Our DjangoConUS 2026 photo album 📷

Few conferences provide such a marvelous balance between professional development and community as DjangoConUS does. Each year draws a crowd, but that crowd is never so overwhelming you get lost in it. Everyone is so friendly that you make three new friends by the time you reach the end of the lunch line. It's a truly special event.

This year I wound up needing a few more self-care sprints than usual because of a three-day migraine episode that was the direct result of the previous hotel guest deciding to set the room alarm clock in my room for one in the morning. This alarm would not be silenced. Like a dog singing the song of their people, it would not stop wailing no matter what button I pressed. And if you're thinking, "Meagen, why didn't you just unplug the cursed thing?" I can assure you even in my furious sleep-deprived state, I thought of that troubleshooting step. The hotel, you see, was determined to prevent alarm clock theft, so the plug outlet was tucked under the super heavy bedframe. I couldn't move it on my own. That's how I found myself camping out in the hallway for an hour until the lone overnight maintenance person was available to banish the clock from my room.

Despite the drama of that first night, my talk went great the next day. I've taught tutorials at DjangoCon before, but this was the first time I presented on the main stage. It was truly an honor to share the Wagtail approach to AI with everyone at the conference and I got a lot of great questions and comments from folks afterwards.

Due to that migraine episode though and some work that needed doing to get Wagtail 8.0 launched, I didn't wind up going to as many talks this year as I would have liked. One talk I did see though was one of the most poignant ones given at the conference. Bartek (who has been the conference photographer for several years) took the stage during lightning talks and shared a montage of his favorite DjangoCon photos. I loved all the beautiful moments he's captured over the years — the hugs, the smiles, the laughs. I especially loved all the pictures he's taken of people programming in weird places! He even surfaced a few pictures of myself and fellow Wagtailers that I never knew existed. If you've never been through his archive, go look at the DjangoCon Flickr album.

So, rather than recap a bunch of talks, I'm going to follow Bartek's lead and share some of my favorite pictures from DjangoCon US.

First, here is me talking on the main stage for the very first time! Thank you Scott Cranfill for snapping this shot.

And here are some more people from the Wagtail community talking about Django and Wagtail. First, we have Dawn Wages, who presented the opening keynote and had loads of great Star Trek references in her talk like always!

Then we have Chrissy Wainwright, who went over some of the awesome work she and Six Feet Up did with Truth. She and Doug Harris wrote a blog post for us about this work with code examples, so you can dig in the details right now if you want to.

Tim Allen sported a classic Wagtail t-shirt during his lightning talk about ParadeDB, which is one of the latest packages he's fallen in love with.

Mariana Bedran shared in a lightning talk how she creates test content fixtures for Firefox.com. It's all open source, so you should totally go look at the repo.

Scott Cranfill didn't talk about Wagtail this time, but he did go over a great government project he helped build with Django to make transit discounts easier to obtain and manage.

Here's a picture from the Wagtail Open Space session we had. What you do see in this photo are the interesting conversations we had about the Wagtail 8.0 API along with some chat about what Wagtail is going to look like in a future with more AI agents roaming the Internet.

Here's a picture of a Chicago sunrise because why not.

Finally, a selfie of me by the Chicago river on my way to the airport.

Hope you enjoyed the photos! Thank you SO much to DEFNA and all the folks who made DjangoConUS happen this year. Y'all are incredible. I'm turning my focus to Wagtail Space now. There's still time to submit a talk if you want to. You can also grab your free ticket now.