www.lajoie.me

Gratitude

It's a lovely summer morning, I'm feeling grateful.

There is a strangeness to feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude amongst chaos. A selfishness, almost, because the true chaos isn't close to here. But it's 2025, and I can observe terrifying scenes through filtered or unfiltered views at my leisure. I still don't know how to hold that juxtaposition in my head or my heart.

And yet, I am compelled to write not because of the things I cannot honestly experience, but because of the things I can.

Summer has arrived, and it is a blissful Maine morning. Sips of coffee punctuated by bird sound layered with the low rumble of rubber on road. I'm in my driveway -- so is our dog -- and even the black flies are preoccupied by their good fortune to be here in this moment.

There are few feelings as good as what I feel now. A quiet contemplation, marveling at the gift of life as it is in this very scene. Every one of my attempts to cast this feeling in words feels woefully inadequate. Still, I have been itching to write literally anything for months now.

I am grateful for the way our towering maple, leaned out over the road, casts fuzzy shadows on the front of the garage -- each one unique every moment, every day.

I am grateful for the rich orange of the Oriole's belly.

I am grateful that my wife and I can whisper jokes and encouragement and "I love you"s to each other in the form of impossibly small vibrations fluttering among the lush trees of peninsula. Like bird chirps with greater range and the ability to encode images of today's snake or frog visitor at the gardens.

Last night I was filled with an eagerness to accomplish about a million things today. This morning the weather and her inspired equilibrium drew me out into the yard, where a sleeping dog lies.

It is my greatest hope that, among the chaos -- and in spite of it -- moments like these will continue to grace us all.

What an honor it is to receive the gift of this day.

New World

A poem from the COVID years.

I used to write a lot of poems / short stories. I want to do that more. So I'll start by sharing one I wrote following the weirdest / most challenging year of everyone's lives.

new world

i've come out the other side,
apprehension waning,
gratitude on tap.

what good fortune to be here.

the spring winds rustle my hair,
feels like an old friend,
one of the many I've missed.

the best comfort around.

vaccines and hugs are available,
both are free,
both stir my insides.

in the best possible way.

i'm still unsure of lots of things,
but i'll get my footing,
kick cans further down the road.

cans clinking with glee.

the ocean is my constant,
a place to anchor,
learn to ebb and flow.

she dances in the moonlight.

i felt strength in my morning run,
in tune with my body,
heart pounding the pavement.

filled with enduring grace.

i'm just so glad to be here,
in spite of the difficulties to face,
the spring winds lift the weight.

how could i ever contain this joy?

Written May 23, 2021 at 5:17PM

Noodling on my first DjangoCon 🎸

Community, hacking, and the "plugin" lifestyle: some takeaways from my first DjangoCon!

Woah! My first blog post on my personal site! Been meaning to do this for a while. I'm not going to make any promises that I'll update this very often (and if you made it this far, hello!)

Here's a recap on my time at DjangoCon US 2024 in Durham, NC.

Getting There

On the way in, I took a quick detour to western NC to visit some family. Despite the clear weather, my final leg did not go as planned. Fun fact: sometimes, it's cheaper to take a 2-hour Lyft than it is to fly or rent a car... 🤯 I ended up having a very pleasant time trading travel stories with Kenyatta, and managed to have a full weekend with family!

Diving into DjangoCon

After much smoother travel over to Durham, I was ready to jump right into DjangoCon. I was traveling solo, and severely underestimated how shy I could be in these kinds of settings... 🤦‍♂️ Luckily, everyone was incredibly welcoming and friendly! After a few days, I managed to meet some new friends and enjoy the social scene of the Django community.

This year was the first time DjangoCon was hosting a simultaneous Hackathon. I've been eager to have the opportunity to spin up an MVP for a project called iotato (more on that another time), so this was the perfect opportunity to start immediately applying some of the new things I was learning throughout the week. Big thanks to the organizers and other teams that participated - seeing the presentations and getting feedback on my project was great!

Beyond that, it was pretty neat to meet some of the folks I've been following in the Django community for the last year or so. Putting faces to the names of very impressive contributors was both exciting and a bit intimidating. And yet, every single one of them was kind and easy to approach. It's made me eager to get involved in the Django community!

Takeaways

In no particular order, here's a brain-dump of some of the highlights/takeaways I had throughout the week:

Inclusivity was on full display and it was awesome: from the code of conduct to the acknowledgement of indigenous communities/land tied to Durham, it was clear how this community managed to become so welcoming and friendly
Sheena O'Connell's keynote on education gave me a lot to ponder in terms of learning styles and the communities that exist to build others up with new skills (and I learned about the term cargo cult programming...definitely guilty of that!)
The amount of relevant phrases you can build from the LOTR acronym is staggering (iykyk)
Related: Django Fellows are fantastic and do some incredible work!
"Complexity Kills Projects" - a great talk by Chris May about honing in on selecting your architecture for web apps
""Cool URIs don't change" -Tim Berners-Lee" -Lorenzo Peña I've been dealing with redirects/url design at work, so this talk provided some great food for thought. #LoveYourURLs
Sage's story about how django changed his life was super inspiring!
Mario's keynote was super engaging and relatable in all sorts of unexpected ways. "To be a better developer, be a better person to others." 👏
I'm definitely gonna checkout the Crunchy Data Postgres Tutorials
A neat project I want to try: nanodjango - would've been perfect for this week's hackathon!
Watching @simonw live code on stage was epic - this blog is using his very own django-plugin-blog courtesy of djp. Consider me subscribed to the #plugin-lifestyle
Thinking about django + emissions was pretty cool, definitely worth considering how we can build leaner sites to the benefit the planet
I was super inspired by Zagaran's work, they're making a very tangible and meaningful impact in the housing crisis 👏
Meeting the figure behind nearly every django forum response I've ever read was fun, and his talk on WebRTC was intriguing
Capping it off with Will & Carlton's words about the User Model and the future of Django was pretty dang fun, considering that Django Chat is the very reason I discovered this community and made it to DjangoCon!
...and so much more

Summary

This conference was top notch. My goals going forward are:

Get involved! Contribute or something!
At the next DjangoCon, break out of my shell a bit more and meet more people!

Until then, I've got so many people/projects to learn from. 🧠

-Nic