Content: Blog

The event featured three days of talks and workshops (15–17 April) followed by two days of community sprints. Keynotes were delivered by Carlton Gibson ("Static Islands, Dynamic Sea"), Marlene Mhangami ("A Practical Guide To Agentic Coding For Django Developers"), and Daniele Procida ("Body of knowledge").

Deployment

Andrew Miller's "Improving One of Django's Most Used APIs — And It's Not the One You're Thinking Of" (Friday, 12:05) proposed an easy-to-configure, production-scale web server bundled with Django itself — a production counterpart to the familiar runserver development server.

Worth a side note is Jochen Wersdörfer's "When SaaS Is Not Allowed: Shipping Django as a Desktop App" (Thursday afternoon), which packages Django as a self-contained desktop product for regulated or offline environments.

Jan Raasch's lightning talk also covered how to use django-simple-deploy for VPS deployments using Kamal, which automates first-time deployments to platforms like Hetzner, Platform.sh, and Heroku with a single management command.

Database segmentation and scaling

Two consecutive talks on the opening day formed a mini-track on segmenting and scaling Django databases:

• Jake Howard — "Scaling the database - using multiple databases with Django" (Wednesday, 16:15) covered how to move beyond a single-database setup by using Django's multi-database support to horizontally split workloads and data.
• Tim Bell — "Partitioning very large tables with Django and PostgreSQL" (Wednesday, 16:50) followed up with vertical segmentation inside a single database, showing how to use PostgreSQL's native partitioning features from within the Django ORM to keep very large tables manageable.

Together, these two sessions offered a practical, end-to-end view of how to segment data once a Django project outgrows a single monolithic database.

Atomic and subatomic transactions

Charlie Denton and Sam Searles-Bryant presented "Where did it all BEGIN;?" (Friday, 12:40), a talk digging into what actually happens when Django opens a transaction — the outer atomic() block, the nested savepoints that act as "subatomic" units, and the surprises that can occur at their boundaries. For anyone who has ever been puzzled by on_commit callbacks, nested atomics, or silent rollbacks, this was likely one of the most quietly useful sessions of the conference.

Highlight: Django in the ESA X-ray observatory

Perhaps the most striking real-world application on the programme was Loes Crama's talk "How Django helps to build the biggest X-ray observatory to date" (Friday, 14:40). She is a software engineer at cosine measurement systems, a Dutch supplier of space instrumentation, contributing to ESA's NewAthena mission. The talk described how Django is being used in the engineering workflow of ESA's next-generation X-ray observatory — a vivid reminder that Django is not only a web framework for CRUD applications, but a dependable backbone for serious scientific and engineering infrastructure balancing the need for accuracy and managability. For me, this was the talk that shows just how far "just a Django app" can reach: into outer space.

Other notable sessions

The schedule also included Haki Benita's workshop on advanced indexing and concurrency with PostgreSQL, Markus Holtermann on handling security issues, and Emma Delescolle on a possible Django Admin rewrite — rounding out a programme that leaned heavily on robustness, performance, and operational maturity.

A personal note

Beyond the scheduled programme, a reference point in hallway conversations and several talks was Jacob Rief's django-formset, which received a number of notable mentions as a modern approach to Django forms, formsets and client-side validation. 

On the margins of the conference, I had the chance to give a few private, ad-hoc demonstrations of django CMS to interested attendees — conversations that were warmly received and a nice reminder that some of the most useful exchanges at DjangoCon happen between the scheduled sessions.