Santa Claus Rally is a seasonal increase of stock value in financial markets that usually occurs in last weeks of December. It is caused by, as always too optimistic, feelings of traders. This year expected rally did not start very positively (special greetings for crypto holders), and I can almost hear cries of many people.. ;)
Well, at least in software development things are not changing in such a drastic way. A good example of this is the Django web framework. Because Django is mature and stable, even having an increased release cycle (currently feature release is every eight months and LTS every two years), things are progressing rather slowly.
Compare the situation of Django with the JavaScript world. Last three years we have seen the rise and fall of major frameworks and a never-ending complete overhaul of the standard tools for the developer. It has been moving like crazy. Looking at this, non-JS developers could smile and just code without troubles.
Then, from last DjangoCon US I watched a talk by Carlton Gibson titled “Your web framework needs you!” (LINK). It says that for Django to stay relevant for the next ten years, it needs change in the way new features and bugs are incorporated in and lots of new hands for help. Carlton gives some hints how to start contributing and explains that most of the tickets are not much harder than the typical problems programmers are solving each day. So why it is so hard to contribute to such wonderful open source software?
Some possible reasons:
- No company incentive to allow programmers to contribute some time to open source during a workday
- High entry barrier for less advanced programmers, who are enthusiastic about helping, but without mentorship unable to help
- Last but not least, most of the advanced programmers who are using Django simply cannot find any errors and are usually satisfied with existing functionality; therefore they do not create new tickets and fix old bugs
Finally, I would like to see more companies who are using open source software to give back to open source community, by sponsoring projects or enabling their developers some time to help. Let’s be optimistic and believe in the Santa Claus Rally…
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