Reflecting on DjangoCon Europe 2018

Published 29 May, 2018; last updated on 14 March, 2019.

I’m back from DjangoCon Europe 2018, my first open-source developers’ conference. It was really exciting to be surrounded by so many clever people sharing great ideas. I learned a lot, but perhaps the most important thing I learned was how to attend an open-source conference.

Of the talks that I saw, my personal highlights were:

• Growing old gracefully: on being a career programmer by Carlton Gibson, a mix of points which resonated with me strongly (Yes! Self-care is incredibly important! No! Good developers don’t stop being good developers after thirty!), great advice, and encouragement to be prolific.
• Writing code? Pfft… evolve it instead! by Emma Gordon which was a very interesting practical demonstration on how genetic algorithms can be used to write code using Brainfuck.
• It’s not a bug, it’s a bias by Anna-Livia Gomart, a great reminder to always keep your own biases and falsehoods you believe in mind.
• Creating solid APIs by Rivo Laks offered some good advice for designing APIs, and taught me that jsonapi.org is a thing I should be aware of and probably make use of.

There were so many talks I missed, and I hope to find some time to go back through the extensive recordings which are now available on YouTube.

Other highlights were:

• Django really is a community, and I’m keen to get involved.
• The measures the conference took to be as inclusive as possible were amazing. They had preferred pronoun badges!