Weeknotes: ao3-tracker and DjangoCon US
DjangoCon US 2022
I just got back from my first in-person conference in more than three years! DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego, CA accomplished everything a conference is supposed to — I feel inspired, energized, and motivated. I’m planning on doing a longer DjangoCon US post once the talks come out on YouTube so I can link to the ones that spoke the loudest to me, but suffice it to say, the talks were top-tier this year and it was incredible.
Pull Requests:
REVSYS offsite
Or hackathon or get-together or whatever we call it — most of REVSYS attended DjangoCon US and got there a couple of days early to code together! It was mostly on an internal project in a private repo, but it’s been a while since I worked on anything “from scratch,” and I really enjoyed the feeling of making a brand-new set of endpoints work for the first time.
Pull Requests:
Add users with a custom user model
Add basic Django models, serializers, and endpoints
Add some placeholder JSON in the serializer so that the frontend could start working with it
Re-learn how to use
django-filtersand allow an endpoint to do some filtering
ao3-tracker
During the pandemic, I got into fanfiction. Like, really into fanfiction. Specifially on the site Archive of Our Own, abbreviated as AO3.
AO3 has an awesome filtering system, making it easy to find fics that fit your preferred fandom, ships, tropes, etc. And they provide a way to save fics to read later, and to recommend fics to friends. But they don’t have the same filtering options on the works you’ve saved to read later, or that you’ve recommended to others, as they do for the more general search.
They also don’t have a REST API (or any other kind of API).
And there is a LOT of fanfiction, y’all. My TBR (“to be read”) is hundreds of works long. And without a good way to filter them, it’s really hard to find the next thing I want to read. I’m not the only one with this problem. In the fandom communities I’m part of, people maintain complex Notion board and Google spreadsheets, or they comment in Reddit threads or keep notebooks, all so they can track their reading.
Enter ao3-tracker, my first idea for a personal project that I need. It’s really simple so far. It uses the Python library ao3_api, and my hope is to turn it into something I can use to track my reading, which will pull data from AO3. No idea where it’s going to go. Maybe I’ll abandon it after this week and no one will hear about it again. Who knows.