Django On The Med: A Contributor Sprint Retrospective

Three months after organizing Django On The Med, a small Django contributor sprint, I wanted to reflect on what actually mattered beyond pull requests and GitHub activity.

This article is a retrospective on that experience, written as a follow-up to the timeline article I published right after the event, aggregating Mastodon posts containing images and first-hand thoughts shared during the sprint days.

With some distance, I look back at how the idea of a standalone contributor sprint was born, how a deliberately simple format based on focused mornings and open afternoons worked in practice, what did not work as expected, and what kind of impact it had on the people involved and on the Django open source community.

What stayed with me

What remains strongest, months later, are the moments in between.

The early mornings when everyone showed up on time, despite staying in different parts of town.
The conversations that continued long after laptops were closed.
The feeling that people were fully present, not rushing to the next talk, not checking a schedule, not optimizing their time for anything other than being there.

Some of the effects of those days only became visible weeks later: conversations that continued online, ideas that turned into drafts, work that started there and is still evolving.

Django On The Med did not end when we left Palafrugell.

Where the idea really came from

The idea behind Django On The Med did not appear overnight.

Long before Django, I was part of the Plone community. There, I experienced a different sprint culture. Smaller groups, fewer expectations, and time split between working together and simply being together.

That experience stayed with me, even as my involvement moved to Django and other Python communities.

Over the years, I attended many conferences as a speaker, organizer, or volunteer. Each role added value, but also came with a growing sense of fatigue.

By the time sprints arrived at the end of conferences, many of us had already spent most of our energy.

San Diego, 2022

The moment when everything clicked happened in San Diego, during DjangoCon US 2022.

After a morning swim in the ocean, I found myself talking with Mariusz Felisiak, Simon Charette, and Wil Klopp. We were all coming from different parts of the world. We had traveled far, given talks, helped others, and were happy to be there, but we were also tired.

When I shared the idea out loud for the first time, the reaction was immediate. They told me they would have loved to replicate that exact moment: being together, relaxed, with time and energy to dedicate to Django.

That was the first clear confirmation that this was not just my feeling.

From proposal to a real event

The idea stayed there for a long time.

It resurfaced in conversations, comments, and feedback. The reactions from Will Vincent and Carlton Gibson were also important signals. From their perspectives, the proposal felt genuinely interesting and not something they had heard before from the community.

What finally turned the idea into reality was a conscious decision to start small, which Carlton and I made during the last sprint day at DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin.

Together with Carlton, we reduced scope, expectations, and complexity: no conference, no talks, and no big promises.

Just a few days, a small group, and a simple format.

The sprint format in practice

The only explicit rule we agreed on was simple: mornings were dedicated to working together on Django, afternoons were left free.

What surprised me was how well this worked in practice. Everyone adapted, regardless of habits back home.

We started early, worked together until lunchtime, and then stopped.

From that point on, people did what they needed most: swimming, running, walking, resting, or continuing conversations in a different setting.

Beyond that single rule, everything else was spontaneous: small groups formed naturally around shared interests, some focused on ORM discussions, others proposed ways to track work better, someone suggested writing things down, and someone else suggested sharing ideas.

Being together created opportunities that were not planned, but very real.

What didn’t work, as expected

Not everything worked perfectly, and that was expected.

We tracked a lot of what happened, but we could have been clearer about shared deliverables beyond the sprint itself.

Logistics was probably the biggest friction point. Everyone chose their own accommodation, which reduced the organizational burden, but also meant people were spread across different areas. This added small but constant overhead when moving between the venue, the beach, and evening meetups. Maybe having a single hotel or residence could significantly reduce this friction and turn transit time into shared time.

Scale is another fragile point. With fourteen participants, everything stayed simple. Moving around, booking restaurants, and organizing activities was easy. That simplicity is not guaranteed if the group grows much larger.

Finally, diversity was lower than we would have liked. As a first experiment, we did not actively push grants or targeted outreach (we didn’t have the resources or the capacity anyway). This allowed us to observe the community’s natural response, but also showed that future editions should explore ways to broaden participation without losing the informal spirit of the event.

“Django 6.1 will support database-level delete options for related fields.
The database variants are much more efficient because they avoid fetching related objects.
This is a great win for Django on the Med.”

Value beyond code

Many of the most valuable outcomes of Django On The Med are not visible in repositories.

Real-time conversations helped unblock long-standing discussions. People who had only interacted online spent hours working side by side. Trust grew faster. Decisions became clearer. Mentoring happened naturally.

Looking back, many of these effects were enabled precisely because the event was not optimized for output alone.

The frictions and trade offs described earlier helped create a space where deeper collaboration could emerge.

Months later, some of that work is still ongoing. That may be the clearest indicator that the event did what it was meant to do.

“… Django on the Med … has been an absolute blast: contributing to the Django project, talking, food tasting, walking, and making new friends …
Many thanks to Carlton and Paolo for making it all happen.
The Django community is amazing — full of brilliant, open, and kind people.
It’s an honor to be part of it.”

What this changed for me

Organizing Django On The Med confirmed something I had been feeling for a while: small, focused, human-scale events matter.

They create space for a different kind of contribution, one that is harder to quantify but deeply impactful.

They also require protecting simplicity, even when it feels tempting to optimize or scale too quickly. Many things worked precisely because we resisted that temptation.

“Paolo and Carlton have started something of real value that’s going to grow and endure …”

Sprint Conspirators

I’m grateful to everyone who took part in the sprint and trusted this experiment with their time, energy, and openness.

• Contributors: 14
• Countries represented: 8 (Canada, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States)
• Most represented country: Spain (5 contributors)
• Longest individual journey: ~6,200 km (from New York)
• Total travel distance: ~24,200 km

A necessary thank you

There is one person whose role deserves to be made explicit: Carlton Gibson.

Carlton was one of the first people I talked to about this idea, back in San Diego in 2022. Over time, he kept offering thoughtful and encouraging feedback, from the moment I first wrote about it to later discussions within the Django Software Foundation.

The real turning point came during the final sprint day at DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin. I was exhausted, walking around the sprint room without the energy to focus on anything specific. Carlton brought the idea back to the table and said, quite simply: “Let’s do it. Let’s keep it small.”

That moment mattered more than he probably realizes.

His enthusiasm pushed me to take the idea seriously again, and from there we started reasoning together about how to make it real and sustainable. Keeping the scope small and the format simple made the experiment feel possible.

From that point on, Carlton took on much of the practical work needed to make the first edition happen. He handled the local logistics in Palafrugell, worked with the municipality to secure a venue, set up communication channels, published updates, reached out for small sponsorships, and quite literally hosted us. Many of the things that felt easy during the sprint days were easy because he had taken care of them beforehand.

Django On The Med would not exist without that push, and it would not have taken the shape it did without his calm, pragmatic enthusiasm. For that, and for everything that followed, I am deeply grateful.

Looking ahead

Looking back makes it easier to think about what comes next.

Django On The Med was never meant to be a one-off experiment.

The goal is to continue the initiative, learning from each edition while keeping the same spirit.

The next edition is planned for early autumn 2026 in Pescara.

If this kind of contributor sprint format resonates with you, you can follow updates and future announcements on the official website and newsletter.

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