Last year's DjangoCon Europe took place on its own island, and this time we were welcomed by the beautiful Cardiff University. One of the goals the organizers immediately set was to promote diversity and embrace minorities, encouraging them to participate to this event. I remember when I bought my ticket and I read “all dietary requirements can be met” and I thought “they're probably trying to set the bar too high”. This is a not so unusual statement, but when confronted to reality you usually end up with dishes not adapted to your dietary requirements, and, as a minority, having to ask for something special can really make you feel excluded. This time was different, as the organizers meticulously took care of that.
I talked about dietary requirements because it's an important topic for me, but they also made sure to have a code of conduct, a financial assistance for people who want but can't afford to attend, a wellbeing service, a subscription system for meals to avoid wasting food, reusable aluminum bottles instead of plastic water bottles, live transcription of talks (for hard of hearing or non-english people), and even a crèche.
All of this was not just buzzwords but was carefully handled by the organizers. In the end, it made everyone feel welcome and put a very warm atmosphere to the event. Talking with people was very interesting and rewarding because of the incredible diversity of backgrounds. A few days after the conference the Django Software Foundation even released a diversity statement to make sure everyone feels welcome in the Django community.
The choice of talks was about 50/50 between technical talks and community talks. I found the community talks to be very inspiring such as Ola Sendecka's “ Into the rabbit hole” which reminded me the benefits of the Pomodoro technique and pair programming. Also Adrienne Lowe's talk “Coding with knives” and Russell Keith-Magee's touching talk about burnout debunked the myth of the rock-star programmer, and how important it is to help people to get started on things they're not comfortable with.
I can't list all the talks I loved because there are way too many but among those I could find the slides for were Ana Balica's “ Demystifying mixins with Django“, Erik Romijn's “ A sincere tale of Django, developers and security“, Aaron Bassett's “ Effortless real time apps in Django“, James Bennett's “ The net is dark and full of terrors“, and of course Rae Knowler's “ Randomised testing for Django with Hypothesis“.
The 3 days of talks were followed by 2 days of sprints and this was a very good opportunity to dive into Django's code and start fixing things. The core developers did a good job at helping people setup a development environment and start hacking on the code. This was a very rewarding part of the conference as this allowed me to do my first pull requests on Django and Django CMS.
Thanks to the DjangoCon Europe team who did an amazing job at organizing this event. See you next year in Budapest!