Issue 353: DjangoCon US Recaps Galore!
| in blog | Django News |
|---|---|
| published date | 2026-09-04 |
| original entry | Issue 353: DjangoCon US Recaps Galore! |
News
The fifth annual survey run with JetBrains is out, with the full report, infographics, and a companion writeup titled "The State of Django 2026: Boring is so back."
Python release manager Hugo van Kemende kindly requests you add 3.15 and allow-prereleases: true to your GitHub Actions matrix and publish wheels before the October 1 release.
Releases
Twelve fixes, nearly all of them 6.1 regressions: admin changelist search crashes, ModelAdmin.list_display traversing multiple relations, __in returning empty querysets, and DecimalField without precision on SQLite.
The last planned release candidate, carrying 144 bugfixes from 76 contributors since rc1, ahead of the October 1 final.
Django Software Foundation
Now accepted, DEP 19 supersedes DEP 10 and DEP 12 as Django's single technical governance document, and trades hard eligibility rules for eight qualitative traits that Steering Council candidates should show three or more of. The five-member council keeps binding authority over technical decisions, with elections triggered by the final feature release of a major release series, a drop below three elected members, or a council vote.
The django-money maintainer and Django Day Copenhagen organizer on closing the distance between developers and the people who use what they build.
Djangonaut Space News
Applications for the eight-week mentorship program close September 6 Anywhere on Earth, with the session starting October 12.
Python Software Foundation
Eligible members can approve up to 17 candidates for four open seats, and ballots cannot be changed once cast, so read the nominee statements before voting closes September 15 at 2:00 pm UTC.
The first Packaging Council election is open to members who affirmed their intent to vote, and closes at the same September 15 deadline.
PyPI now counts only .whl, .tar.gz, and .zip requests, so BigQuery data breaks permanently at 2026-08-24: about 39% of urllib3's earlier counts turned out to be metadata and other non-distribution files.
Wagtail CMS News
Meagen Voss shares photos from Chicago rather than a talk recap, including her first main-stage talk on Wagtail's approach to AI.
Updates to Django
Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Raffaella from Djangonaut Space! 🚀
Last week we had 5 pull requests merged into Django by 5 different contributors - including 2 first-time contributors! Congratulations to Iaroslav and Tyler Russin for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!
News in Django 6.1:
- As default model ordering is now applied to combined querysets,
union(),difference(), andintersection()raiseDatabaseErrorwhen a field inOptions.orderingisn’t selected byvalues()orvalues_list(). Callorder_by()without arguments before combining to clear the default ordering.
- Fixed a bug where
DecimalFieldwithoutmax_digitsanddecimal_placescaused a crash when retrieving values on SQLite (#37275).
- Fixed a regression that caused a crash when iterating a
QuerySetof a model overridingModel.from_db()without the newfetch_modekeyword argument. Such overrides now work again, but are deprecated and should be updated to acceptfetch_mode(#37259).
Playwright is replacing Selenium for integration tests 🎉
Django Fellow Reports
I had a rejuvenating week attending, presenting at, and sprinting during DjangoCon US. I’m still relatively new to this community, so I’m still allowed to be impressed with everyone’s gracious and welcoming attitudes. A smattering of things falling under the usual categories this week.
Was in Chicago (🌬️ 🏙️ 🌭 🇺🇸) for DjangoCon US 🎉. It was a fantastic conference and a lovely city. Delivered a keynote which went “good enough” and my baby boy managed with the jetlag reasonably well 😀. Came away from the conference with a few ideas and energy from engaging with our community
A week of holidays 🏖️ 👡 🍦 followed by a week of DjangoCon US! 🚆 ☀️ 👥 🎤
Sponsored
Until September 10, receive 30% off all new or renewal licenses, with 100% of the proceeds going directly to the Django Software Foundation.
Articles
Divio started building on Django 6.1 at the first alpha, months before the August release. Here's why they picked the pre-release and what they found while testing it every day.
Following Rikki Endsley's "Willie Nelson developer," Trey Hunner makes the case for Dolly Parton as the model: know your rights (she refused to hand over publishing on "I Will Always Love You" when Elvis's team demanded half), exit with grace (she paid Porter Wagoner $1 million to leave his show and kept the friendship), and write the next one. She recorded close to 1,000 songs and wrote thousands more, which is a better target than being a rockstar.
After a decade of development, version 1.0.0 of django-select-multiple-field is here, bringing full support for modern Python and Django versions to store multiple choices in a single database column without extra join tables.
The CMS doesn't need to own your data to make it editable.
Seven worked cases showing where stateless htmx requests and LiveView's persistent WebSocket diverge, with the conclusion that they are complementary rather than interchangeable.
Override create_sql() and remove_sql() on a models.Index subclass and arbitrary table-level SQL rides along in Meta.indexes, managed by migrations for free.
A proposed manage.py deploy namespace of lower-level commands that start by printing their expected inputs and outputs, leaving the actual automation to packages and plugins.
The annotated script of Josh Thomas's DjangoCon US talk on how AI coding agents changed the way he writes Django, written to land for skeptics and true believers alike.
JIT is off by default, LZ4 replaces pglz for TOAST, and async I/O means the old "an index always beats a parallel sequential scan" assumption is worth re-testing.
The full Knuth quote licenses optimizing the critical 3%, and dropping "small" from "small efficiencies" turned it into a blanket excuse to skip the design work that is cheapest to do up front.
DjangoCon US Recaps
Yes, a standalone category since so many posts on it this week!
Jonathan Peacher's notes on attending the conference this year in Chicago, highlighting various talks and projects.
Jason Judkins transcribed the talks so he could go back over them, and this recap is the trailer for a longer per-talk series. He picks out a theme running through Paolo Melchiorre's UUID history, Drishti Jain's GeoDjango talk, and Abigail Gbadago's polyglot persistence talk: push the work down a layer, because the database usually knows how to do it better than you do. AI turned up in nearly every talk, with almost nobody uncritical about it.
Tim Schilling's fifth DjangoCon, spent chairing sprints with Kudzayi Bamhare, working on Django Simple Deploy with Colin Copeland, and meeting Djangonaut Space members in person for the first time.
Paolo Melchiorre on giving "The Django UUID Story," staffing the DSF booth, and fielding questions at the DSF members open space.
Dwayne McDaniel's recap runs talk by talk: Karen Tracey on Django 6's background tasks, CSP support, and template partials, Natalia Bidart on keeping templates the source of truth with HTMX, and Elizabeth Christensen on UUIDv7, graph queries, and OAuth 2.0 in PostgreSQL 18 and 19. His through line is that frameworks, databases, and browsers keep absorbing work that used to need extra layers, with Kasey Kelly's 16,000-line AI-generated frontend file as the cautionary case.
Events
September 23, 2026 in Pescara, Italy 🇮🇹.
October 2, 2026 in Copenhagen 🇩🇰.
Django Job Board
Two new listings this week, plus the DSF still looking for its first Executive Director.
Machine Learning Engineer (Hybrid) at Provision 🆕
Django Developer at The Cruise Brothers 🆕
Full Stack Software Engineer (Hybrid) at Provision
Executive Director at Django Software Foundation
AI-Assisted Software Engineer, Web Applications at Logical Media Group
Projects
Django CMS project with comprehensive features for running a partnered social dance school.
An experimental Rust-backed multipart parser that plugs into Django's parser extension point, so upload handlers, request limits, request.POST, and request.FILES all keep working as they do now. Requires CPython 3.12 or later and Django 6.1, with prebuilt wheels for Linux, macOS, and Windows.