I've owned this petergrandstaff.com domain since 2008 and I struggle to remember all the versions of a site that I've had here. Even before that I had convinced my employer to let me have a little personal site on their domain. Prior to that I'd used my college's web hosting and ran a webcam from my dorm room last century.

My first site was on Geocities.

It's been a long time since I updated this site and my world has changed a lot in that time. There's a lot less content here than the last version, but it's a lot more relevant to the present day Peter.

Where it started

I was working as a coffee roaster when I bought this domain. I had started building an inventory management system for the coffee company using PHP and MySQL. I also had a steady gig on the side helping with web design and marketing for a dog trainer. It was starting to dawn on me that I had a career ahead in this field.

How I found Django

It was in my own mental postmortem of the inventory management system that I discovered the concept of web frameworks. I had written everything from scratch and it was awful: fragile, insecure, and so slow to build. But it ran fast and it worked.

I set about reading about the different web frameworks available at the time and Django really stood out.

The framework for perfectionists with deadlines

That was me.

Soon a project came along and Django was a good fit. I got to build my first Django application. It has been in use for about 15 years. Then another one came along and I met Victor, who was also building with Django. Years later, we would found Two Rock Software together.

That project has been running for 14 years now and keeps growing.

How I found Community

My company hired Dawn Wages in February of 2020. Of course all our plans fell apart as COVID changed everything. But Dawn stuck around for awhile and she told me repeatedly that I needed to go to DjangoCon US. I checked it out online in 2021, and in 2022 it felt too far away over in San Diego. But Dawn reached out and said they were looking for a venue for 2023 and we should propose Durham. We put together a proposal with a team of locals, including some of the excellent folks from Caktus.

Next thing I know, DEFNA gets in touch and says they liked the proposal and want to come to Durham.

It felt a bit like one of those cartoons where a row of people all take a step back except one. So there I was standing in front when a conference chair was needed. And DEFNA happened to want a new president after Jeff Triplett had held the post for too long.

So here I am now, in charge of the largest Django event in North America and loving it.

Back to my website

Over the past three years I've been overwhelmed learning new things about running a conference and probably doing more of the heavy lifting than I should. All that time it's been sitting in the back of my mind that my own personal website was stuck in 2019. That's one thing that didn't change with COVID.

But it's time.

So, today I'm launching this new site. Welcome to Peter Grandstaff's homepage.