Django is Pengutronix' framework of choice for internal applications that handle our business processes. These internal tools are also a great opportunity to try out current developments in the Django universe.

More than enough reason to also pay the Django community a visit at this year's DjangoCon Europe took place in Edinburgh, Scotland. The by now well established community conference offered three days of talks, covering a wide variety of aspects of Django development, followed by two days of Django project coding sprints.

Some talks that we found especially interesting were for instance Wilhelm Klopp’s great overview on testing and testing utilities and Dawn Wages’ excellent talk on different types of Open Source project contributors, how to best motivate and integrate them and what general themes contribute to a healthy Open Source community project.

There were also several presentations on especially inspiring applications of the Django framework, such as on AURA, an auto-scheduling tool for free radios or on scaling up a Django app to such an extent, that it could be used to run the back-end of a WhatsApp based pandemic information and health service, serving almost 15 Million users all across South Africa.

Established topics such as performance improvement and query optimisation have gained new significance in light of aspects such as green computing. This was well illustrated by Andrew Aikman, who gave an extensive overview on the subject, talking about everything from query optimisation to efficient kettle usage!

Carlton Gibson presented a very promising new project called neapolitan („better than vanilla“) for quickly bootstrapping CRUD oriented Django projects

Special mention also to Daniele Procida’s talk on The programmer’s imagination, which offered a most entertaining perspective on the general disenchantment of computer use and the emergence of “servile” design and objects.

Big thanks to the conference's organising team and volunteers for an all around great conference!

If you're interested in attending a DjangoCon yourself, next year's DjangoCon is taking place in Vigo, Italy.