DjangoCon 2026 Review

This week I have just got back from my third DjangoCon Europe. This year was Athens and once again it was an amazing experience. Made slightly stressful this time by doing a last minute talk that I had proposed but got rejected, it was a last minute cancellation that meant I got the opportunity to do so! So I spent most of the conference preparing for that in terms of slides, demo and practising. I also managed to squeeze in a lightning talk on Thursday for the online community working group to advertise it and call out that we can and should do better online as a community, there's more to do and we need help!

The main talk I did was on however essentially advertising Django prodserver, the package I've created, but framing it as an API design talk, so Django lacks a deployment API story, or running and I was focusing on running Django projects. So we lack a production story and the run server argument is that it's it doesn't really communicate actually what it's the commands doing. So I think it generated a bit of interest. Some peop I think it, lots of people appreciated it, I think, or enjoyed it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the other talks as well. There were some excellent database talks from Tim Bell at Kraken, Jake Howard from Torchbox, more folks at Kraken, Charlie and Sam talking about subatomic. A really an excellent set of talks overall this year, I could go through each one, but each I attended I either learnt something new or have a new package to experiment with later this year. Finally the keynotes are worth a mention, I caught most of Daniele's on philisophy and documentation and Carlson's was excellent to kick us off on types and his new package django-mantle. I I was very sad that I missed the sprints this year but had to get back for family commitments at the weekend which made for a fun trip home!

Finally the socials were great! My slight bias for Tuesday with a pre-conference Django social, the afterparty on Thursday was smooth with a visit to Django Gelato afterwards - would 100% recommend ffor any visit to Athens. The venue was excellent and allowed for multiple opportunities for networking with lots of folks at different times. I'm excited for already excited for 2027 where I think I might volunteer and maybe propose a talk again, but that entire depends on what happens in the next 6 months! Or perhaps next year I may be giving the US conference a go. In the meantime I'm hoping to attend Django on the Med (and/or perhaps a Django off the Med!)