Django Cardiff User Group

Last night I went to the second meeting of the Django Cardiff User Group.

This is a sister group to the DBBUG Bristol based one that I have been attending for the last 5 years. It was organised by Daniele Procida, who started attending DBBUG events a few years ago and has now decided to spread the word over the Severn, in Wales.

He is also organising the first UK Django conference in a couple of months, https://djangoweekend.org/ so its good to see one open source / Python group be inspiration for spawning another, and one that is perhaps more organisationally active than its progenitor.

The evening was fun, and it was good to meet and chat with Djangonauts over the border.

Andrew Godwin, Django core developer / release manager, gave us an update on all the new goodies to be added in Django 1.7
So this release is largely about really sorting out the niggling issues with relational database features, and the low level ORM handling of them.
It sees rationalisation of transaction handling with the use of nestable atomic statements, addition of generic connection pooling, and handling of composite keys.

Daniele demonstrated how to fly a helicopter (a toy one) via the Python command line, although Andrew seemed rather more adept at landing it safely. I gave a little reprise of a talk introducing DBBUG and how a developer can follow the road to their own open source contributions.

Thanks to everyone involved, I hope to get to the Django weekend too.