We love going to DjangoCon.
This year was our second time. 12 people strong, we went to Copenhagen for a week.
Our overall feeling for DjangoCon 2019 – great conference, hosted in an interesting venue in a great city.
What we usually look for in a conference, is a nice balance of talks that will inspire us to be better as developers, and as human beings. Luckily, this years’ DjangoCon covered our needs!
Here are the talks that we found specifically interesting, and want to share with everyone:
Feeding the Pony: Contributing back to Django & How to make that work for you
Carl did a great job, explaining why it’s important to contribute back to Django & how to actually start doing it.
We felt the need to do more for open source & thanks to this talk, we’ll increase our efforts.
Frontend Development for Backend Developers
Frontend development can be dodgy. This talk did a great job of explaining the tooling & terminology around modern frontend development. So you won’t feel lost there.
Pushing the ORM to its limits
For me, this was one of the best Django-related talks for the entire conference.
What’s really great are the practical examples & general patterns that were shown in the talk – things that we have to deal with in our everyday work with Django & the ORM.
This talk requires a deep focus to follow, but it’s worth it. We already started applying some of the patterns mentioned there.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Persisting WebSocket connections with SharedWorkers
Again, a very practical talk.
In one of our projects, we have a lot of web socket communication & this talk came just at the right moment!
Highly recommended to watch in order to gain more context about web sockets & the current state of the web around them.
Apathy and Arsenic: a Victorian Era lesson on fighting the surveillance state
A must-watch. Superb storytelling that ended with a standing applause.
Maps with GeoDjango, PostGIS and Leaflet
Maps, geo locations, GIS & visualization of geo data are a very weird beast, at least for me.
This talk shows all of them, in a very structured way, with nice examples & references.
Building a custom model field from the ground up
If your Django project deals with money, there’s a big chance that you are using the django-money package.
In this talk, the creator of django-money shares details on what goes into building a custom model field in Django.
Maintaining a Django codebase after 10k commits
At HackSoft, the Django projects we work on are quite big. We have projects with 20k commits, being developed by teams of 5-6 people.
Maintaining such projects led us to our Django Styleguide and several talks on scalable Django.
This talk builds on some of our concepts, and also adds a lot more. It was a pleasure watching this talk & this is the talk that I’ll personally rewatch every few months.
There are tons of references, materials & things to think about. A must-watch.
Sketching out a Django redesign
Now, the closing talk was a killer. Tom blew us away. He did a great job describing how a future version of Django might look like. Async all the way down.
It was the best way to close the conference. I left motivated & thinking about the future. And was thinking to myself – picking Python & Django, 6 years ago, was a great idea.
There’s more!
And that’s only few of the talks! Be sure to check out the playlist where all talks are uploaded.
Also, check out the official Flickr album, to get a sense of the atmosphere at the conference.
We were happy to be part of DjangoCon 2019. See you in 2020!
