2018 has been a hell of a ride 🔥.
I started with a three-month trip to Australia (holidays 
), learn how to dive in the great barreer reef 
and spent all my time hiking and discovering this beautiful country.
Being away for a while helped me understand what was really important to me in my work environment. (This blog post is not an introspection on my personal life so I’ll go straight to the point where I speak about work/tech/community.)
During the first days, work concerns kept popping in my head, “Did our team deliver that product on time ?”, “How is that part going ?” etc…
After a while, daily concerns went away and I cared less and less about most projects I was previously working on. It really helped me see the bigger picture, what I like in my work and what I’d like to change.
I realised that I was driving away from communities like Django and Python and it felt wrong. It gave me so much I’d like to give back now.
I decided I needed to reconnect with those communities. Here is how I fixed this problem:
- I registered for DjanConEurope, Europython, and the french DjangoCong
- I also went back to django and pythons meetup in Paris more regularly
If conferences can be very expensive 
(in terms of money, time and energy), meetups are quite cheap to attend to. My company also decided to pay me back some of my expenses, and yours should too!
I met new people and old friends in these conferences. It felt really great. I was part of these events but I wanted to help/contribute more, I submitted a lightning talk but did not get picked up (maybe next time).
I tried to go back to open source but it’s really time consuming and I wasn’t satisfied with the amount of time I could offer.
Since it’s been a few years now that I’m working, I realised I could make small donations to organisations I care about without any impact on my personal finances.
In 2018, I gave money to the Django Software Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and Django Girls.
It’s been a while now that I’m using Django and it was the least that I can do. The PSF seems also an obvious choice to me and I’m a big fan of the work Django Girls achieve every year all around the world. I wanted to make sure to help them as well. It’s not huge donations but still, I hope that helps. What are you waiting for to do the same? You may get this cool badge doing so!
2019 will be full of surprise as I’m changing position and will maybe shift to others languages/frameworks.
I want to plan more regular donations. For 2019, I’m considering:
- Vue.js - amazing framework with a really good documentation
- Django Rest Framework - I couldn’t do my job without this framework. I started submitting a few tiny mini PRs, we’ll see where that goes
- Let’s Encrypt - They change my life for certificates!
What are your suggestions?
Cheers !