Djangonaut diaries, week 6: Charting the Unknown Unknowns of a PR

Hi there! This week's post is less technical, a reflection of the journey so far, while I celebrate my first PR merged and wait for two more to be reviewed. More specifically, it's reflection on the PR for ticket #10919 , which is in progress. My first Django core PR At my $DAYJOB , we live and breathe the "Build, Measure, Learn" cycle. Our lead time from "ready for dev" to "deployed" in the Kanban board is measured in a few days, and we routinely deploy a few dozen times a week under CI/CD. We rely heavily on feature flags to mitigate risk; if something doesn't pan out or a weird bug slips through, we simply flip a toggle, check the error logs, and iterate. Worst case (which is rare), we can rollback the deployment with a few clicks. It’s a nimble, high-velocity speedboat where the cost of failure is relatively low. But stepping into Django core to tackle #10919 is an entirely different reality, and it's been a great and rewarding learning experience. This issue opened back in 2009, r