2025-09-21 –, Main stage
In 2018, I was a student in Indonesia, learning Django at my university. Today, I maintain Wagtail CMS as a full-time job at Torchbox in the UK. Here's my journey and how mentorship programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy help sustain open source communities.
My journey began with a curious hack: creating a custom JSONField in Django to meet the deadline of a university assignment. That led to me applying for GSoC 2019 with Django. With mentorship from veteran contributors, I spent a summer building the cross-database JSONField that would later ship in Django 3.1.
But that was just the start. GSoC gave me confidence, visibility, and skills—not only as a developer, but as a contributor to a global community. It unlocked the opportunity to work on Wagtail CMS (an open source project) as a full-time job after graduating from university, allowing me to move to the UK in the process. I’ve since gone on to mentor others through GSoC and Outreachy, helping the next waves of Django and Wagtail contributors succeed.
These mentorship programs aren't just career accelerators. They're lifelines for open source projects. They help turn curious users into committed contributors, and sometimes, into future maintainers. Django and Wagtail are thriving today in part because of the energy and diversity brought in through GSoC, Outreachy, and newer initiatives like Djangonaut Space.
In this talk, I’ll share:
- How mentorship programs helped me go from a student to a maintainer
- What makes mentorship programs successful, from both mentor and mentee perspectives
- How open source projects can make the most of these programs
- Why sustained, inclusive mentorship is one of the most impactful ways to keep projects like Django and Wagtail alive
This is not just my story, it’s a call to action. I want open source projects in the Python ecosystem to be sustainable with new contributors who step up and become maintainers. If open source sustainability is in your interests, I hope you’ll join this conversation.
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In 2019, I participated in Google Summer of Code with Django, during which I implemented the cross-database JSONField that became available in Django 3.1. Now, I work as a Developer at Torchbox, building new features and improvements to the Django-based Wagtail CMS and its ecosystem.
Outside of the Django world, I maintain my project giscus, a comment system powered by GitHub Discussions. You can find me @laymonage on GitHub, Fosstodon, and other sites.