Start Coding Now

DjangoCon US 2024 - Short Summary

I apologize in advance for (1) the brevity, and (2) that not every talk is listed here. I didn't get a chance to watch them all yet. I do not mean any disrespect to any speaker who spoke, but is not listed here.

Hopefully this can serve as a taste of the conference. I had a great time at DjangoCon US 2024, and I hope to see you next year!

Day 1

Learning, Teaching

Sheena O'Connell - Power to the People who Teach the People (Sheena's slides)

  • "Make It Stick" by Peter C. Brown, Henry I. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel.
  • Mastery-based Learning
  • Self-efficacy

SPA vs Progressive Enhancement

Chris May - Choosing Wisely: SPA vs. HTMX for Your Next Web Project

Error Culture

Ryan Cheley - Error Culture

  • Reactive, firefighting Culture
  • Provide useful and relevant context along with your alerts: actionable, important items sent to the correct people.

Lightning Talks

SQL Queries

Chris Adams - A Related Matter: Optimizing your webapp by using django-debug-toolbar, select_related(), and prefetch_related()

  • django-debug-toolbar
  • select_related() for foreign keys
  • prefetch_related() for many-to-many relationships and reverse foreign keys
  • Make sure to inspect the 95th and 99th percentile queries on sites with high traffic because highly active users may be encountering problems that your other users don't feel.

Passkeys

Ryan Hiebert - Passkeys: Your password-free future

Running Django in Production

Vince Salvino - One Thousand and One Django Sites

  • Error detection might auto-trigger a self-healing patch or rollback
  • MaxMind for fraud detection
  • codered.cloud for deploying Django and Wagtail apps

Day 2

Self-Improvement

Mario Munoz - How To Be A Developer and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

  • The way to be a better developer is to be a better human.

htmx + Alpine.js

Karen Tracey - Django + Alpine.js + htmx Ups & Downs

Maps

Paolo Melchiorre - Maps with Django

  • SQLite uses SpatiaLite
  • PostgreSQL uses PostGIS
  • Django uses GeoDjango

Lightning Talks

End-to-End Testing

Avindra Fernando - Lessons from E2E Testing Web Applications

Plugins

Simon Willison - How to design and implement extensible software with plugins

  • The beauty of plugins is that they allow you to extend the functionality of an app without changing the app itself
  • pluggy and djp

Migrations

Tim Bell - Deploying Django migrations at Kraken scale (Tim's slides)

  • Locks
  • Break up migrations into smaller chunks
  • "Async Migrations" from Yakko Majuri at Posthog

Large Scale Project Considerations

Benjamin "Zags" Zagorsky - Fighting Homelessness with Django (Zags' slides)

  • Used Vue with one Vue app per Django template that needed it
  • Sticky sessions on load balancer

Day 3

Django Fellows

Natalia Bidart - The Fellowship of the Pony

  • Who is a Django Fellow and what do they do?

Release Notes

Sarah Boyce - Hidden gems of Django 5.x

  • Not all changes are listed in the release notes

Django History

Frank Wiles - A Brief History of Django

  • How Django came to be (starting out known as "The CMS")

Lightning Talks

WebRTC

Ken Whitesell - WebRTC with Django, Channels, HTMX, and coturn

PostgreSQL

Elizabeth Christensen - A Guided Tour Through Postgres Internals

  • Tons of tips on how to use PostgreSQL and the psql commmand

Django User Model

Will Vincent - Django User Model: Past, Present, and Future

  • Did you know Django has a wiki?
  • Django's current auth provides friction for new users trying to learn Django
  • Suggesting a profile model, ship with a login template, add Profile model to docs
  • Simon Willison also suggested maybe a profile JSONField on the User model

Bootstrapping

Carlton Gibson - API Maybe: Bootstrapping a Web Application circa 2024

  • Django is the perfect framework when money is tight

Get Notified of New Posts

Sign up for the newsletter and I'll send you an email when there's a new post.