I'd like to take a moment to update everyone with my current state of affairs. It seems there are quite a few things I am invovled these days. I just want to set the record straight. My day job is at Eldarion. I love it. I started officially back in August of 2009. I get the opportunity to work with James Tauber on a daily basis. He has been a wonderful boss and — most importantly — a good friend of mine.
Pinax
Pinax is my top open-source priority for the foreseeable future. I get the opportunity to work with it nearly every day at work. My contributions to the project are mostly done in spare time. We are working towards a 0.9 release which I think will be the best release of Pinax to date. Look for an alpha release soon. We also have some improvements coming to pinaxproject.com and code.pinaxproject.com.
Django apps
Being one of the core developers of Pinax you end up having to maintain apps that are a part of the project. When something is broken in one app it breaks users code.
In the earlier days of Pinax it was much more of a pain to get everything working together during the push to Django 1.0. Many apps would break and we didn't have access to them to fix. As a result of the work we did on Django apps I ended up with commit permissions on almost every app we include in Pinax. Fortunately most of the apps just moved to a DVCS thus accessible on either GitHub or Bitbucket. This has made contribution a ton easier. It gives us control of the code without needing a ton of coordination with the original authors. However, we try not to take apps in different directions than what the original author intends. Though there are cases where the original developer either takes apps in directions we don't particularly like or they don't maintain it at all. This results in a slight extra burden on core developers of Pinax.
I'd like to call out one particular set of apps that as fallen in the latter category.
django-(tagging|voting|mptt)
These three apps have yielded the most e-mail in terms of support than any of my other ones. They are very well known apps. We included them in Pinax because of their usefulness. Unfortunately, Jonathan Buchanan left the scene almost entirely. When issues came up on them we ended up e-mailing him and the result was that I was given a committer role (literally no communication other than him giving me the role). My role on each of these apps has been entirely make it work for Pinax. There are a ton of bugs in these apps that people have either directly e-mailed me or reported to the project's issue tracker. My stance at this point is to keep maintaining them as I see fit. This mostly means in direct coordination with what I or Pinax needs. I strongly believe their home now on Google Code is a bit dead. I have cloned each of these apps onto GitHub. To me I'd rather mantain them there since they can grow much easier from others contributions than the SVN model.
django-tagging is the most used of these three apps. Why not check out and contribute to Alex Gaynor's django-taggit? That'd be my vote.
For the rest I will try my best, but don't expect anything great. Sorry.
DjangoDose
It all started with a guy named Michael Trier. No, seriously, he really helped bootstrap something great. Unfortunately it never really went as well as we hoped. When he decided to leave TWiD I felt we needed to change things up. I was lucky to have Eric Florenzano ready to step up and help out. We decided to move direction towards what you know as DjangoDose.
I will be stepping down from DjangoDose as the role everyone knows me as. There is so much DjangoDose can do, but no longer feel I am contributing as much as I should be to get us there. I give Eric and Alex my best. I hope that it can succeed into what they want it to become. They have my 100% support.
Django
During a recording session of a DjangoDose episode we were playing around with formspring.me. I ended up getting this question:
"Why don't you contribute to Django itself anymore?"
This struck me pretty hard. I tried to shake it off, but for something as important to me as Django I couldn't.
I owe a lot to Django. It has given me opportunities I could only dream of two years ago. Contributing to Django doesn't nesscarily have to be committing code to the main repository. I do think I need to step up my contribution in that area. I contribute to Django in many ways. You've already read about a lot of it.
I did answer the question with my contributions to the upcoming 1.2.
This blog
This falls as more of a personal thing than anything else. I've wanted to revamp this blog for a long time. I have been in a bit of a struggle of what my online presence actually means. Twitter has killed blogging for me.
I have a few ideas on how to improve it. Stay tuned.