DjangoCon Europe 2024 bird’s-eye view 🐦️
We had a great time; and hope you did too. See you next at Wagtail Space in the US and Netherlands?
¡Qué rápido pasa el tiempo! We had a blast at DjangoCon Europe 2024 in Vigo. High-quality talks, and the Spanish seaside as a backdrop – a recipe for success. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of the conference from the perspective of our Wagtail attendees.
The talks
They were all pretty excellent! A personal highlight was Empowering Django with Background Workers by our core team member Jake Howard. As well as the technical excellency, this talk is a solid example of the Django Enhancement Proposal (DEP) process, and of Wagtail work making its way back to Django (the DEP started as a Wagtail RFC).
Jake on the main stage, waving. Photo by Paolo Melchiorre.
In the lightning talk corner, we really liked the CV (or is it résumé?) tips by Josh O'Brien. Instantly actionable insights!
Josh O'Brien on the main stage, with the audience in the foreground.
The workshops
Our accessibility team member Saptak S gave an excellent set of demos of accessibility considerations for Django developers, all live before-after comparisons. One of those examples is alt text, where Saptak is also supporting a Google Summer of Code internship to provide better defaults in Wagtail.
Saptak presenting in the workshop, showcasing aspects of the Django admin interface.
We also had two of our core team members giving workshops!
- Supercharge your Developer Experience with VS Code, Dev Containers and Codespaces by Dawn Wages
- Blogging with Django: get started with Wagtail by Thibaud Colas
The sprints
Over the weekend, we contributed to Django sprints with all sorts of tasks:
- Thibaud worked on his proposal for a package maintainers team for the Django ecosystem, directly inspired by a similar packaging team proposal for Wagtail
- Jake worked on django-tasks, a reference implementation of the Background Workers DEP.
Dawn worked on her yet-to-be-revealed Wagtail Space US talk 🤫, and gave a tour of Wagtail to Django Girls Harare organizer Kudzayi Bamhare.
The atmosphere
A boat trip, a venue rooftop party – it was lovely. My personal highlights here are two efforts to bring some of the conference experience to people who couldn’t be there in person:
- Paolo Melchiorre’s excellent coverage of the conference with live posts at #DjangoConEurope2024.
- Organizers providing a livestream hybrid experience with venueless. They even provided free access to everyone who applied for an opportunity grant but didn’t get approved!
Up next: to Wagtail Space and beyond!
We have a packed schedule this month with two more events coming up 🌈 Dawn will be presenting at Wagtail Space US, and Jake at Wagtail Space NL. Join us at those events for more of the same quality of talks, workshops, and sprints.
Thibaud, Jake, and Dawn with the Django pony.
