Queryset-Refactor Lands in Trunk

Malcolm Tredinnick (whom Adrian Holovaty described in his PyCon 2008 presentation as "this Australian guy who is like a Django god") has just finished merging the queryset-refactor branch into trunk. The wiki page summarizes the changes in detail so go ahead and take a gander there to get a glimpse of what to expect. Collectively this branch brings a number of features that will make it more intuitive to get the results you want with less code. Model inheritance (covered earlier here) will also be a big win.

One nice side effect of the merge is that once the newforms-admin branch merges with trunk to incorporate these changes, developers won't have to choose between the two branches anymore. If you are preparing your applications for the goodness that Django will soon bring you now only need to code against the newforms-admin branch.

It is hardly enough to just give kudos to Malcolm for his work. Well, to be sure many others put in effort in terms of ideas, advice, reviewing, and testing code. However Malcolm did the heavy lifting and the desire to produce a first-class product shines through. This may be a little unfair to take his words out of context, but on his blog about a month ago he mentioned:

I've been doing all this reading in an attempt to get out of a bit of a funk about writing code and designing things. It's not too serious, but I'm grumpy a lot and missing the feeling of being enthusiastic about stuff and have been spending a lot of time trying to work out why this is the case...

...I want to work on something that matters, something that has a completion point and will be useful. Contributing to projects like Django are still fun, obviously, but that's mostly doing little things to help out others and sometimes I'm not as invested in it as I should be. I think I'm missing the fun of working on something that is hard but realistic and which can be said at some point to be done. I'm also worried that the lack of periodic work with teams is not giving me any outlet for ideas or source of problems. I'm hardly a hermit, but I sometimes miss working closely with other people and succeeding together on something that is non-trivial. Self-education is fun and something I do a lot, but the real world tends to throw up a lot of interesting problems that you don't see in the books.

Defying Classification: Software Development Motivation

I think Malcolm is being modest and/or underestimating his own abilities here. I've never written an ORM but I've used a handful across a few languages and I've put just enough thought into their construction to realize that they are complex beasts to get right. When one accounts for the fact that Malcolm also regularly participates in the Django user group as well as fixing bugs it becomes clear that this is one talented guy. I believe that Malcolm is truly a shining star in open source development and we in the Django community are very fortunate to be able to utilize his efforts.

Malcolm recently interviewed by the 42topics blog and also made an appearance on the "This Week in Django" podcast. If you are fortunate enough to encounter him in a social setting please do pay for his meal, buy him a beverage, and pass along an enthusiastic thanks for me.

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