Sat 16 Sep 2006

Drinking From The Fire Hose

After travelling and being generally busy for the three weeks, I got back to Australia last Saturday and immediately came down with a heavy cold or the flu or something. So most of this week was spent swimming through a haze and generally not being a human being. Slowly started catching up on some urgent outstanding items on Thursday and Friday, in between taking naps, but today is the first day I actually feel like moving around a lot. So it was time to tackle all the unread email I had let accumulate.

Most lists were disposed of pretty quickly, since I read them for information, rather than participation. Django was another story, though, since I like to play a bit in that space.

What with working strange hours whilst away and various things, I had let about 200 django-developers emails pile up unread and 700 django-users. Essentially two to four weeks of only very partial skimming and saving everything else. These aren't just emails I can breeze through without thinking, either, particularly since there was a serious discussion about forms and manipulators that seems to have lead somewhere useful, although petering out a bit now and a discussion on some parallel SQLAlchemy integration (nothing really special in the thread beyond the initial accouncement, but that's something to watch). There were a few other threads that had something to do or note in them, so I've ended up with a couple of dozen bullet points of things to investigate or fix. Now, if those 30 hour days I ordered would just arrive.

Only about a third of the way through the django-users unread pile so far, so apologies if anybody was expecting a response from me on something. I'll get through them all by the end of today.

One thing this did bring home to me: we need to be really understanding of people who may miss something that was posted on one of these lists. It is a non-trivial task to keep up to date if you aren't putting in a chunk of time each day to read and digest all the emails. I'm not sure if a weekly mailing list summary would help or not, but it might be worth a shot. There's a lot of good information on those two lists and the signal to noise ratio is surprisingly high most of the time. The constant understanding from everybody and "treat no question as too silly" attitude is very good, compared to many lists I've been on for other projects. It is a lot like drinking from the fire hose, though, and I felt really out of touch with development trends after only a few weeks away (this either makes me a concerned citizen or a control freak).

So, hopefully I've learnt the right thing from that and will be able to post repeats and references to older threads with sufficient good humour.

And, yes, I will get back to writing some more Django tips articles in the near future.

Topics: software/django