DjangoConEU 2025

Dublin's reputation precedes it: live music, a welcoming people and spirited environment. A city of ornate Georgian architecture bisected by canals. At the end of April 2025 three hundred members of the global Django community shut ourselves away from all this in a hotel in Dublin's suburbs and kicked off that year's DjangoCon EU! This is a synopsis of my time there.

Day 0

The soundtrack to today's breakfast was, as on many days, an episode of the Django Chat podcast. The airport setting, however, was less routine - I was on my way to DjangoCon Europe!

I am delighted to be representing the University of Cambridge's DevOps division at this year's conference, and look forward to talks reinforcing Django fundamentals or exploring the future of the framework and its community. A framework that is at the core of the work carried out by DevOps @ Cambridge.

The flight was spent picking up tips from Adam Johnson's 'Speed Up Your Django Tests' (browse his catalogue of invaluable e-books at https://adamchainz.gumroad.com) and poring over the conference schedule. I am excited to meet people I otherwise only know through the Internet. Carlton Gibson & Will Vincent, hosts of the aforementioned Django Chat (https://djangochat.com) have talks, as does Sarah Boyce, the latest Django Fellow.

Stay tuned for digests from the next few days of talks - from Data-Oriented Design, workshops on measuring quality in Software Engineering, or a Q&A with Django's board.

Day 1

A brilliant Day 1 of DjangoCon Europe! The day included:

• Sarah Boyce's keynote on contributing to Django, and how attention is a vital resource in open-source projects.
• Jacob Rief's top tips on using Playwright as a less-flaky alternative to Selenium.
• Tim Bell's masterclass on migrating data fields at scale at Kraken.
• Adam Johnson's talk on Data-Oriented Django and how to speed up database queries.
• Daniele Procida (creator of Diátaxis) on how to define, measure and elevate quality at scale.

And a shout-out to the MercadonaIT delegation who took the time to chat about the tech landscape in Spain, with an emphasis on Django & Python.

As lovely as it was to learn so much and meet new people on the hallway track, the day's best moment came courtesy of an old colleague. It was a pleasant surprise to bump into Harinder Toor, a talented Python engineer who got their start as I did as a graduate dev at Nomensa.

It seems unlikely that Day 2 can surpass this, but the roster of speakers is promising indeed!

📸: with Harinder; Daniele & a quality dashboard like those used at Canonical; code added to Django over time, from Sarah's talk.

Day 2

My Day 2 of DjangoCon Europe had two distinct yet complementary flavours: a focus on community & technical deep-dives.

The collaboration enabled by open-source transcends geographical & cultural barriers, yet it is in-person in Dublin that I see the people behind Django at their best.

At the annual meeting of members of the Django Software Foundation it was enlightening to hear concerns & suggestions regarding the framework's trajectory.

• Emma Dellescolle's introduction to the Steering Council for the 6.x release cycle pulled back the curtain on the project's governance and keeping decision-making nimble.
• Carlton Gibson had the best take on 'consensus' I've heard - one of building trust. Framing Django as "a community first, a web framework second" cemented why it is one of the best tools to build with.

The technical deep-dives I attended were excellent, and left me eager to share insights with colleagues:

• Haki Benita's lively tour of best practices for foreign keys & indexes, with plenty of actionable advice for writing robust migrations.
• Jacob Walls' talk on dynamic models threatened to go completely over my head, but he made the subject accessible and pragmatic.
• Tom Carrick brought securing the Django Admin into the 21st century with his demo of adding passkeys to an app, sharing many lessons from doing so.

📸 (clockwise): with Adam J.; Haki's masterclass; learning about using Django for genomics from Miguel L.; how the Django fairytale starts, from Carlton's talk

Day 3 & sprints

The conference brings to mind a particle accelerator: countless disciplines (accessibility, DevX, core team, security, documentation, third-party packages...) whizzing past each other, their collisions resulting in bursts of energetic conversation & collaboration!

Day 3 talks included:

• Will Vincent from JetBrains showed us how to deploy machine learning models using everyone's favourite web framework.
• Karen Jex from Crunchy Data shone a light on the dark recesses of database queries otherwise abstracted away by the ORM.
• Graham Knapp – co-maintainer of django-waffle – explained how feature flags accelerate getting changes to users.
• Thomas De Bonnet showed how to improve performance and UX via the judicious application of HTMX. An opportune talk given the buzz around HTMX in the Django community both online and in-person!
• Agnès Haasser spoke on the importance of adding Multi-Factor Authentication, and how this can be done with relative ease. (and taught us a couple new words in French!)

Despite the name, attendees weren't limited to Europe. It was wonderful to also meet delegates from Latin America, the United States, the Middle East, Africa, India, and Australia.

While I didn’t get as stuck in contributing to Django during the 'sprints' as I'd hoped, the conversations and hands-on work with nox & matrix strategies for test automation will yield dividends in other open source work I hope to share in coming weeks.

With thanks to everyone who welcomed me to the community, to the organisers for ensuring it all ran smoothly (heroes!), and to my employer for making attending possible.

W. A. Hofstetter, cover of 'Country Gentleman' (9th March 1912 issue), out of copyright.