Transcript: DjangoCon Europe 2025 Recap

I'm Will Vincent, joined by Carlton Gibson.

Hey Carlton.

How are you?

Good.

I love it.

Yep.

We are both back from DjangoCon Europe in Dublin.

So we're recording this to share our thoughts, share our emotions while it's still in our head.

Because I've actually I come I have like a sprint of things I want to do this week because I always come out of conferences with lots of ideas and people to contact.

But if I don't grab the bull by the horns right away, then the rest of the waves of work hit me.

So I'm still, you know, following up with people, writing things down.

And then this hopefully is a good chance to save for posterity some of the takeaways from a really good week, almost week in Dublin.

Yeah, no, it's amazing.

It was really it was a whole it was a whole thing.

But all good anyway.

You were acclimatized.

It was a little tiring, of course, but we toured around mainly the southwest coast of the country.

So we saw the cliffs of Moore, we were in Killarney, um, went to the Aaron Islands, uh, yeah, we did all the things and then dropped them off at the airport hotel, and in the midst of a thunderstorm, as often happens, picked you up from the uh terminal and we we took a cab down to the venue.

That was good.

It was very nice to come out because I I was quite it was quite late now.

It's like, how am I gonna get there?

How am I gonna get there?

And then Wheels there waiting to escort me to the right direction.

So if if you're in charge, then you're in charge and I'll just ride behind.

If I need to be in charge, I can be, but I'd much rather someone else did it.

Um so then the flip side was so it was a it was a bit late and tiring getting in.

Um I stayed at a hotel where the conference was happening, and you you and um Marish were a little bit ways away.

But that first day started off, and uh I actually that this is a point I want to make.

So we talk about how um Kojo has this idea of self-care sprints, and I needed one that first night.

So even though there's a party the first night, I just had dinner by myself, walked down to the water, had you know, had the first chance to be alone for over a week, and I so needed it.

So like even multiple people the next day were like, Oh, you seem a little more yourself.

I just, you know.

Um What's Kojo's line?

And and I think also this is not my first DjangoCon Europe even.

It's my second, or certainly not my first DjangoCon US, and yeah, it is a sprint.

Like I I think that's a point I've made before, but it's is worth repeating that the first time I went to a conference, uh, I met you, but I was speaking and I sat through talks all day long.

And that's great.

Like you should go to the talks, you should go to most of the talks.

I went to most of the talks, but it's also about the hallway track.

It's also about getting outside the venue from every now and then.

Um, and we were gonna mention a couple of the more interesting um interactions we had was, you know, like the second day you just gave in your talk, and we went to have a drink to celebrate, and then you know, met people who are also doing the same, and then saw them at the speaker's dinner later.

So there's a there's a mix of the technical and the talks, and then also just socializing with people who are doing things and contributing to Django.

If you watch the talk live, you're in you're involved, you see the speaker, you interact with the speaker, there's the question, the Q<unk>A's afterwards.

It it it there is it they are much more vibrant, but you can watch the speak the talks on YouTube later on.

So uh so with that second afternoon, I'd give him my talk, I was I was exhausted, I was like, no, okay, it was a lot of work to write.

Um, stupid me, I gave a community talk.

I was, you know, I was thinking they're a million times harder than the technical talk.

So I must have been

It must have taken me literally a week, an entire week to write.

Like, you know, if you add up all the hours.

And so the talk's gone over, it's gone over quite well.

It's like then release.

I just need some deep to decompress after that.

So I can't, you know, I sat through Karen's talk afterwards, which was very good actually on debugging and production.

Um Karen Tracy was always just knocks it out of the park.

Um I couldn't carry on that afternoon.

I need I need to do, I need to just chat to people, I need to relax, I need to just you know be in a slightly different space.

So the hallway check is perfect, then you have serendipitous conversations.

And part of the reason to turn up is the conversations, right?

It's it's the meeting the people, whether the old people that you've met before or the new people that you you meet that first time, it's like that deeper root um that deepening that reaction.

Sometimes you offer you've seen work with them online, right?

Jacob Wells, who's um the could big contributor now in Django, he's on the triage and review team, I think, but he's a regular contributor.

I've never met him.

So anyway, I guess the hallway track.

And I think also the it's really the second or third time you're at a conference when it hits its peak of, you know, because the first time you you meet people for the first time, you you you have the getting to know them talks, which is great.

But you know, once you know them, you're already following them, following them online.

The next year, when you see them, you can just jump right into like, oh, like Carlton, I saw you've been working on paths and like let's talk about it, right?

Or or whatever it is, right?

There's there's less of the getting to know people stuff.

But there's still also, I think especially at DjangoCon Europe, there's a lot of people who it's their first Django Con.

You know, like there was a um a woman I met who's using Django and Python and doing stuff with like mirrors for the European Space Agency and like all this, you know, interesting stuff, you know, doing data science and web, like there's such an interesting mix of the you know, the regulars, new people.

Um yeah, it's great.

There's you know, if you can possibly attend, I highly recommend it.

And even as there's a little bit of you know, jet lag and and definitely cost to be fair, um, something good always comes out of it.

This podcast came out of it, you know.

You because you have to travel there.

So that's a day, you know, or at the at the least, you know, it's a full day that it's gonna take you to get there.

And then it's probably quite a late evening because you'll go to the social and you'll stay up a bit later than you had, and it's an early start, and then well, okay, day one, fine, day two, day three, and then by the time you reach the sprints, you're like, okay, I'm really ringing it right now.

Well, and that's the thing.

But you know, you weren't able to really you just attended the morning.

Um I wasn't really able to.

So stay for the first day.

And but

That's I'm sorry, you you stayed longer.

But that you know, if you could stay to to the end, then you do get the kind of extra couple of evenings which are much quieter, much you know, and you get to have much deeper conversations.

And then at the sprints, that's when you'll chat, you know, there'll be really contributors, really established contributors there.

And you get to have really in-depth conversations about really specific things, and it'll be like, you know, we've had Florian on the show, so I asked Florin, Florian, can you review this PR?

You know, is this gonna be the one, you know, and he he can then give his opinion and that, and it just helps to set the, you know, I've just picked Florin out of the air because I had that one particular, but you know, lots of contributors.

And it just helps to set the agenda for going forward.

You know, we've got a short list of possibles, and then by having those more, those deeper conversations, you can really narrow it down and and get more focus.

Uh and so I never get anything done at the sprint, so I always turn up, I've got these grand ideas.

Oh, I'm gonna look at these PRs.

I managed to get my bus bus ticket booked.

That's about all I but I but I had the conversations.

I mean, I have so many new you know so I gave a talk on um Django for data science that's a good thing.

Not just a

Keynote.

Keynote, yes, thank you.

Um yeah, so I learned a lot doing that talk, and then people came up to me, like, because I want to do the next version already.

Um so that spurred so many interesting conversations, which, you know, in the moment I can't do anything with, but I have all these long lists of like, oh, you know, packages and ways people are doing things.

Um as well as, you know, so again, JetBrain sponsored me to go, which I'm very grateful for.

We launched, we JetBrains launched while I was on vacation the week before this huge new AI push for us.

So an integrated AI chat assistant and uh our own agent Juni.

And it was great that I was on vacation when all that happened.

So like I actually got a little bit of a break, you know, and it's not just me doing everything as it has been the last few years.

It's nice to be part of a team.

But it's also I got to have so many conversations with people just about you know about PyCharm.

I mean unsurprising there's a lot of users around PyCharm just being like, you know, tell me what you tell me what you think or or whatever they're using, right?

Or like, oh like why do you like this IDE text editor?

You know, and that's stuff that I then can take, you know, so I then talk to our product teams and share.

And I think you know one of the interesting things is most people are so we working on the product, we see and share, you know, when someone says something horrific on Reddit or on pick a social, you know, and it it it can internally working on a product it can feel like people hate it.

But the reality is like the only people who take the time to post things on socials generally are at one extreme or another and they're usually on the negative stream.

And so the fact that I was able to have and share with our product team quite a number of people came up to me just uninvited and said yeah like I'm really I'm really liking PyCharm or like I've been doing the early access program for the agent and it's really working well for me.

And then I was like ooh tell me more because you know I've I've been pushing the limits and I'm trying to understand you know how I can showcase what it can and can't do.

You know that that's the real world right is that people you know somewhere in between but people are a lot more positive than again what we see.

So it's very helpful that I can bring that back to our internal group.

And so when we here have these blog posts of criticizing oh Django's it these are early adopters who are desperate to push forward and then it we're not taking into account when we when you know those yeah those are legitimate criticisms.

Yeah there's things that we need to do yeah there are challenges we face but the reality is that Django's doing a great job for the 99.9% who never boast and and never say oh no I really need you know if if we don't integrate with React within the next cycle Django's dead no it's not

around how to improve it.

But then you sort of have to ignore the tone because somebody who's really worked you know they care about it right yeah so that's the kind of person who if you can solve it for them they'll be all the more you know they want you to solve it.

That's why they're doing it right so like you know you can feel a little bit like when you have a bunch of issues or you put a lot into it.

But it it I don't know if it comes from a good place but it's a it's a positive thing.

You just have to separate the emotion that you feel as a human being in the moment from no this is there's something there to investigate and decide how it fits with the priorities internally.

I think they're the only one who had a table there but got the chance to talk with the the team there um their developer advocate she gave a talk yeah um but also she mentioned her talk this was this is kind of nice to see like I was messaging you during it that uh the Django developer survey which is one of the things I worked on on the board had questions around databases and I think she cited that 8% of people said that they used Mongo which seems quite high but you know so out of however many thousands of responses if you extrapol

ate that out to the larger millions of users, Mongo internally was able to help use that to justify this new push for this official backend and we had an interview with Jib about it but you know these small things it's it's gratifying right to see small things and effort just to support Django or whatever it is, you know, years later you know they don't lead themselves but they help help these things come about right so there's it's always something positive there

And you know and and then sometimes you know I I I had a thought I would love to do one of these you know soft talks are hard and hard talks are soft so like these non-technical talks to your point like it it's much easier to give a technical talk but I love the soft talks I especially like your ones I would love to do something around not avoiding the Django meat grinder but the like the the valleys and and mountaintops of it right where you know sometimes you're super involved and then you're less involved but you don't have to go away.

If you need to you can right and like you know both of us but especially you you've done that where you had a year post fellow and now you're on the steering council and you know that just to understand that there's a life cycle to it and it's not just you like it's normal like it's normal like this week right I'm just like it's normal for me to feel tired and jet lagged and it's not that I feel that way about whatever it is I'm doing this week.

It's just like no I just had an intense two, three weeks and that's not really how I feel.

I even now so with the steering council we've had a busy beginning um we're coming to the point where we our initial goals are we're kind of those plans are filling out and okay so then it will be it should be that as a steering council we can step back slightly and just help steer the technical direction of of Django rather than having to work on the contributing process and the ecosystem page and those things should fall into place over the next you know little while and then it

should be a bit more time for us to just back away.

Because the steering council doesn't need to be in there every week working really hard because that's not sustainable over you know the two and a half year cycle.

And you have you have been with this new you know the new group and

And so part of me is very much now looking forward to just stepping back hiding back in my cave just a teeny bit.

I'm not going in I'm still on the steering house I still got work to do but I'm gonna step back into my cave just a teeny bit and work on async over the summer you know I just

It might take them ages to work into the work project right it's not gonna you can't just rewrite your project in

I mean that was the thing there was you know the talks run them run the gambit of of things.

I really liked I really like the talks of we're using Django to solve this problem at work and there were there were quite a there were a couple of those you know Tim Tim Bell gave one at Kraken about um database migrations um

from integer to big

yeah yeah yeah and then um there were three downita gave a talk on gave a talk and and

I'd never heard him speak.

Like I've been reading his stuff for forever I remember being like oh like who's this like you know legend coming out of the the woodwork and you know and then see his talk and then we saw we saw him at the social and you get to get a sense of you know the person and yeah it's it's great.

It fills in the the the whole picture of people in the community I guess.

no but it was a good thing there wasn't anything that night and so they organized a just Django social it's just like and all it really is is we're gonna be here come here and but it's an opportunity to say especially in a city the size of Dublin where the it's it's not likely that you would b

But in the centre of Dublin you're not going to meet conference attendees by accident.

So to just say we're gonna be in a place it gives people a place to head to and then I had some really great conversations again it was a little bit noisy for my old ears.

Because I think you got to go to a couple more than me because I I was speaking at the last day so it's sort of I had to skip a couple to work on my slides.

ched because obviously it's really really really complex and she explained it really really well and I was going through and it got to that point where the database is fetching pages of data from the disk and I was just starting to phase out I was a bit like no I'm getting lost and then and then that was the most that was like the high watermark for complexity and I was like oh phew phew he's coming so but it was just perfectly pitched.

It was really good talk so I love that one.

What else Agnes Hasser gave a talk on multifactor auth which I thought was really well done um you know I I much more into um understand the passkey signing algorithm now because she used different sunglasses and um put them on and off and I was like okay these are the different roles in the algorithm.

Graham Knapp did one on feature flags and I thought and that there were like just loads.

These were the ones that kind of stood out to me.

But then again every day the lightning talks were just there was some absolute genius

I mean and Danielle gave an amazing like if you're gonna be like what's a you know hall of fame lightning talk um yeah and lightning yeah someone I I forget which I'm sorry which person did it but they had a point about you know why give a lightning talk is it maybe it was the one where they used AI but they were saying you know it's short enough you don't you don't have to take questions but also like you have to get to the point right away.

Yeah.

Which is sort of a developer mindset sort of thing.

Yeah.

Uh let me think highlights I I'll just call out a couple um so Jacob Brief had uh the end-to-end testing with PyTest and playwright yes that was really he did a really good job with it and also I have really not used playwright much myself so I'm gonna rewatch that um and he I thought he made a lot of good points too about you know Py test versus Django tests and um I think I'm like you I still am fine using Django tests but I understand that

if I was working on a larger code base like there's a ton of reasons why PyTest is I think the dominant pattern.

So he gave some context on that and I thought that was really interesting.

And then of course um Adam Johnson had his data oriented Django Dre.

That's German for three sorry I say that wrong.

But yeah so many I mean so many good ones in oh and then there was also there was um I guess the first day there was the Django Software Foundation had a board QA yes which was very good.

So there was so they both the the main hall for talks but there's also a separate one for workshops and so this was in a workshop and um yeah I'm really excited what the board's doing and that there's new people and you know executive director maybe kind of sorta they're doing things around Django 20th the the Django blog is more and more people are writing like it just seems like there's a lot of good energy in that direction and there were three board members or three or four there

was Tebow there was four right so Tebow Tom and Tom Carrick and Sarah and Sarah A were there and then Paolo I think wasn't speaking but he was in the room so yeah four of the seven um in one room so

Ooh and I did want to call out um Mia's uh keynote then second day so the most bizarre software bugs in history this was a great talk and it was such a like spectrum of what a keynote could be because it was very much I would say like a TEDx like I don't think there was any code actually shown but it was all about code and about you know software bugs over history and communication and just set a really good engaging you know beautiful slides template for what a keynote could

be and then and then there was mine which is sort of in between where it was like a mix of technical I did talk through some slides but then also trying to do context and you had several people but you especially had some really good uh ideas around ways I can show more of the data science going forward which I think would be really helpful to people to understand like what does it mean to train a model?

Because there's there's all these there's there's a number of off the shelf ways to do it that are not that hard but give a sense of the patterns and I talked a little bit about how you know why would you choose a di one data set over another you know because like so we used Iris which there's no fitting problems but Titanic has like just enough fitting problems.

So I could already see a second talk or videos on all this.

So like that's what we use that's a default but you know you could do 90 10 or 7030 depending on how you know loose or strict you want to be and there's pros and cons there.

Like I do think there's something helpful to being a little hand wavy but just super context y, right?

Because the details are fun and we all get lost in them but like what are the foundational things of of training a model or even making the point that machine what is machine learning versus data science.

Machine learning is when you give it the inputs, you give it the answer and the psychic learn the computer figures out its own logic for it.

You know that's what makes it machine learning.

You could also just decipher things and do fine patterns yourself.

So that was that was part of the talk too is that data science is just a umbrella term for a whole bunch of disciplines.

I mean I'm using one every day and yet you know vibe coding I I I can't help but be offended by the term um and I think it was helpful you know talking to other professional developers like there's clearly something there but only somebody who's deeply ignorant would say it's going to replace programmers in the same way that somebody who says AI is going to replace doctors has never sat in a doctor's office and tried to have a patient explain what the problem is because guess what?

They often can't even come close to explaining what the problem is and it's like if you've ever sat in a meeting like even if you said oh you have this perfect AI that can write the perfect Django code you can't get people to agree on what they want even if they could do the code.

You know like that's that's what the real world is like so it's so there's something there and it's really interesting and there's um it's changing but yeah just a side rant I'm vibe coding but it just pushes the debugging problem later on which is more work for Django consultancies I guess but

Anyway, I I have nothing really to add here.

We've said this, we've said this loads of times, and they they're clearly useful, but I don't yet feel for my job security.

No.

No.

This doesn't this wasn't meant to be a super long episode any other

And so the bus became part of the mini social event as well.

It's everyone up the back on the top.

So it's double deckers up the top, on the back, like it's cool.

I wish uh I mean, you know, part of it is they don't have a subway system in Dublin or indeed, I guess, all of Ireland.

But the buses are are great, they're very regular.

I mean, yeah, the bus to the airport.

I was telling my wife, oh my god, if there was like a direct bus to get to the airport from places within Boston, you know, as it is now, I can take public transport to get to the bus, but it's like two different subway lines plus a dedicated bus.

Like it takes forever.

Yes.

So that perspective, you know, coupled with my day job, um, I definitely appreciate that.

But you know, I I would say if anyone's curious, I sort of expected to get more political questions from people about like, hey, what's going on with your country?

And I got almost none.

You know, if I wanted to talk about it, I could, but you know, people I think maybe people in Europe or other countries are more familiar with this idea of not everyone identifies exactly with whatever your government in power is doing.

So um, yeah, that was that was not really an issue at all.

Just in case anyone's curious.

You don't want to put a total downer on things all the time, right?

Yeah.

Um, all right, so we are we'll link to some posts on this um in the Django newsletter.

Definitely will feature all the talks when they come out.

Um, I would the last thing I want to say is I got a chance to talk to the organizers um and just thank them because I think it's so much work to do these conferences.

I I every time I go to another one, I appreciate I start to appreciate even more how much work it is for the lead organizers, but people just you know volunteering a check-in, all the rest.

It's also a great way to meet people to to volunteer, but um I do recommend people take a moment to thank the organizers for all the hard work.

They've done um they were organizing Porto before the pandemic pandemic came, so that didn't happen.

They did two years online, they did Porto, um, they've done Vigo.

Um they didn't do Edinburgh, they did Vigo, they've done now done Dublin.

They're now stepping, so they're you know, just absolutely, you know, rocks that the conference has leant on over that really difficult period.

Um they're stepping back slightly.

They you know, they're still doing PyCon Portugal, so you know if you fancy um, you know, a bit of Python in Portugal, sunny Portugal, then do do look look up for that.

Um, but they there's you know, I was talking to David Vass, who's one of the team, and he was very much low.

We're still uh available to be around and to help people who come, you know, to give our expertise and our experience to the people who come um up next.

What they had what they have around DjangoCon US and DEF now is a lot of institutional knowledge, and that that that isn't institutionalized in the European, you know, there are people who've done it and there are people who know, but until it's sort of somehow institutionalized, until it's made more slightly more formal, the danger is that it can drop through the gaps and then we you know we have a continuity problem.

So hopefully that can be yeah, you know, but again, there were there are a couple of pitches in this year.

There's um I spoke to the conference at the conference from people from the multiple cities who are keen to you know try and put forward a proposal.

So, you know, it seems like a really good and healthy time.

I think, you know, again with the DSF, you were talking about the DSF meetings, meetings and talks around the DSF, they were really positive.

And you think, yeah, I think we finally finally come out of the the lull that we had after the pandemic.

Um but and it I think it really was a pandemic.

And it's just taken a few years to remain.

So anyway.

Good.

We've been

This was just supposed to be a quick recap.

Let's let them go, get coffee or whatever it is, they're missing.

Thank you for listening.

We'll we have a couple more this spring.

Then we're taking the summer off per usual, and we'll be back in the fall with more episodes.

So jangochhat.com, and we'll see everyone next time.

Bye bye.