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.)
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.
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.
Years ago, Facebook maintained a Python SDK for their API. One day, with no warning, Facebook announced they would no longer support it because they didn't have the resources, and the repo was removed from their Github org, which caused a huge headache. IIRC, the community settled around someones fork.
A few months later, Facebook was a major sponsor of PyCon and they set up a recruitment booth. "We'll take your developers, but we won't support your ecosystem." Really rubbed me the wrong way.
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.)
Small world indeed!