DjangoCon US 2025 Recap

DjangoCon US just wrapped up in Chicago last week, three days full of talks followed by two days of sprints on Django itself. Over 300 members of the Django community and sponsors attended at the Voco Hotel downtown.

Photo by Bartek Pawlik (CC BY-NC-SA)

It’s important to note that DjangoCon events are 100% run by volunteers, here in the U.S., in Europe, and now in Africa. It is a testament to the strength of the Django community that organizers are willing each year to put in the immense amount of work required for this, alongside the Django Events Foundation North America (DEFNA) that provides additional support.

Day 0: Sunday Travel from Boston to Chicago

I flew out Sunday night since it’s roughly a three-hour flight and only one time zone difference from my home airport of Boston. Given the many international trips I’ve taken this year, this trip was blissfully short and easy.

If you’re unfamiliar with Chicago, it’s the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), yet largely overlooked in coastal-city led cultural conversations. It’s always been a gateway city: geographically situated between the east and western halves of the country, a hub for immigrants, and the center of grains and meats from the heartlands that were then shipped down the Mississippi River or across the Great Lakes.

You can see its unusual geography here on this airplane map from my flight:

The city itself is built right along the Lake Michigan coastline, which makes it relatively cool in the summer with a light breeze, but also brutally cold and windy in colder months. September was a perfect time of year to visit; the weather was mild and sunny the whole week.

One thing that immediately stands out about the city, especially downtown, is its amazing architecture. You can even take an architecture boat cruise to explore the city’s rich history. Here are just a few highlights I took during the week.

Pre-Conference Social

In the evening, Jon Gould of Foxley Talent organized an informal pre-conference social event. This is a regular feature of DjangoCons, usually with a sponsor, so I’m grateful Jon stepped in to organize. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it given my timing but around 30-40 participants did.

Here are some evening photos I took later in the week that participants who attended likely would have seen:

Hotel

I stayed at the Hyatt Place River North, right downtown and a 15-minute walk from the conference venue.

Here’s a picture of my uneventful room. If you take a closer look at the three items circled in red you’ll note something else worth paying attention to.

In the corner is a sound machine, ear plugs, and a little note. My reaction went from “how thoughtful” to “wait a minute” to “oh no” in less than a second. Was this going to be a noisy room and ruin my sleep?

This cheery note by the bed did not assuage such feelings. Fortunately, I use a white noise app on my phone when staying in hotels and cranked it up extra loud. Overall things were pretty much industry standard for hotels. Little hallway noise, occasional sirens and such on the busy city street below, but manageable all things considered. Phew!

Day 1: Monday Talks

I managed to wake up early and go for a proper run along the water, always a good move for me to remove any pre-talk nerves.

Both these photos are taken going south along the water. It felt like you could just go and go for miles, in both directions, if you wanted. There were some bike groups that did just that in the early mornings, but I didn’t bring my gear this time.

Then I scarfed down a quick buffet breakfast at the hotel before heading over. These post-conference posts are mainly an excuse to post about food anyway, right? Chicago is about 20% Hispanic these days and has an excellent Mexican food scene as a result. The buffet was somewhat standard but I don’t usually see tortillas outside of California at such things.

Keynote Talk: Carson Gross

The opening keynote was by Carson Gross, the creator of HTMX, an ingenious way to sprinkle interactivity into server-side templates without needing any JavaScript. It’s a big favorite in the Django community.

His talk was titled Lateral Thinking with Weathered Technology: How The Nintendo Philosophy Applies to Modern Web Development, based in part on a Japanese book, The God of Games – The Words of Gunpei Yokoi (Definitive Edition).

Carson spoke at length about the importance of avoiding hype cycles in development and how we (many of us are on the seasoned side in the audience) need to give this advice to younger programmers. Hypermedia, HTMX, and Django all fit into this concept of weathered technology, not appropriate for all use cases, but often more than enough. Yet it can be hard for tried and true advice and projects to stand out in today’s hype cycles. A more recent version of this theme is Dan McKinley’s well-known choose boring technology post.

Carson also highlighted several quotes from Yokoi, a famous Japanese toy maker and video game designer. Among them are “don’t chase tech, chase fun”, “design is communication”, “be useful”, and “fail forward.” He was saying these things decades before others, like Steve Jobs, picked up on the ideas.

DEFNA Community Update

After the talk was a brief update from DEFNA (Django Events Foundation North America) President Peter Grandstaff. This is the organization that helps plan and run DjangoCon US every year and it is, like most parts of Django, completely run by volunteers.

There is a Call for Venue Proposals for DjangoCon US 2027-2028 if you or someone you know is interested in hosting a DjangoCon US in the future. You can send any questions to either Peter or Keanya Phelps.

Next was a short break for coffee/tea/snacks and then the two-talk track began.

Django for AI

I gave my talk, Django for AI, downstairs while Colleen Dunlap gave her talk, Easy, Breezy, Beautiful… Django Unit Tests, upstairs. The room was about half full for me, and I’m not surprised it was an even split, given that unit tests are a perennial topic of interest for most Django developers. If I hadn’t been speaking, I definitely would have been in attendance for her talk.

As to mine, here is the opening slide. I wrote up my notes so you can read the full version of the talk while waiting for the video to eventually go live on the DjangoCon US YouTube channel. It usually takes a few weeks for all the talks to be posted.

The short version is I focused first on traditional machine learning models, how they work, how easy they are to do (on smaller scales), and why Django is perfectly placed for their deployment. As an example, please see djangofordatascience.com, the live version of this demo. Code for all the projects is available on my GitHub account. The second half of the talk focused on LLMs, including how they work, why they differ from traditional ML models, and a demo on how Django can integrate with them. See here for a demo and code of a Django chatbot working with a local LLM model, server-side events, and HTMX.

Django’s GeneratedField by Example

Right after my talk, I went upstairs to see Paolo Melchiorre give his on Django’s GeneratedField by Example.

He talked through the new GeneratedField feature in Django 5.0 for database-generated columns, computed entirely in the database based on other fields in the model, and therefore very computationally fast. As a general rule, in Django, you want to shove logic as far down the stack as you can, so in descending order, move it from Templates -> Views -> Models -> Database if you can.

Lightning Talks

After his talk, it was downstairs again for Lightning Talks hosted by Andrew Mshar, a chance for people to give shorter, ~5 minute, talks on a wide variety of topics and receive feedback from the community. It’s a good way to try out some ideas or even potential talks without the burden of having to speak for 25 or 45 minutes~

I always try to attend the lightning talks each day. Really interesting ideas have come out of them over the years.

Then it was lunch. The organizers had delicious lunch as well as snacks and breakfast treats during the day. The staff did a wonderful job throughout the whole event.

Afternoon Talks

In the afternoon there were again two tracks of talks, on Wagtail, deployment, debugging, and integrating MongoDB into Django.

Jib Adegunloye was the lead developer of the MongoDB backend, something we spoke to him about on DjangoChat back in February. It was very cool to see him discuss in visual form the challenges around the project, as well as announce the public release of the official Django MongoDB Backend.

After a break, even more talks, on web components with Vue, peaceful migrations, Djangonaut Space, the very cool ShotGeek project, PostgreSQL, and open source in Namibia.

DjangoCon events are just packed with great talks and also people I want to chat with in the hallway. At larger conferences, the “hallway track” can take over, where people have side chats rather than try to attend all the talks. DjangoCons are usually smaller in size and also what I’m most interested in, so I try to make as many talks as I can, while also reserving some time to just chat with people as needed.

Dinner

In the evening, I headed off with Eric Matthes, Andrew Mshar, Paolo Melchiorre, and Justin Duke for some excellent ramen and sushi at Umai. A long day but a very full and fulfilling one.

Day 2: Tuesday Talks

The next morning, I went for a brief walk before the conference began. The Chicago Riverwalk was nearby and it is an amazing place to stroll, filled with huge buildings, small vendors along the water, and lots of walkers and runners in the morning.

Check out the car garage on the lower level of this building!

Keynote: All the Ways to Use Django

Day two kicked off with a keynote on All the Ways to Use Django by Zags (Benjamin Zagorsky).

He made a lot of good points, such as Django not marketing its REST API options (Django REST Framework, Django Ninja) and losing mindshare to newer API tools like NextJS and FastAPI.

After his talk, there was a very lively and active discussion on the forum around Django Needs a REST Story. By the way, this is the way to foment change! Give a big speech and then follow up by starting a conversation that people everywhere, not just at the event, can participate in. I think there might be some real change as a result of this.

Personally, I’m 100% in favor of Django having a better API story. I have to admit I’m biased by my Django Chat co-host Carlton Gibson’s take, which is a little more nuanced here than just pulling in DRF, but it’s a discussion the community needs to have and I think everyone is in agreement on the need. It’s a question of the technical steps, but those are solvable.

There was another full day of excellent talks, lightning talks at lunch, wonderful food, and good chats with sponsors at their tables and people in the hallways. It was all a bit of a blur so I don’t have a talk-by-talk breakdown today. Sorry!

Check out this view from the venue itself, just outside one of the presentor rooms. Quite a view.

Kraken had some of the best swag I have to say, especially these little notebooks and finger puppets.

I was also pleased to finally meet in person Justin from Buttondown and members of his team.

In the evening, there was a speaker’s dinner, always a highlight, which is put together by the organizers for all the speakers. It was at Carnivale. I sat between two of our Django Fellows there, Natalia Bidart and Jacob Walls.

Six Feet Up Social Event

After the dinner, Six Feet Up sponsored an Arcade Night at Punch Bowl Social, but I was too tired to attend.

A very fun evening, another long day, but a rewarding one.

Day 3: Wednesday Talks

Check out the above-ground subway I passed under while walking to the conference venue! I decided to go through the city rather than along the water this time.

Wednesday was a Deep Dive day that was single track again, making it a lot easier to see all the talks!

Keynote: Django Reimagined for the Age of AI

The keynote was by Marlene Mhangami from Microsoft on Django Reimagined for the Age of AI.

I really enjoyed this talk and not just because it was on a similar topic to mine! She had a ton of demos, including a token probability app and an MCP example, all available in her GitHub repo. I definitely recommend checking out the talk when it is live.

One area she called out–and that I’m passionate about–is agent rules for Django. I agree with her that this is a big area where Django can try to have some common suggestions so users get the most out of new AI agent tools.

You can see some of the forum discussion here.

Django Software Foundation Community Update

Four members of the Django Software Foundation were in attendance and gave a brief community update after the keynote.

In short, Django is doing well. There is progress on an Executive Director, the Board successfully hired a new Fellow, but always more to do. Also, elections are coming up for three new board seats later in the year!

Also highlights for Django 6.0 coming out in December. There are three headline features:

• Built-in support for the Content Security Policy (CSP) standard is now available. This is a “hard battery” that is very important and you definitely do not want to implement yourself. Another buttress in Django’s security-first defense. For many years django-csp was the third-party default, but soon it will be part of core.
• Template partials. Ex Fellow Carlton Gibson released django-template-partials back in 2023, a key component to working with HTMX. Farhan Ali did the work to bring it into Django as part of his Google Summer of Code project.
• Async tasks. Thanks to yeomen’s work by Jake Howard and Fellow Natalia Bidart, this will make 6.0 as well. The Steering Council confirmed this back in 2024 and it is now ready.

Paolo also called attention to Django on the Med, a new effort for three-day sprints in both Spain and Italy. The first one takes place October 7-9 in Palafrugell, Spain.

High Performance Django: 10 Years Later

After the break, Peter Baumgartner gave a talk on High Performance Django: 10 Years Later, looking at what has changed and remained the same since first publishing this excellent book, which you can read for free online now.

A(I) Modest Proposal

Mario Munoz had a spirited and funny take on an A(I) Modest Proposal, channeling Jonathan Swift’s book and making many parallels to the economic underpinnings of today’s AI world.

Lightning Talks, Lunch, Django’s Future

Then lightning talks, lunch, and a panel discussion on Django’s future led by Velda Kiara. Panelists included Peter Grandstaff, Dawn Wages, Natalia Bidart, Jeff Triplett, Rachell Calhoun, and Tim Schilling.

Finally, three more talks to close it out on free threaded Django, automating deployments with django-simple-deploy, and What a Decade! by Tim Allen.

This photo is of Eric’s talk. There is a lot of excitement around his django-simple-deploy package, which makes deployment much easier for everyone. He’s been working on this for a while, and it seems to be at a stable place. The trick is finding a way to make it sustainable for him (and contributors) to continue to work on going forward.

It was a long day, and at the end, I went out to dinner with folks from RevSys. We had about 20 people total, and I found myself, again, sitting next to our two fellows, Natalia and Jacob. Good times indeed.

Thursday: Sprints

Thursday and Friday are two days of sprints on Django itself. If you are able to stay, these are often the most enjoyable part of the whole conference, a smaller group of people working on various core Django code.

CPython Developer in Residence Łukasz Langa recently wrote why sprints are the best part of a conference and many seasoned attendees would agree.

Vulture Method

One issue for wannabe contributors is where to start. Fortunately, last year Django Fellow Sarah Boyce put out a short video advocating the Vulture Method for tackling Django tickets.

Jacob Walls was scurrying around helping people setup their local environments and, in some cases, submit their first PRs to Django. There was also a table working on django-simple-deploy and a bunch of other tables hard at work that I didn’t want to interrupt! I was seated with Jacob and Natalia and, in addition to answering some PyCharm questions from people, wrote up my slide notes in a blog post for anyone interested.

After lunch, I intended to go explore the Art Institute of Chicago, but instead ended up packing (early flight the next morning) and taking a brief nap. Oh well.

In the evening, I went to the amazing Frontera Grill with Eric Matthes, Andrew Mshar, and Jeff Triplett.

Takeaways

Thanks for reading this far. Here are my bullet point takeaways from the conference. Carlton Gibson and I will do a Django Chat episode soon discussing all this at greater length:

• Almost everyone is using AI; not everyone is happy about it, but the sentiment is far less negative than in past years
• Django is a more experienced crowd than, say, PyCons. People want real answers to tech questions and AI hype.
• Open source maintainers and Django Fellows are struggling with LLM-driven PR requests and general slop.
• Some people are getting a lot out of AI agents; most people seem to use chat as their main AI tool at the moment.
• It’s wonderful to see the same faces year after year at these events, especially newer faces who are now in leadership roles in DEFNA, Django code base, and in the community. It makes me feel old but also grateful that the community remains strong and caring.