The story of my first open source contribution

I'm reporting from PyCon Italy 2026, Bologna, the city of ragù and mortadella, and, as of today, my very first steps toward an open source contribution.

I have always thought open source contributors were kind of bad ass. They are the people behind the tools I use every day, quietly fixing and improving things. Every time I pip install something and it works, there is a person somewhere who made that happen.

The conference kicked off with an Open Day dedicated to communities. I spent it at the Django Off The Med workshop, which is a sprint session inspired by the Django On The Med gatherings, brought to the city of Bologna for the conference.

The format is simple: you clone the repo, set up the test suite, and start looking for something to work on in the bug tracker.

My first open source contribution

Django and I are not really there yet. I don't use it that much, so jumping straight into contributing to the framework itself felt like a stretch too far for one morning.

What I did instead turned out to be more relevant to me anyway. I set up a project where I got to interact a bit more with GeoDjango, Django's built-in geospatial extension. (I work with weather data, and spatial queries come with the territory.)

Turns out GeoDjango offers quite a lot. For example:

• Geometry model fields - PointField, PolygonField, MultiPolygonField which map directly to OGC geometry types in PostGIS.
• Spatial ORM lookups - you can query with things like filter(poly__dwithin=(geom, D(km=5))) directly in the ORM, no raw SQL needed.
• Distance calculations built in - annotate a queryset with Distance("point", reference_point) and get back a Distance object you can express in various units: .km, .mi, .m.

One thing I keep turning over: there is a real difference between writing raw SQL and query builders, where you have full control over what hits the database, and using an ORM. Neither is obviously better, and for spatial data specifically I am curious how the abstractions hold up when queries get complex.

But when in Bologna, do as the Bolognesi do - and apparently that means leaving with something to explore.