Noodling on my first DjangoCon 🎸

Sept. 26, 2024, 4 p.m.

Community, hacking, and the "plugin" lifestyle: some takeaways from my first DjangoCon!

Woah! My first blog post on my personal site! Been meaning to do this for a while. I'm not going to make any promises that I'll update this very often (and if you made it this far, hello!)

Here's a recap on my time at DjangoCon US 2024 in Durham, NC.

Getting There

On the way in, I took a quick detour to western NC to visit some family. Despite the clear weather, my final leg did not go as planned. Fun fact: sometimes, it's cheaper to take a 2-hour Lyft than it is to fly or rent a car... 🤯 I ended up having a very pleasant time trading travel stories with Kenyatta, and managed to have a full weekend with family!

Diving into DjangoCon

After much smoother travel over to Durham, I was ready to jump right into DjangoCon. I was traveling solo, and severely underestimated how shy I could be in these kinds of settings... 🤦‍♂️ Luckily, everyone was incredibly welcoming and friendly! After a few days, I managed to meet some new friends and enjoy the social scene of the Django community.

This year was the first time DjangoCon was hosting a simultaneous Hackathon. I've been eager to have the opportunity to spin up an MVP for a project called iotato (more on that another time), so this was the perfect opportunity to start immediately applying some of the new things I was learning throughout the week. Big thanks to the organizers and other teams that participated - seeing the presentations and getting feedback on my project was great!

Beyond that, it was pretty neat to meet some of the folks I've been following in the Django community for the last year or so. Putting faces to the names of very impressive contributors was both exciting and a bit intimidating. And yet, every single one of them was kind and easy to approach. It's made me eager to get involved in the Django community!

Takeaways

In no particular order, here's a brain-dump of some of the highlights/takeaways I had throughout the week:

  • Inclusivity was on full display and it was awesome: from the code of conduct to the acknowledgement of indigenous communities/land tied to Durham, it was clear how this community managed to become so welcoming and friendly
  • Sheena O'Connell's keynote on education gave me a lot to ponder in terms of learning styles and the communities that exist to build others up with new skills (and I learned about the term cargo cult programming...definitely guilty of that!)
  • The amount of relevant phrases you can build from the LOTR acronym is staggering (iykyk)
  • Related: Django Fellows are fantastic and do some incredible work!
  • "Complexity Kills Projects" - a great talk by Chris May about honing in on selecting your architecture for web apps
  • ""Cool URIs don't change" -Tim Berners-Lee" -Lorenzo Peña I've been dealing with redirects/url design at work, so this talk provided some great food for thought. #LoveYourURLs
  • Sage's story about how django changed his life was super inspiring!
  • Mario's keynote was super engaging and relatable in all sorts of unexpected ways. "To be a better developer, be a better person to others." 👏
  • I'm definitely gonna checkout the Crunchy Data Postgres Tutorials
  • A neat project I want to try: nanodjango - would've been perfect for this week's hackathon!
  • Watching @simonw live code on stage was epic - this blog is using his very own django-plugin-blog courtesy of djp. Consider me subscribed to the #plugin-lifestyle
  • Thinking about django + emissions was pretty cool, definitely worth considering how we can build leaner sites to the benefit the planet
  • I was super inspired by Zagaran's work, they're making a very tangible and meaningful impact in the housing crisis 👏
  • Meeting the figure behind nearly every django forum response I've ever read was fun, and his talk on WebRTC was intriguing
  • Capping it off with Will & Carlton's words about the User Model and the future of Django was pretty dang fun, considering that Django Chat is the very reason I discovered this community and made it to DjangoCon!
  • ...and so much more

Summary

This conference was top notch. My goals going forward are:

  1. Get involved! Contribute or something!
  2. At the next DjangoCon, break out of my shell a bit more and meet more people!

Until then, I've got so many people/projects to learn from. 🧠

-Nic