January Edition
I realized today if I didn’t post on my blog that I was going to miss out on having a Five for Friyay in January. My lack of updates doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy working.
This past week I dusted off my Trello boards, did some spring cleaning, configured a Pinboard.in RSS-to-Trello importer via IFTTT.com, and I worked on a few tools to help me sort out some of the content avalanche that I have felt under as of late.
Since I missed most of January, I decided to make this a Five(ish) for Friyay and to share more than five this week.
What I’m Reading
Do you participate in code reviews? If so, please read Unlearning Toxic Behaviors in a Code Review Culture
Another Five for Friyay
One of my colleagues, Lacey Williams Henschel, published a blog post Five for Friyay: Useful Python and Django Libraries which covers a few of my favorites. I drafted my version, but hers was too good not to share.
Podcast Episode I Listened to and Got a Lot Out Of
I enjoyed Jason Scott’s Public Speaking: The Iron Sheik, No Stage Fright, A Rat for Office, Presentations, Tips for Talks, TED is Fake, In Your Head Lover, A Five Minute Offer episode a lot. If you love, hate, are indifferent but are still interested in public speaking then I think you’ll enjoy it too.
Utility I Open Sourced
This week I open sourced a utility which makes working with Frontmatter easier. Frontmatter is used by Jekyll and helps represent special variables for metadata. For example, you might store the title of your page or blog post using it. I also use it store the weather when I publish my articles.
I unoriginally named this tool frontmatter-cli.
Humbrag: DjangoCon US Is One of the Best Engineering Conferences in 2018 to Attend
The conference that I help run was mentioned in an article about The best software engineering conferences of 2018 
.
DjangoCon US is a six-day conference for users of the Django web framework. The event caters to the entire spectrum of Django users, from those who develop business apps on the framework to those who tinker with it in their spare time. Conference planners are committed to diversity and offer financial aid to members of the Django community to meet the costs of tickets, travel, and accommodations.
Humbrag #2: I Was Nominated for the Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize
I was blown away to be nominated for the Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize. While I’m usually not a fan of awards, Malcolm was a friend and a mentor to me. Just being nominated along with a half-dozen+ incredible community members took me a few days to grasp it. Plus, I was humbled to see a summary of the nice things that people said about me.
Jeff Triplett, for his huge contribution to the running of DjangoCon US, and the consistently warm, supportive attitude he brings to this and to his other work in the world of Django