly so that, e.g., the Django shell can automatically enable it for those quick debugging sessions.
Heh, I discovered your comment while googling to fix the same. I'm in the same boat as you; it's seriously annoying and distracting. Did you ever find a solution?
I ended up getting involved with Qtile for a few years and contributed to the docs, website, and various widgets.
So, thanks again!
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